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"If I had to get a new Ph.D. now, I'd get it in polymer engineering - the manipulation of matter."
- Bart Kosko
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| Seetee Blinker | ||
| A marker of contraterrene matter (antimatter) asteroids, to aid in interplanetary navigation. |
If your standard matter ship encountered a seetee asteroid, annihilation would result!
| The seetee blinker was Drake's own invention, made many years ago. It was a necessary task of the Guard to mark the contraterrene bodies, whenever they were identified, so that ships and miners might avoid them - yet no man, or work of man, could touch them unconsumed...
The blinker was a spiderlike frame of meteoric iron, set to circle in a narrow planetary orbit about the body to be marked. The whirling arms carried mirrors of sodium foil, tilted to reflect the Sun's rays through colored filters in a sequence of warning flashes. The signals were listed, with data on the objects marked, in the "Ephemeris and Register". The oldest beacons had been spinning for nearly forty years, perfect machines, requiring neither fuel nor attention. |
| Technovelgy from Collision Orbit,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the space beacon from Troubled Star (1952) by George O. Smith and to the hyperspace beacon from The Repairman (1959) by Harry Harrison. Also, distinguish from the space-beacon (in the sense of a landing signal) from Exploration Team, a 1956 story by Murray Leinster.
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'... he had tightened the chest to gain maximum pumping action from the motion of breathing.'
'...a prayer wheel swung into view and began spinning at a furious pace.'
'And are all the people willing to be governed by a machine?'
'It's an old model,' Rawlins said. 'I'm not sure what to do.'
'the robot-boss was busy at the lip of the new lode instructing and egging the men on to greater speed...'
'He rode the bike with an intense lack of physical grace...'
