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.