: Double or Nothing by Sharkey Jack - Science fiction; Short stories; Inventors Fiction Science Fiction

@FreeBooksWed 07 Jun, 2023

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DOUBLE or NOTHING

I don't know why I listen to Artie Lindstrom. Maybe it's because at times I'm as screwy as he is. At least, I keep letting myself get sucked into his plans, every time he's discovered the "invention that will change the world". He discovers it quite a bit; something new every time. And, Artie having a natural mechanical aptitude that would probably rate as point-nine-nine-ad-infinitum on a scale where one-point-oh was perfection, all his inventions work. Except--

Well, take the last thing we worked on.

So we're a team, Artie and me. He does the planning, I do the constructing. Like, as I mentioned, the last thing we worked on. He invented it; I built it. A cap-remover . But not just a clamp-plus-handle, like most of the same gadgets. Nope, this was electronic, worked on a tight-beam radio-wave, plus something to do with the expansion coefficients of the metals making up the caps, so that, from anyplace in line-of-sight of her home, the housewife could shove a stud, and come home to find all the caps unscrewed on her kitchen shelves, and the contents ready for getting at. It did, I'll admit, have a nice name: The Teletwist.

Except, where's the point in unscrewing caps unless you're physically present to make use of the contents of the jars? I mentioned this to Artie when I was building the thing, but he said, "Wait and see. It'll be a novelty, like hula hoops a couple of decades back. Novelties always catch on."

Well, he was wrong. When we finally found a manufacturer softheaded enough to mass-produce a few thousand of the gadgets, total sales for the entire country amounted to seventeen. Of course, the price was kind of prohibitive: Thirteen-fifty per Teletwist. Why would a housewife lay that kind of money on the line when she'd already, for a two-buck license, gotten a husband who could be relied upon to do the same thing for her?

So Artie's ideas seem to have their uses, all right. Only, for some reason, Artie never thinks of the proper application for his latest newfound principle. That neat little disintegrator pistol carried by the footsoldiers in the Three Day War was a variation on a cute little battery-powered device of Artie's, of which the original function had been to rid one's house of roaches.

"It looks great," I said, lifting my face from the blueprint, and nodding across the workbench at Artie. "But what the hell does it do?"

My eyes returned to the conglomeration of sketchy cones beneath his flailing finger, and I said, as truthfully as possible, "A pine forest on a lumpy hill."

"Those," he said, his tone hurt as it always was when I inadvertently belittled his draftmanship, "are flywheels."

"Cone-shaped flywheels?" I said. "Why, for pete's sake?"

"A centr--" I said, then sat back from the drawings, blinking. "That's impossible, Artie."

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