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"I don't have an e-mail address. As much as I admire the Internet I suffer literally agoraphobia, which in it's original sense means a fear of the marketplace. I do not want to receive three hundred e-mail messages per week from strangers…"
- William Gibson
 |
| Tomato Babies | ||
| Unusual fruit native to Iapetus, can hold electric soul. |
Harry Potter fans may be reminded of horcruxes.
| "Do you know what that double-barreled fool of a Farquarson had selected to cook?"
"No," I replied. "A bunch of Tomato Babies." McBream obviously expected me to be impressed with this piece of information. I struggled with it for a time and then gave up. "I never heard of them," I said. "Never heard of them? What do they teach you kids on Terra nowadays? Why, when I was going to school we had course after course in extra-terrestrial subjects, and you couldn't graduate unless you got at least a passing grade in Solar History. No wonder people are only half-educated these days!" McBream sounded outraged. I had been thinking. "Wait, now," I said, "it seems to me I read a piece in a digest about the Tomato Babies a couple of years ago. Yes, I do remember. It was by a professor of Folklore in Ares City College, and he said that the myth of the Tomato Baby proved that the folklore theme of the external soul—you know, like the stories in Grimm about the giants who can't be killed because their souls are in magical eggs or crystals—that that theme was system-wide." McBream looked at me. "It isn't a myth," he said with a hint of indignation, "it's perfectly true. The Folklorist who wrote that article didn't know what he was talking about. The Tomato Babies are a big red ovoid fruit that grows on floppy vines in a few odd places on Iapetus. They're hollow inside, and the Talipygians put their souls in them."
 (Talipygians from 'Return Engagement' (1952) by Margaret St. Clair) "Well, more or less their souls. You remember I told you the Talipygians were hard to photograph because they were partly electrical energy. When one of them is sick or wounded, the others take his soul out—the electrical part of him—and put it inside one of these fruits. The Tomato Babies, as far as we can find out, are a sort of natural Leyden jar. Or maybe more like a storage battery. Anyhow, the point is that a sick Talipygian doesn't have to suffer for months and months while he's getting well. His electrical component is popped into one of these containers, and his body can devote itself quietly and painlessly to the business of recovering." |
| Technovelgy from Return Engagement,
by Margaret St. Clair. Published by Imagination in 1952 Additional resources -
|
The Leyden jar is a cylindrical container made of a dielectric (an insulator, like glass) with a layer of metal foil on the inside and outside. With the outside surface grounded, a charge is applied to the inside surface. This gives the outside an equal but opposite charge. When the outside and inside surfaces are connected by a conductor, the stored electrical energy is discharged. It was the world's first working capacitor.
Decorative mid-19th century Leyden Jars
The Leyden jar was first discovered by Ewald Georg von Kleist, a German inventor. However, Pieter van Musschenbroek of the University of Leyden discovered the Leyden jar independently in 1746 and the name remains.
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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.'
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'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
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