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"...if you want to know what your future looks like, don't waste your time on Analog; read Time magazine. We are already saturated in the future. "
- Peter Watts
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| Prowlie | ||
| A police vehicle. |
| FOCUS: the prowlie. White-painted, trapezoidal vehicle thirteen feet long by seven wide, its wheels out of sight underneath for protection against shots, dispersed around the flat slab tank of the fuel-cell powering it, its forward cabin for four men windowed with armour-glass and additionally screened with retractable wire grilles, its rear section designed for carrying off arrestees and if necessary the injured having a solid metal drop-down tailgate with stretcher rails and a sleepy-gas air-circulation system. On the nose, two brilliant white lights with a field of 150°, one extinguished because the driver had waited too long to roll up the wire screen and protect it; on each corner of the roof other lights with adjustable beam-spread; revolving in a small turret on the roof, a gas-gun shooting fragmenting glass grenades to a distance of sixty yards; under the skirt, for ultimate emergency use only, oil-jets that could flood the adjacent street with a small sea of fire to keep back attackers while the occupants waited out the period till help arrived, breathing through masks from a stored-air system. It was vulnerable to mines, to three successive hand-gun bolts striking within about two inches of each other on the shell, or to the collapse of a building, but to nothing else encountered during an average urban riot. However, its fuel-cell was inadequate to push out of the way either the stationary cab ahead, whose brakes were automatically set because its door was open |
| Technovelgy from Stand on Zanzibar,
by John Brunner. Published by Del Rey in 1968 Additional resources -
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
