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"...a few centuries of coherent humanist thought, set against a million odd years of evolved killer ape tendency. No-one's going to give you very good odds on humanism, are they?"
- Richard Morgan
 |
| 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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I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
'He carried on his person a triggering mechanism sensitive to his heartbeat.'
'...Anything was possible in my imaginary environment.'
'Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair...'
