Double or Nothing — Inside the Classic

Artie looked at the gadget, sitting and whistling on the floor of the lab, then turned a bleak-but-still-hopeful glance my way. "Maybe--If we could make a _guy_ take on a cone-shape, and whirled him--"

"Sure," I muttered. "Bend over, grab his ankles, and fly anywhere in the world, with his torso and legs pivoting wildly around his peaked behind." I shook my head. "Besides the manifestly undignified posturing involved, we have to consider the other effects; like having his eyeballs fly out."

"If--If we had a bunch of men lie in a circle around a kind of Maypole-thing, each guy clutching the ankles of the next one...."

"Maybe they'd be weightless, but they _still_ wouldn't go _up_," I said. "Unless they could be towed, somehow. And by the time they landed, they'd be too nauseous to be of any use for at least three days. Always assuming, of course, that the weak-wristed member of the sick circlet didn't lose his grip, and have them end up playing mid-air crack-the-whip before they fell."

"So all right, it's got a couple of bugs!" said Artie. "But the principle's sound, right?"

"Well--Yeah, there you got me, Artie. The thing _cancels_ weight, anyhow...."

"Swell. So we work from there," He rubbed his hands together joyously. "And who knows what we'll come up with."

"_We_ never do, that's for sure," I mumbled.

But Artie just shrugged. "I like surprises," he said.

The end of the day--me working, Artie inventing--found us with some new embellishments for the machine. Where it was originally a sort of humped metal box (the engine went inside the hump) studded with toothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones (lest elementary torque send the machine swinging the other way, and thus destroy the thrust-effect of the cones), it now had an additional feature: A helical flange around each cone.

"You see," Artie explained, while I was torching them to order from plate metal, "the helices will provide _lift_ as the cones revolve."

"Only in the atmosphere of the planet," I said.

"Sure, I know. But by the time the outer limits of the air are reached, the machine, with the same mass-thrust, will have less gravity-drag to fight, being that much farther from the Earth. The effect will be cumulative. The higher it gets, the more outward thrust it'll generate. Then nothing'll stop it!"

"You could be right," I admitted, hammering out helix after helix on an electric anvil (another gadget of Artie's; the self-heating anvil--The Thermovil--had begun life as a small inspiration in Artie's mind for a portable toaster).

It was just after sunset when we figured the welds were cool enough so we could test it. Onto the scale it went again, I flicked the toggle, and we stood back to watch the needle as the cones picked up speed. Along with the original whistling sound made by the cones we began to detect a shriller noise, one which abruptly became a genuine pain in the ear. As Artie and I became somewhat busy with screaming (the only thing we could think of on the spur of the moment to counteract the terrible waves of noise assaulting our tympana), it was all at once much easier to see the needle of the scale dropping toward zero, as the glass disc facing the dial dissolved into gritty powder, along with the glass panes in every window in the lab, the house, the heliport, and the movie theatre. (Not to mention those of a few farmhouses a couple of miles down the highway, but we didn't find that out till their lawyers showed up with bills for damages.)

Sure enough, though, the thing lifted. Up it bobbed, like a metal dirigible with agonizing gas pains, shrieking louder by the second. When the plaster started to trickle and flake from the walls, and the fillings in my teeth rose to a temperature just short of incandescence, I decided it was time to cancel this phase of the experiment, and, with very little regret, I flung a blanket-like canvas tarpaulin up and over the ascending machine before it started using its helices to screw into the ceiling. The cones bit into the tarpaulin, tangled, jammed, and the machine--mercifully noiseless, now--crashed back onto the scale, and lost a lot of symmetry and a couple of rivets.

"What's Plan C?" I said to Artie.

"_Quiet!_" he said, either because I'd interrupted his thinking or because that was our next goal.