Read Ebook: Double or Nothing by Sharkey Jack

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Ebook has 130 lines and 10451 words, and 3 pages

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."

"And why should it be?" he persisted. "Picture an umbrella, with the fabric removed. Now twirl the handle on its axis. What do the ribs do?"

"I suppose they splay out into a circle?"

"Who knows?" he said, his blue eyes dancing. "Maybe no one ever thought of it before. You could sit down and twist a paper clip out of a hunk of soft wire, couldn't you? Easy as pie. But someone had to invent the thing, first. All the great inventions have been simple. Look at the wheel."

"Okay, okay," I said, since I'd been sold on his gadget the moment I pictured that umbrella moving ferruleward like a whirling arrow. "Still, it looks like you're getting something for nothing. A kind of by-your-own-bootstraps maneuver...."

"An inventor," said Artie, quoting his favorite self-coined aphorism, "must never think like a scientist!"

"But"--I said, more to stem the tide I expected than to really make a coherent objection.

"An inventor," he went dreamily onward, "is essentially a dreamer; a scientist is an observer. An inventor tries to make a result he wants happen; a scientist tries to tell the inventor that the result cannot be achieved."

"Please. Artie. Don't tell me about the bee again."

It was nearly lunchtime when he finished his spiel, and I was kicking myself in my short-memoried brain for having let him get onto the subject, when abruptly the joyous glow behind his eyes damped its sparkle a bit.

"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 the regrettable tendency to liquiefy at about thirty degrees centigrade? Or perhaps of the most elusive of its eleven isotopes?"

"No, no, nothing like that," he murmured almost distractedly. "It's the force-per-gram part that's weak."

"Don't tell me," I said unhappily, "that this thing'll only generate enough 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.

It wasn't, I had to admit, anything that an inventor could have reasonably theorized at the outset.... So I locked myself in the lab for a week, and built his gadget, while he spent his time pacing through his fourteen-room mansion across the way from the lab building , trying to coin a nifty name for the thing. We both finished in a dead heat.

Artie pouted. "'Uuaa' is initials. For 'Up, up, and away!' I thought it was pretty good."

I shook my head. "Why feed free fodder to the telecomics? I can hear them now, doing monologues about people getting beri-beri flying from Walla Walla to Pago Pago on their Uuaas...."

"A bust," I sighed, left-thumbing over my shoulder at the lab. "It sits and twirls and whistles a little, but that's about the size of it, Artie."

He spanieled with his eyes, basset-hounded with his mouth, and orangutaned with his cheeks, then said, with dim hope, "Did you weigh it? 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 I found that I could lift the machine into the air, and it'd stay where it was put, just whistling and whirling its cones. But then it started to settle." I beckoned him back inside.

"Settle? Why?" Artie asked.

"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...."

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

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

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 studded with toothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones , it now had an additional feature: A helical flange around each cone.

"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 .

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 , 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.

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.

The next four days were spent in the arduous and quite tricky business of reaming acoustically spaced holes along the flanges. Artie's theory was that if we simply fixed it so that the sound made by each flange was of the proper number of vibrations to intermesh with the compression/rarefaction phases of the sounds made by the other flanges, a veritable sphere of silence would be thereby created, since there'd be no room for any sound waves to pass through the already crowded atmosphere about the machine.

"It'll make less noise than a mouse in sneakers drooling on a blotter!" enthused Artie, when I had it rigged again, and ready to go.

Silence. Beautiful, blissful, silence. There before us twirled the rows of shiny cones, lifting slowly into the air, and there was nothing to hear at all. Beside me, Artie's lips moved, but I couldn't catch a syllable. This time around, we'd looped a rope through a few metal grommets in the base of the machine, and as it rose, Artie slipped the trailing ends under his arms from behind, and proceeded to lash it across his chest, to test the thing's lift-power. As he fumbled with the knot, I shouted at him, "Use a firm hitch!"

"--your language!" Artie was snarling, as sound returned.

"All I said was 'Use a firm hitch!'" I pleaded, trying to shove his shins off my floor-pinned biceps.

Artie stared at me, then rocked off my prostrate body, convulsed in a fit of laughter. "Say it silently in front of a mirror, sometime," he choked out. Before I had time to see what he was talking about, I smelled smoke, above and beyond that engendered by the scorched insulation.

I ran to the door, and opened it to observe the last glowing, crackling timbers of the house, the theatre, and the heliport vanish into hot orange sparks, in the grip of a dandy ring of fire that--in a seventy-yard path--had burned up everything in a sixty-five to hundred-thirty-five yard radius of the lab.

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