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"This is a predictive tool I've used: There are goals we've sought for ten thousand years, and we'll go on seeking them. Instant transport and travel, immortality (or at least longevity and miracle cures.), instant learning …"
- Larry Niven
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| Gravograph | ||
| A graphical representation of gravitational fields. |
Approaching the Sargasso of space, an area of space where the gravitational influences of the planets cancel each other out, the ship's crew monitor the situation with their gravograph.
| On the third ship-day Kent and Captain Crain stood in the pilot-house behind Liggett, who sat at the now useless rocket-tube controls. Their eyes were on the big glass screen of the gravograph. The black dot on it that represented their ship was crawling steadily toward the bright red circle that stood for the dead-area....
They watched silently until the dot had crawled over the circle's red line, heading toward its center. "Well, we're in at last," Kent commented. "There seems to be no change in anything, either." Crain pointed to the instrument-panel. "Look at the gravitometers." Kent did. "All dead! No gravitational pull from any direction—no, that one shows a slight attraction from ahead!" "Then gravitational attraction of some sort does exist in the dead-area after all!" Liggett exclaimed. "You don't understand," said Crain. "That attraction from ahead is the pull of the wreck-pack at the dead-area's center." "And it's pulling the Pallas toward it?" Kent exclaimed. Crain nodded. "We'll probably reach the wreck-pack in two more ship-days." |
| Technovelgy from The Sargasso of Space,
by Edmond Hamilton. Published by Astounding Stories in 1931 Additional resources -
|
Read the discussion of weightlessness in Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, and see how he was the first to describe the idea of planetary gravities canceling each other out (in fiction, anyway).
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
