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"The primary attraction [of writing sf] is the sheer pleasure of creating something from whole cloth."
- Dan Simmons
 |
| Paralyzing Eye | ||
| False eye contains mechanism for causing brief paralysis. |
Oh, who wouldn't want one of these?
| Mendez S.D. de Witt had several different artificial eyes, none of which was quite what it seemed.he occupied a section of a laboratory desk in the Bureau of Standards building, and, with a soldering iron and tweezers, deftly assembled the mechanism for yet another spurious optic. This one was to be a paralyzing ray machine. The mechanism would be installed in the Lucite shell at another time, de Witt didn't want the other Bureau of standards technicians to learn about his eyes. |
| Technovelgy from The Best-Laid Scheme,
by L. Sprague de Camp. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
|
Here's how it worked:
The idea of a paralysis beam or device was quite popular. Compare to the paralysis bomb from Robert Heinlein's 1941 novel Methuselah's Children, the paralyzing cone from The Atomic Conquerors by Edmond Hamilton (1927) and the para-beam From The Mechanical Monarch, by E.C. Tubb (1958).
Hedges got the pin out of his bomb just as de Witt remembered his paralyzing eye. He blinked his real eye, and sighted the phony on the back of Hedges' neck. The bomb fell to the asphalt.
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'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
'The greatest problem of all was the elimination of the human element of braking together with its inevitable time lag.'
'Across the ancient sea floor a dozen tall, blue-sailed Martian sand ships floated, like blue smoke.'
