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"By the time I can take people out to where Hubble is looking, they won't be human anymore, by a long way."
- Larry Niven
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| Paralyzing Eye | ||
| False eye contains mechanism for causing brief paralysis. |
Oh, who wouldn't want one of these?
| Mendez S.D. de Witt had several different artificial eyes, none of which was quite what it seemed.he occupied a section of a laboratory desk in the Bureau of Standards building, and, with a soldering iron and tweezers, deftly assembled the mechanism for yet another spurious optic. This one was to be a paralyzing ray machine. The mechanism would be installed in the Lucite shell at another time, de Witt didn't want the other Bureau of standards technicians to learn about his eyes. |
| Technovelgy from The Best-Laid Scheme,
by L. Sprague de Camp. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Here's how it worked:
The idea of a paralysis beam or device was quite popular. Compare to the paralysis bomb from Robert Heinlein's 1941 novel Methuselah's Children, the paralyzing cone from The Atomic Conquerors by Edmond Hamilton (1927) and the para-beam From The Mechanical Monarch, by E.C. Tubb (1958).
Hedges got the pin out of his bomb just as de Witt remembered his paralyzing eye. He blinked his real eye, and sighted the phony on the back of Hedges' neck. The bomb fell to the asphalt.
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
