The Gently Orbiting Blonde by John Victor Peterson - HTML preview

The Gently Orbiting Blonde

Anti-gravity may be hard
 to handle—but a woman
 scorned is still harder!

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.

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!"

I hadn't noticed.

Just then the thermostat did notice, and the air-conditioning unit cut in. Warm air started to blow from the baseboard outlets.

"Bill—"

"Yeah," I answered, trajecting past the chitchat bench and wondering if by stretching real hard I could reach it on the next trip round and drag myself to it. Then, if it didn't come unplugged I could ground (now that was a silly thought!)—I could stop myself and maybe work out of the living room along the edge of the tacked-down carpet.

"Bill, if Helene doesn't come back, do you think, maybe—"

I thought, maybe.

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.

I conjectured.

"Say," I said, but the girls were shouting. I yelled, "Hey!"

They quieted but kept glaring balefully at each other and circled like a couple of female wrestlers waiting—but wholly unable—to pounce.

"We're in a pickle," I started.

"You're in a pickle," Helene corrected me.

"Oh, stop it!" I said.

"I didn't start it," Helene said.

Logic!

"Now, look," I said, "we've got to get down. If one of us could only manage to grasp something that's fastened—the carpet, a window, a doorknob—"

I didn't finish; it was too painfully obvious that none of our orbits took us that close to the finite boundaries of my null-grav living room. Helene's, I noticed, was the closest. A germ of an idea came into my mind as I observed that Helene's handbag was still in a tight orbit around her.

"Honey," I said.

She raged at that and made futile fluttering motions as though she thought she just might be able to fly.

Perhaps formality was indicated.

"Mrs. Wright," I tried.

Gladys laughed and the irate Mrs. Wright, sweeping close to Gladys' orbit at perihelion, made a vicious swipe which neatly tore away a considerable portion of the upper part of Gladys' sunsuit, which portion went fluttering away on a bat-like trajectory of its own. I forgot the portion; the point of departure was more absorbing.

Helene gasped and told me to concentrate on getting us down; but my powers of concentration were rather difficult to influence since I was in a fixed orbit and, like Mercury or old Luna, my face was turned inward and Gladys' orbit was now considerably tighter than mine.

"Well, do something, will you!" Helene cried. "At least, stop leering!"

Now I'm a reasonable man even when befuddled by null-grav, so I tried to forget about orbiting hemispheres and to attack the problem of reaching terra firma.

I closed my eyes, but promptly became so unoriented that I almost became ill; so I opened them again and concentrated on my primary, the sun-chandelier.

The visio had stopped buzzing. I hoped that meant that Jim O'Brien—if it had been Jim—had figured that something was amiss and was now hurrying over in his Caddicopter. He could throw us a line and haul us out. Then I threw that hope away. Jim's severely practical; and this was to have been my wedding night.

Oh, well....

Could one of us somehow reach the sun-chandelier and short it, thereby shorting the machine downstairs? Mentally reconstructing the house's electrical circuitry, I concluded that my lab was on a separate circuit.

Hey! I am confused, I thought. Helene's handbag! I'd thought of it before. Of course! Women carry all sorts of things.

"Helene," I said, "do you have a squeeze bottle in your bag? Perfume or hair spray or deodorant, maybe?"

"Bill Wright, if you think for one minute that I'm going to—"

"Have you?" I cut in.

She spluttered. "Perfume," she finally said grudgingly. "Though with that eau-de-whatever Gladys is wearing, I should think—"

"Oh, stop it! Now will you please get the perfume out!"

She did; then she went wandering off to aphelion in her orbit and momentarily out of my line of sight. When she came back toward perihelion with the chandelier, I said, "Now, look, wriggle around a little axially if you can—"

That did it. Helene exploded into a verbal nova. "You lecherous beast!" she cried. "It isn't enough for you to dally with this shameless blonde hussy on our wedding night. Not enough for you to float along looking like a blissful ogling ogre, making mental mockery of your wedding vows. No, you—you BEM!—you have to ask your meek and retiring, your quiet and unassuming, your defenseless and self-effacing wife to act like a bumping and grinding burlesque queen!"

And my meek, retiring, quiet, unassuming, etc., wife went on etcetera-ing ad practically infinitum.

When swiftly trajecting Helene's tirade paused for lack of words and/or breath, I said meekly above the gently orbiting blonde's chuckles, "But I was only trying to get us out of this mess. I wanted you to perform a slight axial rotation so that you could aim your—er—posterior at the cellar door when you next reach aphelion near it. Do you understand?"

"No," she said, but did manage by some completely feminine and to me quite incomprehensible maneuvers (girdle girding procedure, maybe?) to twist ninety degrees axially.

"When I say 'go,' squeeze the spray bottle," I directed, "and keep squeezing it hard and keep it pointing straight away from your longitudinal axis."

"My what? Now, look, what do you think you'll accom—"

"Wait!" I cut her off. "For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, right? I hope you'll widen your orbit when the reaction sets in."

She was nearing aphelion. "Go!" I cried.

She did squeeze the spray bottle, and kept squeezing it quickly and strongly, but so far as I could judge her orbit wasn't effected one whit. Something was accomplished, however, that made our situation more desperate: those little droplets of potent perfume proceeded to bounce, scatter, splatter and ricochet all over the place. The scent spread. Overpoweringly.

"And you talked about my perfume!" Gladys cried and began to giggle again.

My gaze wandered toward the lovely albeit space-happy blonde.

"Bill!" Helene cried as she swept across my line of sight. She looked like an avenging angel, a very lovely one. She made me feel humble and contrite; I went dutifully back to the problem.

It seemed rather hopeless. Both Gladys and I were orbiting nearly parallel to the floor in what I was calling the plane of the ecliptic. My brief encounter with the chandelier had twisted me into the plane as had Gladys' unfortunate but exhilarating encounter with my irate bride.

Helene's orbit was still tilted from the plane, like Pluto's, and was curiously elliptical like a comet's. Currents created by the allegedly draftless air-conditioning system must have caused and must be maintaining the ellipse. Being a newcomer to our tight little system, Helene also still had considerable orbital speed whereas air resistance would soon bring Gladys and me to a midair stop, probably in inferior opposition. I knew what Helene would think of that.

I decided we couldn't do anything individually or jointly unless an outside agent were introduced or full advantage taken of something already present.

We had cosmic debris, for sure: the flipflopping chaise longue which was in a tight orbit near the peak of the cathedral ceiling; the framed picture of the Viking rocket (could I ever use a little of its thrust now!) fluttering close to the flapping torn part-away of the sunsuit down below the plane of the ecliptic; and the big package Helene had brought. The last suddenly proved to be on a collision orbit with Gladys, curving in then to bump against her derriere. Reaching back swiftly she caught it like an errant salesman's hand. I waited expectantly.

"Wonderful!" she commented. "Wonderful!" And pulled out a bottle of Scotch. I watched in fascinated, gleeful anticipation as she unscrewed the cap, and moved the bottle up toward celestial north to reach a normal drinking position. Naturally the contents promptly departed; then splashed against the arch of the ceiling and went into a thousand odd orbits, of which many made moist contact with my own. The perfume-Scotch combination—yoicks!

"Glad," I said.

"Oh, it's Glad now!" Helene burst.

I ignored her.

"Glad, get the package in your hands like a basketball—"

"Yes, conceal your shame!" Helene cut in acidly.

"Will you stop it?" I cried. "Now, Glad, listen, aim it toward my orbit. Lead me a little—there, that ought to do it. Now when I count down to zero give it a shove. Ready? Three, two, one—zero!"

It was dead on!

I looked in the bag, hoping to find a newly charged carbonation unit for the servomech bar. I didn't, but I found something else!

"Helene," I said, "I love you!"—and I drew forth the loveliest magnum of champagne you'd ever hope to see.

"But, Bill," Helene cried, "that's to celebrate our wedding night!"

I appreciated the present tense but said nothing, working on the wire which bound the cork.

"Bill, remember what happened to the Scotch," Gladys warned me.

I ignored them both, thinking furiously. It had to be Helene! She would sweep to the apogee of her cometlike orbit near the cellar door again in seconds. I shook the magnum as violently as I could. Its cork went whooshing off on a ricochet romance with the Scotch cap. The freed and deeply disturbed champagne blasted off straight for the most remote point in Helene's orbit—and Helene was there! On target!

I went whirling backward with the reacting magnum against my chest, bounced against a wall, smacked against the chandelier, flipflopped a few times and found myself orbiting directly below Gladys. I re-oriented myself with some effort and found by twisting my head sharply that I could see the results of the improvised jet blast: Helene, drenched with champagne, stood in gravity on the cellar stairs.

"Dear," I ventured, "just go down and ease off on the rheostat; that'll cancel this out gradually and let us down easily."

She made a spluttering noise and went downstairs.

I made a quick survey for a possible safe touchdown area just in case Helene inadvertently cut the power too fast; chances were good that we'd hit one of the several sofas.

Gladys and I were celestially north of the chitchat bench when Helene completely killed the null-grav. The bench, with visio, suffered complete collapse; it wasn't meant for sitting down on from twelve feet up. Especially with a blonde dropping immediately into one's lap. Lucky for me both were nicely padded.

"I'm sorry, Bill," Gladys said, September Morn-ing, and hurrying, dishevelled and forlorn, out the front door. I heard her car start up as Helene came up from the basement.

I ruefully surveyed the shattered visio amid the other debris.

"Null-grav," I said. "Real null-grav. Jim's got to know—but the visio's ruined. I've got to go out and call him."

"Oh, no, you don't!" Helene burst. "Null-grav and Jim O'Brien can wait until tomorrow!"

She kissed me tenderly then.

"How right you are," I said, getting re-oriented fast.

Now you must excuse me; I've got to degravitize the living room. They're due here for training in a few minutes—the Satellite One Cadets. I worked out a keyer that remotely controls the null-grav's rheostat; it's calibrated to permit creating any sub-gravitational effect from one G down to null-G. Those boys are really getting trained.

Someday I'll duplicate the null-grav over at the Project—Jim O'Brien and I have nearly got the circuitry licked—and we'll have the living room all to ourselves. Jim and his blushing bride—Gladys—come over almost every evening after the Cadets are through. We play null-grav polo, orbital chess and some other games we've adapted. Our favorite, though, is "Pick Your Planet" where we take turns imitating the orbit of one of Sol's planets, planetoids, moons or visiting comets, and pantomiming other clues.

Funny, but most often Helene or Gladys chooses Venus. With them, poor cold old Pluto's out.

Women are funny that way.