Cold Haul Between The Stars: Science Fiction

It was a long, cold haul on the job, going around the asteroid belt and building up a nice trail of ice-rich meteors to follow him back to the warm orbit where the watership could scoop them up. Not much to do out there, not even for a man as scientifically inclined as himself--the first few trips, he'd busied himself with experiments on plants and animals, seeing how they handled the strains of space. Most of it was repeating research done back in the early days, but he didn't care. Eventually, it ceased to interest him. Though in the beginning he'd watched the distant singing of the black holes on the spectrograph with the same fascination ancient sailors would have given to whale song, it too paled. He'd borrowed--

Inspiration: My tiring work schedule the last couple of weeks, an interesting (if unread as of the writing) article in SciAm about singing black holes, and Billie Holiday.
Story Potential: High, actually.
Notes: At least, I like the character and the themes a story like this could explore.