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"SF looks towards an imaginary future, while fantasy, by and large, looks towards an imaginary past."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| The Cosmic Express | ||
| A means of transmitting matter wirelessly. |
Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding wrote novels of high adventure - in a drab, boring era in the not-too-distant future, when the plodding of the scientific method had reduced all challenges to harmless trivialities. Ah, to escape to a more primitive world - Venus, perhaps? But how to get there...
| "The Cosmic Express?"
"A new invention. Just perfected a few weeks ago, I understand. By Ludwig Von der Valls, the German physicist... A new way to travel—by ether!" "...the method, in the new Cosmic Express, is simply to convert the matter to be carried into power, send it out as a radiant beam and focus the beam to convert it back into atoms at the destination." |
| From The Cosmic Express,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
Here's a description of how it works:
Eric helped Nada to a place on the crystal, lay down at her side.
"I think the Express Ray is focused just at the surface of the crystal, from below," he said. "It dissolves our substance, to be transmitted by the beam. It would look as if we were melting into the crystal."
"Ready," called the youth.
Thanks to Jordan Bassior for suggesting this item.
The little door had swung open again, and Eric led Nada through. They stepped into a little cell, completely surrounded with mirrors and vast prisms and lenses and electron tubes. In the center was a slab of transparent crystal, eight feet square and two inches thick, with an intricate mass of machinery below it.
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