The Gently Orbiting Blonde By JOHN VICTOR PETERSON Illustrated by ENGLE _Anti-gravity may be hard to handle--but a woman scorned is still harder!_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Infinity, April 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Maybe Helene's right in saying that I shouldn't tell exactly how our living room became the training station for Space Satellite One. If I don't, though, I'm afraid she'll let it slip out as a deep dark secret to one of her tri-dielectronic bridge friends and it'll be all over the Project as quickly as a pile past critical mass. It certainly wouldn't help my reputation at the labs, especially if in the retelling the facts should become distorted about Gladys, the gently orbiting blonde. Some of it was accidental, certainly, but didn't Wilhelm Roentgen get brushed by the breeze of chance? I must have been on the right track, anyhow! 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.