Double or Nothing, Page 2
Jack Sharkey
short-sighted ilk were still scoffing at the ancientalchemist's talk of the Philosopher's Stone for transmuting metals, eventhough transmutation of metals was being done every day in atomic piles.And how he'd theorized that there _was_ once a genuine Philosopher'sStone, probably a hunk of pure U-235, that someone had managed to make,which might explain why so many alchemists (lacking, unfortunately, anyknowledge of heavy radiations or Geiger counters) sort of died off intheir quest for the stone.
* * * * *
It was nearly lunchtime when he finished his spiel, and I was kickingmyself in my short-memoried brain for having let him get onto thesubject, when abruptly the joyous glow behind his eyes damped itssparkle a bit.
"There _is_ one little hitch--"
"I thought it looked too easy," I sighed, waiting for the clinker."Don't tell me it has to be made out of pure Gallium, which has theregrettable tendency to liquiefy at about thirty degrees centigrade? Orperhaps of the most elusive of its eleven isotopes?"
"No, no, nothing like that," he murmured almost distractedly. "It's theforce-per-gram part that's weak."
"Don't tell me," I said unhappily, "that this thing'll only generateenough force to lift itself?"
A feeble ghost of his erstwhile grin rode briefly across his lips."That's the way it works out on paper," he said.
"Which means," I realized aloud, "that it's commercially useless,because what's the good of an anti-gravity machine that can't liftanything except _itself_! It falls into the class of lifeboats thatfloat up to the gunwales in the water while still _empty_. Fun to watch,but impossible to use. Hell, Artie, if that's the setup, then thisthing wouldn't be any more help to a space-aiming government than anaborigine's boomerang; it flies beautifully, but not if the aboriginetries to go _with_ it."
"However," he said, a bit more brightly, "I've been wrong on paperbefore. Remember the bumblebee, Burt! _That_ theory still holds up onpaper. But the bee still flies."
He had me, there. "So you want I should build it anyhow, just on theoff-chance that it _won't_ follow the rules of physical logic, and willdecide to generate a force above and beyond its own gravitic drag?"
"That's it," he said happily. "And even if it only manages to negateits own weight, we'll have an easier time ironing the bugs out of amodel than we would out of a diagram. After all, who'd have figured thatbeyond _Mach I_, all the lift-surfaces on a plane work in _reverse_?"
It wasn't, I had to admit, anything that an inventor could havereasonably theorized at the outset.... So I locked myself in the lab fora week, and built his gadget, while he spent his time pacing through hisfourteen-room mansion across the way from the lab building (the "way"being the flat grassy region on Artie's estate that housed his swimmingpool, private heliport, and movie theatre), trying to coin a nifty namefor the thing. We both finished in a dead heat.
* * * * *
I unlocked the door of the lab, blinked hard against the sting of warmyellow sunlight after a week of cool blue fluorescents, and just as Iwheezed, "Got it," Artie was counterpointing with, "We'll call it The_Uuaa_!" (He made four syllables out of it.)
"The Oo-oo-_ah_-ah?" I glottaled. "In honor of the fiftieth state, orwhat? I know 'aa' is a type of lava, but what the hell's 'uu', besidesthe noise a man makes getting into an overheated bath?"
Artie pouted. "'Uuaa' is initials. For 'Up, up, and away!' I thought itwas pretty good."
I shook my head. "Why feed free fodder to the telecomics? I can hearthem now, doing monologues about people getting beri-beri flying fromWalla Walla to Pago Pago on their Uuaas...."
"So what would _you_ call it!" he grunted.
"A bust," I sighed, left-thumbing over my shoulder at the lab. "It sitsand twirls and whistles a little, but that's about the size of it,Artie."
He spanieled with his eyes, basset-hounded with his mouth, andorangutaned with his cheeks, then said, with dim hope, "Did you weighit? Maybe if you weighed it--"
"Oh, it lost, all right," I admitted. "When I connected the batteries,the needle on the scale dropped down to zero, and stopped there. And Ifound that I could lift the machine into the air, and it'd stay where itwas put, just whistling and whirling its cones. But then it started tosettle." I beckoned him back inside.
"Settle? Why?" Artie asked.
"Dust," I said. "There's always a little dust settling out of the air.It doesn't weigh _much_, but it made the machine weigh at least what thedust-weight equalled, and down it went. Slow and easy, but down."
Artie looked at the gadget, sitting and whistling on the floor of thelab, then turned a bleak-but-still-hopeful glance my way. "Maybe--If wecould make a _guy_ take on a cone-shape, and whirled him--"
"Sure," I muttered. "Bend over, grab his ankles, and fly anywhere inthe world, with his torso and legs pivoting wildly around his peakedbehind." I shook my head. "Besides the manifestly undignified posturinginvolved, we have to consider the other effects; like having hiseyeballs fly out."
"If--If we had a bunch of men lie in a circle around a kind ofMaypole-thing, each guy clutching the ankles of the next one...."
"Maybe they'd be weightless, but they _still_ wouldn't go _up_," Isaid. "Unless they could be towed, somehow. And by the time theylanded, they'd be too nauseous to be of any use for at least threedays. Always assuming, of course, that the weak-wristed member of thesick circlet didn't lose his grip, and have them end up playing mid-aircrack-the-whip before they fell."
"So all right, it's got a couple of bugs!" said Artie. "But theprinciple'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 somenew embellishments for the machine. Where it was originally a sortof humped metal box (the engine went inside the hump) studded withtoothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones (lest elementarytorque send the machine swinging the other way, and thus destroy thethrust-effect of the cones), it now had an additional feature: A helicalflange around each cone.
"You see," Artie explained, while I was torching them to order fromplate 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-dragto fight, being that much farther from the Earth. The effect will becumulative. 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 anelectric anvil (another gadget of Artie's; the self-heating anvil--TheThermovil--had begun life as a small inspiration in Artie's mind for aportable toaster).
It was just after sunset when we figured the welds were cool enough sowe 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 todetect a shriller noise, one which abruptly became a genuine pain in theear. As Artie and I became somewhat busy with screaming (the only thingwe could think of on the spur of the moment to counteract the terriblewaves of noise assaulting our tympana), it was all at once much easierto see the needle of the scale dropping toward zero, as the glass discfacing the dial dissolved into gritty powder, along with the glass panesin every window in the lab, the house, the heliport, and the movietheatre. (Not to mention those of a few farmhouses a couple of milesdown the highway, but we didn't find that out till their lawyers showedup with bills for damages.)
Sure enough, though, the thing lifted. Up it bobbed, like a metaldirigible with agonizing gas pains, shriekin
g louder by the second.When the plaster started to trickle and flake from the walls, and thefillings in my teeth rose to a temperature just short of incandescence,I decided it was time to cancel this phase of the experiment, and, withvery little regret, I flung a blanket-like canvas tarpaulin up and overthe ascending machine before it started using its helices to screw intothe ceiling. The cones bit into the tarpaulin, tangled, jammed, and themachine--mercifully noiseless, now--crashed
* * * * *
It was nearly lunchtime when he finished his spiel, and I was kickingmyself in my short-memoried brain for having let him get onto thesubject, when abruptly the joyous glow behind his eyes damped itssparkle a bit.
"There _is_ one little hitch--"
"I thought it looked too easy," I sighed, waiting for the clinker."Don't tell me it has to be made out of pure Gallium, which has theregrettable tendency to liquiefy at about thirty degrees centigrade? Orperhaps of the most elusive of its eleven isotopes?"
"No, no, nothing like that," he murmured almost distractedly. "It's theforce-per-gram part that's weak."
"Don't tell me," I said unhappily, "that this thing'll only generateenough force to lift itself?"
A feeble ghost of his erstwhile grin rode briefly across his lips."That's the way it works out on paper," he said.
"Which means," I realized aloud, "that it's commercially useless,because what's the good of an anti-gravity machine that can't liftanything except _itself_! It falls into the class of lifeboats thatfloat up to the gunwales in the water while still _empty_. Fun to watch,but impossible to use. Hell, Artie, if that's the setup, then thisthing wouldn't be any more help to a space-aiming government than anaborigine's boomerang; it flies beautifully, but not if the aboriginetries to go _with_ it."
"However," he said, a bit more brightly, "I've been wrong on paperbefore. Remember the bumblebee, Burt! _That_ theory still holds up onpaper. But the bee still flies."
He had me, there. "So you want I should build it anyhow, just on theoff-chance that it _won't_ follow the rules of physical logic, and willdecide to generate a force above and beyond its own gravitic drag?"
"That's it," he said happily. "And even if it only manages to negateits own weight, we'll have an easier time ironing the bugs out of amodel than we would out of a diagram. After all, who'd have figured thatbeyond _Mach I_, all the lift-surfaces on a plane work in _reverse_?"
It wasn't, I had to admit, anything that an inventor could havereasonably theorized at the outset.... So I locked myself in the lab fora week, and built his gadget, while he spent his time pacing through hisfourteen-room mansion across the way from the lab building (the "way"being the flat grassy region on Artie's estate that housed his swimmingpool, private heliport, and movie theatre), trying to coin a nifty namefor the thing. We both finished in a dead heat.
* * * * *
I unlocked the door of the lab, blinked hard against the sting of warmyellow sunlight after a week of cool blue fluorescents, and just as Iwheezed, "Got it," Artie was counterpointing with, "We'll call it The_Uuaa_!" (He made four syllables out of it.)
"The Oo-oo-_ah_-ah?" I glottaled. "In honor of the fiftieth state, orwhat? I know 'aa' is a type of lava, but what the hell's 'uu', besidesthe noise a man makes getting into an overheated bath?"
Artie pouted. "'Uuaa' is initials. For 'Up, up, and away!' I thought itwas pretty good."
I shook my head. "Why feed free fodder to the telecomics? I can hearthem now, doing monologues about people getting beri-beri flying fromWalla Walla to Pago Pago on their Uuaas...."
"So what would _you_ call it!" he grunted.
"A bust," I sighed, left-thumbing over my shoulder at the lab. "It sitsand twirls and whistles a little, but that's about the size of it,Artie."
He spanieled with his eyes, basset-hounded with his mouth, andorangutaned with his cheeks, then said, with dim hope, "Did you weighit? Maybe if you weighed it--"
"Oh, it lost, all right," I admitted. "When I connected the batteries,the needle on the scale dropped down to zero, and stopped there. And Ifound that I could lift the machine into the air, and it'd stay where itwas put, just whistling and whirling its cones. But then it started tosettle." I beckoned him back inside.
"Settle? Why?" Artie asked.
"Dust," I said. "There's always a little dust settling out of the air.It doesn't weigh _much_, but it made the machine weigh at least what thedust-weight equalled, and down it went. Slow and easy, but down."
Artie looked at the gadget, sitting and whistling on the floor of thelab, then turned a bleak-but-still-hopeful glance my way. "Maybe--If wecould make a _guy_ take on a cone-shape, and whirled him--"
"Sure," I muttered. "Bend over, grab his ankles, and fly anywhere inthe world, with his torso and legs pivoting wildly around his peakedbehind." I shook my head. "Besides the manifestly undignified posturinginvolved, we have to consider the other effects; like having hiseyeballs fly out."
"If--If we had a bunch of men lie in a circle around a kind ofMaypole-thing, each guy clutching the ankles of the next one...."
"Maybe they'd be weightless, but they _still_ wouldn't go _up_," Isaid. "Unless they could be towed, somehow. And by the time theylanded, they'd be too nauseous to be of any use for at least threedays. Always assuming, of course, that the weak-wristed member of thesick circlet didn't lose his grip, and have them end up playing mid-aircrack-the-whip before they fell."
"So all right, it's got a couple of bugs!" said Artie. "But theprinciple'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 somenew embellishments for the machine. Where it was originally a sortof humped metal box (the engine went inside the hump) studded withtoothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones (lest elementarytorque send the machine swinging the other way, and thus destroy thethrust-effect of the cones), it now had an additional feature: A helicalflange around each cone.
"You see," Artie explained, while I was torching them to order fromplate 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-dragto fight, being that much farther from the Earth. The effect will becumulative. 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 anelectric anvil (another gadget of Artie's; the self-heating anvil--TheThermovil--had begun life as a small inspiration in Artie's mind for aportable toaster).
It was just after sunset when we figured the welds were cool enough sowe 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 todetect a shriller noise, one which abruptly became a genuine pain in theear. As Artie and I became somewhat busy with screaming (the only thingwe could think of on the spur of the moment to counteract the terriblewaves of noise assaulting our tympana), it was all at once much easierto see the needle of the scale dropping toward zero, as the glass discfacing the dial dissolved into gritty powder, along with the glass panesin every window in the lab, the house, the heliport, and the movietheatre. (Not to mention those of a few farmhouses a couple of milesdown the highway, but we didn't find that out till their lawyers showedup with bills for damages.)
Sure enough, though, the thing lifted. Up it bobbed, like a metaldirigible with agonizing gas pains, shriekin
g louder by the second.When the plaster started to trickle and flake from the walls, and thefillings in my teeth rose to a temperature just short of incandescence,I decided it was time to cancel this phase of the experiment, and, withvery little regret, I flung a blanket-like canvas tarpaulin up and overthe ascending machine before it started using its helices to screw intothe ceiling. The cones bit into the tarpaulin, tangled, jammed, and themachine--mercifully noiseless, now--crashed
