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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Docking-Cradle | ||
| Holds a space craft in gravity. |
| "HEY, YOU! What’s your business?” Bart Harlan, standing on the cat-walk that circled the upper rim of the docking-cradle, did not immediately answer the shouted question. He clung to the thin hand rail, bracing himself against the sheets of rain which drove across the almost deserted landing field, and stared wearily down into the shadowy interior of the cradle. It was about the grubbiest looking space-tramp he’d ever seen. Its weblike outer skin of molybdo-barium meteorite cushionings was tarnished black, except where recent gouges revealed shining metal. One boarding grapple was badly bent; it would not quite fold back into the housing, and stuck out like a broken finger. The iso-quartz space ports showed no lights; they peered like dead eyes from behind the molybdo-barium interweave. A trip to the repair cradles was certainly in order; no space-ship inspector would ever 0. K. a tramp like that, unless the bribe was pretty steep. |
| Technovelgy from They Never Came Back,
by Fritz Leiber. Published by Astounding in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Robert Heinlein also uses the term "cradle" in his 1956 novel Double Star:
I wish I had been awake to see it, for they say that catching an egg on a plate is easy by comparison. Dak was one of the half dozen pilots who could do it.
Compare to the splashdown from From the Earth to the Moon (1867) by Jules Verne,
landing arms from Creatures of the Comet (1931) by Edmond Hamilton,
landing stage from Atomic Fire (1931) by Raymond Z. Gallun,
landing cradle from The Radium World (1932) by Frank K. Kelly,
landing on an asteroid from Murder on the Asteroid (1933) by Eando Binder,
landing-grid from Sand Doom (1955) by Murray Leinster,
landing pit from The Stars My Destination (1956) by Alfred Bester and
launching cradle from Needler (1957) by Gordon Randall Garrett.
Our Moon being an airless planet, a torchship can land on it (an atmosphere converts the torchship exhaust into a deadly nuclear air burst with wide-ranging devastation). But the Tom Paine, being a torchship, was really intended to stay in space and be serviced only at space stations in orbit; she had to be landed in a cradle (translation: Tom Paine is an orbit-to-orbit ship, it has no landing gear. A cradle is a framework that holds the torchship.).
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
