"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...."
"Maybe they'd be weightless, but they still wouldn't go up," I said. "Unless they could be towed, somehow. And by the time they landed, they'd be too nauseous to be of any use for at least three days. Always assuming, of course, that the weak-wristed member of the sick circlet didn't lose his grip, and have them end up playing mid-air crack-the-whip before they fell."
"So all right, it's got a couple of bugs!" said Artie. "But the principle'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 some new embellishments for the machine. Where it was originally a sort of humped metal box (the engine went inside the hump) studded with toothbrush-bristle rows of counter-revolving cones (lest elementary torque send the machine swinging the other way, and thus destroy the thrust-effect of the cones), it now had an additional feature: A helical flange around each cone.
"You see," Artie explained, while I was torching them to order from plate metal, "the helices will provide lift as the cones revolve."