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"None of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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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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'The observation vehicle was of that peculiar variety used in conveying a large number of people across rough terrain.'
'The real border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'I ... set my automatic astronomical instruments to searching for a habitable planet.'
'...haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'
'... oblongs were all over the floor and surfaces.'
