"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.