* * * * *
Hey, was I imagining things or was my orbit changing? And was Gladys
smiling more warmly?
Oh, oh! The air-vents were doing it, the air currents from them
pressing me into a more curving trajectory which would probably graze
Gladys' orbit.
I was passing the chitchat bench. I flailed out for it, missed, and my
movement seemed to twist my trajectory even more. I looked at Gladys
and she was smiling warmly, welcomingly. I thought of Helene and felt
like a louse. An airborne louse. Without wings, like a louse should
be. You need wings to fly. If I'd had them I think I'd have flown.
Elsewhere.
Sure, you can let your conscience be your guide but what can you do
when you're helplessly warped into a collision orbit with one of the
loveliest women in the world, a welcoming planet in a closed system of
your own peculiar manufacture?
The visio started buzzing then and I wondered agonizingly if it were
Helene. On the other hand, it might be Jim O'Brien wondering why Gladys
hadn't come back. With no answer, he might come over, but I doubted it.
Jim's a bachelor and somewhat of a hermit.
Ah, missed on this go-round, but it was close. Gladys' smile told me
she was paying no heed to the buzzing visio at all.
The sun-chandelier--I could reach it! I caught at one of its sunburst's
rays. It promptly snapped off, but the action had changed my orbit.
Changed it--and how! Now I was in precisely the same orbit as Gladys
and gaining! She smiled back over her nicely rounded shoulder. It
wasn't fair!
I hadn't heard a sound outside, what with the visio buzzing away like
mad, but the front door was suddenly opened and there was Helene
starting to come in, a big package in her arms.
"Stay out!" I cried. "Don't come in, Helene!"
I was a split second too late; her foot hit the null-grav area and she
was suddenly orbiting, her package tumbling off on a trajectory of its
own, her pocketbook a satellite beside her.
Helene was startled, certainly, but not beyond speech. "Bill Wright,"
she cried, "you're a beast! You bring me home on our wedding night and
leave me for your silly machine and without a single solitary drop
to drink in the servomech and I go out for something and come back
to find you flying after that blonde hussy!" She swept up around the
chandelier, her orbit grazing it at perihelion but apparently destined
to be far remote at aphelion.
"But, dear--" I started.
"Don't dear me!" she cried, and went out of my range of vision just as
I overtook Gladys and her outflung arms caught me painfully by the
neck.
Which is when Helene's orbit mercifully turned out to be a collision
orbit with Gladys'--and she took Gladys away from me like a super-Nike
taking out a stratojet-bomber. They bounced against the ceiling. Gladys
took the impact. Rearward. Fortunately Mother Nature had been kind.
Helene bounced away from Gladys. Strands of blonde hair went with her.
"Dark roots!" Helene cried triumphantly.
Gladys said a bad word.