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...."
"So what would you call it!" he grunted.
"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.
"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 the dust-weight equalled, and down it went. Slow and easy, but down."
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."