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"I have a standard axiom: all governments lie. Don't believe anything they say. And corporations are only kinds of government."
- Frank Herbert
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| Robotic Tail | ||
| A sleek coiled length of robotic segments. |
| The Wabbler went westward, with a dozen of its fellows, by night and in the belly of a sleek, swift-flying thing... The Wabbler lay in its place, with its ten-foot tail coiled neatly about its lower end...
The Wabbler hurtled downward through blackness... The Wabbler’s tail uncurled and writhed flexibly behind it.
Splash! The Wabbler plunged into the water...
It wabbled to one side and the other, straining, and presently its body was free, and a foot or two and then four or five feet of its tail — but it still writhed and wabbled spasmodically — and then suddenly it left the sea floor and floated free.
A long, long time afterward — years afterward — salvage divers finished cutting up the sunken warship for scrap. The last irregularly cut mass of metal went up on the salvage slings. The last diver down went stumbling about the muddy harbor water. His heavy, weighted shoes kicked up something. He fumbled to see if anything remained to be salvaged. He found a ten-foot, still flexible tail of metal. The rest of the Wabbler had ceased to exist. Chronometer, tide-time gear, valves, compressed-air tanks, and all the balance of its intricate inwards had been blown to atoms when the Wabbler achieved its destiny. Only the flexible metal tail remained intact. |
| Technovelgy from The Wabbler,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Street and Smith in 1942 Additional resources -
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'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'... with the Master-operator all you have to do is push one! A remarkable achievement!'
'Not like me. A T-1000, advanced prototype. A mimetic poly-alloy. Liquid metal.'
'It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'The massive feet working the pedals, arms and hands flashing and glinting...'
'There were cubic miles of it, and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree...'
'Jason had been guiding the caravan of cars as usual...'
"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
