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"My father was a master mechanic; I grew up with a screwdriver in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| Bladder Birds | ||
| Alien life well adapted. |
I don't usually put invented animal life in the index, but I couldn't resist this one.
| “Look I” she cried. "There’s something moving on the peaks — like a big ball. And way up where there’s no air at all !”
I glanced over. “It’s just a bladder bird,” I said indifferently. I’d seen plenty of them ; they were the commonest mobile form of life on Europa. But of course Qaire hadn’t, and she was eagerly curious. I explained. I threw stones into a tinkling grove of song-bushes until I flushed up another, and it went gliding over our heads with its membrane stretched taut. I told her that the three-foot creature that had sailed like a flying squirrel was the same sort as the giant ball she had glimpsed among the airless peaks, only the one on the peaks bad inflated its bladder. The creatures were able to cross from valley to valley by carrying their air with them in their big, balloonlike bladders. And, of course, bladder birds weren’t really birds at all ; they didn’t fly, but glided like the lemurs and flying squirrels of Earth, and naturally, couldn’t even do that when they were up on the airless heights. |
| Technovelgy from Redemption Cairn,
by Stanley G. and Helen Weinbaum. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1936 Additional resources -
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'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
'The car had no steering wheel, and no one drove!'
Now that's power walking that Hugo Gernsback would have approved.
'It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct...'
'...he rewired the delivery robot so that it would serve him midnight snacks.'
'On went the electric-yacht faster and still faster.'
'...the huge vessel had spun, with a sickening lurch, through a complete half-circle, the instant the power was reversed.'
'...he realized that it was not quite a clear lens. Speckles of colored brightness swirled and gathered in it.'
