"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.
"Which means," I realized aloud, "that it's commercially useless, because what's the good of an anti-gravity machine that can't lift anything except itself! It falls into the class of lifeboats that float 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 this thing wouldn't be any more help to a space-aiming government than an aborigine's boomerang; it flies beautifully, but not if the aborigine tries to go with it."
"However," he said, a bit more brightly, "I've been wrong on paper before. Remember the bumblebee, Burt! That theory still holds up on paper. But the bee still flies."
He had me, there. "So you want I should build it anyhow, just on the off-chance that it won't follow the rules of physical logic, and will decide to generate a force above and beyond its own gravitic drag?"
"That's it," he said happily. "And even if it only manages to negate its own weight, we'll have an easier time ironing the bugs out of a model than we would out of a diagram. After all, who'd have figured that beyond Mach I, all the lift-surfaces on a plane work in reverse?"
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 (the "way" being the flat grassy region on Artie's estate that housed his swimming pool, private heliport, and movie theatre), trying to coin a nifty name for the thing. We both finished in a dead heat.
I unlocked the door of the lab, blinked hard against the sting of warm yellow sunlight after a week of cool blue fluorescents, and just as I wheezed, "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, or what? I know 'aa' is a type of lava, but what the hell's 'uu', besides the noise a man makes getting into an overheated bath?"