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"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."
- Isaac Asimov
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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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Science Fiction
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
