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"The point sticks in your head: physics rules. Virtue does not triumph unless the physics allows it."
- Larry Niven
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| Watercouch | ||
| A couch filled with water, rather than springs and cushions. |
This is a very simple extension of a now common idea; make use of waterbed technology in other rooms in your house.
| And there are times when I am so full of learning and being and doing that the moments zip past and the days are packed, and other times when I am floating in slack water beside a current, and the world is sliding speedily by. There was plenty to do. I didn't feel like doing it. Albert was bursting with news from Heechee Heaven and the Food Factory. I let him purge himself. But the synoptics plopped into my mind without raising a question or even a ripple; when he was through reporting about architectural deductions and interpretations of maunderings of the Dead Men I turned him off. It was intensely interesting, but for some reason I was not interested by it. I ordered Harriet to let my simulacrum deal with everything routine and tell everyone who was not urgent to call me another time. I stretched out on the three-meter watercouch looking out over the weird Brasilia skyline, and wished that it were that couch in the Food Factory, connected to someone I loved. |
| From Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,
by Frederik Pohl. Published by Ballantine in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Lots of people think that science fiction writer Robert Heinlein invented the waterbed; see the entry for hydraulic bed, from Stranger in a Strange Land for a more complete story.
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'...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...'
'Want a life-companion... sir, I can get you up any style you want.'
