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"...a lot of people find adventure on the Internet. That's their idea of being interactive. My idea of being interactive is going on out and doing it on the street."
- Harlan Ellison
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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?” |
| 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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'the registration number which the traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlway...'
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'Then they press one of these here thirteen buttons...'
'...without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule to injure the diseased atmosphere any further.'
'Bird-like robots now descended from the ceiling of the theatre...'
'The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal.'
'...in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life has taken almost instant form.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'The atmosphere yielded its moisture with reluctance. It had to be coaxed down...'
