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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
- Isaac Asimov
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| X Gun (X-Beam Projector) | ||
| A device that projected soft x-rays into small planetoids to determine their composition. |
So you're out out Saturn-way, looking for mineral deposits in the small bodies ringing the gas giant. What would you use to check to see if a given planetoid was worthwhile?
| As the pencil of soft x-rays, under the guidance of his skilled hand, probed into the twenty-foot planetoid, its reflections trembled ghostily in the milk-luminous chart...
Osgood rotated the handle of the X-beam projector, the "X gun," with the expertness of a machine gunner, and read the fluctuating, melting Fraunhofer designs out of the corner of his eye. |
| Technovelgy from Diamond Planetoid,
by Gordon A. Giles. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1937 Additional resources -
|
What's more, this ship was equipped with a special converter that meant you didn't need to interpret some sort of crystallography design, either. Read up on the spectroscopic robot converter.
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'The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.'
't came out into plain view. Darkington glimpsed a slim body and six short legs of articulated dull metal.'
'Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper.'
'I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh.'
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
