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"I was driving a dynamite truck when I was 14 years old in North Carolina."
- Harlan Ellison
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| Blue Ray of Death | ||
| A ray that reduces an organic being to ash instantly. |
The weapon itself is described as "a long metal tube" which is pointed at the victim.
| "All was ready, yet before emerging onto the upper Eartth, they decided to have a sure, deadly weapon against the races of man, who might molest them in their work. So they developed a deadly ray, a ray that crumbles a human body into a puff of white powder instantly..." |
| Technovelgy from Across Space,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Weird Tales in 1926 Additional resources -
|
Here is a description of the ray in use:
Fans of Star Trek TOS may recall the episode By Any Other Name; an alien ray reduced crew members to polyhedra of crumbling salts. The good news was that the person could be reconstituted - the bad news was once a block was crumbled, that person was gone.
...As a number of them [Martians] began to climb up the pillar, the blue ray of death flashed out from inside the box and cut a wide swath through their numbers, reducing those it touched to white powder in an instant!"
(Star Trek crew reduced to crumbling blocks in By Any Other Name)
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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
