I'll leave it to you....
It's true, I _do_ get absorbed in things. So it happened on the night I
was married. But I did, after all, carry Helene across the threshold.
Can I help it that, as I was fetching her a toast, I just happened to
glance up at the sun-chandelier in our cathedral-ceilinged living room
and got reminded of the Project and decided I just had to go down into
my lab in the basement and change one little bit of circuitry? When
you're working on something as elusive as anti-gravity, you've got to
seize upon every minute of inspiration.
I told her I'd be right back and dashed downstairs. I guess I should
have kissed her first. I forgot. I'm sorry now. In a way. If I had,
maybe--But, let's face it, I forgot.
You could ask old Ruocco, my psych prof. He always says I've
supernormal powers of concentration.
There I was in the basement. One thing led to another. I rearranged the
circuitry on the psionic machine and found then that changes in the
gyrorotors were indicated.
Something intruded vaguely on my mind but I ignored it, enmeshed as I
was in magnetostriction lines. This just might work!
It didn't. My concentration was disrupted. I glanced at my watch. _Oi_!
I thought, _Helene!_
And my subconscious told me with sickening certainty that the near
disturbance I had had, had been the slamming of a door--of the front
door by someone on the way out.
I went upstairs. Helene was gone, complete with pocketbook. Her valises
had been in the car and I saw from the living room window that she'd
taken that.
She'd gone home to Mom, I guessed. She'd have no trouble getting off
the reservation; she had a nonsensitive job on the Project. Not like
me; I couldn't get pried out of White Sands by less than Presidential
order.
It'd be hours before I could try visioing her. Mom's way up in
Connecticut, quite a hop even by jetliner.
I sat on the chitchat bench, felt sorry for myself for a second and
then got concentrating on the starchart on the ceiling above the
sun-chandelier and decided that if man was to start exploring upward
I'd better continue my exploring downstairs.
But I couldn't concentrate. I fiddled around rewiring the psionic
machine just to have something to do.
The front door banged again with the loveliest, most satisfying
solid bang--and I dropped my soldering iron on a printed circuit and
something went _whoosh_ which wasn't just me going up the stairs.
Simultaneously a feminine scream came to meet me.
* * * * *
I went up the stairs but when I got to the top I
didn't--couldn't--stop. I kept going up, making climbing motions and
touching nothing at all until my head ricocheted off the curving
ceiling and I bounced down upon my contour chair. I didn't stop there
but bounced right back up again, vaguely aware that the recoiling chair
was slowly following me.
During this time I was seeing considerably more stars than you'd see
from Palomar on a good clear night.
The stars began to blink out of focus, and me in. And then, in the
midst of marveling over the undeniable fact that I'd discovered--well,
what about Roentgen?--_discovered_ anti- or at least _null_-gravity, I
remembered (a) the door slamming and (b) the scream.
I bounced off the ceiling, cartwheeled a bit, glanced off a picture of
a Viking rocket on the wall which took off on a trajectory of its own,
and then spun in my orbit and got a look at the blonde.
Now, anyone under normal conditions would have taken a good look at the
blonde. I was, however, performing what is known in aeronautics as a
barrel-roll, and my viewing of the blonde was the sweeping scan of a
surveillance radar.
Not that I hadn't seen the blonde before. I knew her well. Her name is
Gladys. She's the most gorgeously put-together creature at the Sands.
Most of the boys would ride bareback on a Nike if she gave them the
smile she was giving me then.
Gladys was in a gentle orbit as nearly circular as that of Venus. Her
primary was the sun-chandelier.
I thought then of another Venus. Only Gladys has arms. Her arms were
bare. In fact, a lot of Gladys was bare and there's a lot of Gladys,
all nicely proportioned, of course. The sunsuit's designer had
indubitably been inspired by a Bikini.
I bounced off a sofa, which absorbed some of my inertia, and through
some frictional freak stopped my axial rotation. I went then into
an elliptical orbit grazing the chitchat bench at aphelion and the
chandelier at perihelion.
The thought of Helene crossed my mind in a peculiarly guilty manner,
and I was rather glad at that moment that Gladys and I weren't on a
collision orbit.
"Now that you've stopped pingponging," Gladys said, "you might tell
me how we're going to get out of this fix. And I don't mind behaving
like an electron but you might make like a positron and come a little
closer; it's getting cold in here! By the way, where's Helene?"
I don't know why, but I told her. And maybe I did put on an aggrieved
husband act a bit, but who could blame me?
"Oh, Bill, I'm sorry," she said throatily. "You're so attractive, so
fine. To think you've been snared by someone who doesn't appreciate
your worth, your handsomeness, your manly strength. Oh, why couldn't
you just have given poor little me a glance? After all, we've been
together in the Project Lab every day. I _know_ you, Bill, and I'm _so_
sorry!"
And she moved on, lovely, graceful in her gentle orbit, and my heart
swelled with recognition of her compassion.
I started to make a self-effacing remark, stammered, and finally
changed my mind and asked, "But how did you happen to come here?"
She sighed. "Business, I'm sorry to state. Jim O'Brien wants you at
the lab. Thinks he's on the track of anti-grav--and here you have it
already! Gee, Bill, it _is_ getting cold in here!"