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"[Science fiction is] an integration of the mood and attitude of science (the objective universe) with the fears and hopes that spring from the unconscious."
- Gregory Benford
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| Tetrahedron Interference Projector | ||
| Projects a field of force around the Solar System, bending the light of stars to make them seem more distant. |
| Far ahead, a brilliant splash of dazzling white light lay across the corridor. Dain and Ormond paused in stupefaction as they reached it. One side of the corridor was open, without wall or rail, and they looked down as from a giddy catwalk into an immense space that was a colossal room occupying a great part of the giant cylinder. They could not tell how distant were the wglls of the vast chamber, their eyes were so blinded by the thing blazing at its center. It was a stupendous tetrahedron of pure white light, poised with apex uppermost, hanging weightlessly down above the floor of the vast chamber. All around it, in a circle of which the dazzling tetrahedron was the center, stood a ring of huge glass spheres. Each sphere was filled with curdled white light or force, and from each a thin stream of light jetted inward to feed the central tetrahedron... “Ross, these spheres are reservoirs of force !” he cried. “They collect force from the sun and store it somehow in the spheres to keep the tetrahedron going. But what’s it all for?” |
| Technovelgy from The Great Illusion,
by Will Garth. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1938 Additional resources -
|
The aliens in the ship bring grim news - humanity has been fooled for countless millennia!
“That can’t be!” exclaimed Kenneth Dain incredulously. “Why, our astronomers have for years measured the stars’ distances, by every delicate method. We know that even the nearest star is countless billions of miles away.”
“We built this great ship, and all it contains, and towed it here into an orbit about your sun. It draws power from your sun, power which is stored in spherical condensers and fed ceaselessly into the shining tetrahedron. That tetrahedron emits a force that maintains a constant sphere of interference around your Solar System, a shell of energy that refracts and bends all light entering this System from the outer Universe. It so distorts and diminishes the lightbeams from the outer stars that from inside the System those stars appear fearfully remote. Aye, and so cunningly that even to the most delicate instruments of your world the stars still appear remote...
“You think that the other stars are unthinkably far from your own Solar System, so distant that they can never be reached. That is the great illusion! For the truth is that the stars are hundreds of times nearer your System than you and your scientists believe. So near are they, indeed, that it would not be hard for you to reach them in craft similar to the one that brought you here.”
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Great Illusion
More Ideas
and Technology by Will Garth
Tech news articles related to The Great Illusion
Tech news articles related to works by Will Garth
| SETI Suggests Prospecting The Solar System Without Landing |
| Cislunar Space And The Space Lanes of Golden Age Science Fiction |
| NASA Moonbase Update |
| The Solar Oberth Slingshot |
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'Space-sickness is one of the most unpleasant sensations that a human being can experience. Not all are subject to it...'
'...I saw a nice black heavy-looking cloud sailing by just now, and I can get the electrical machine out in five minutes to draw it down.'
'From a distance it could resolve the cosmic rays reflected from various substances.'
'The answer to the dumb student's prayer.'
'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
