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"If we're going to be consistent and advocate freedom of speech we have to advocate freedom of encrypted speech too. The genie is out of the bottle, cryptologically."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Protolectric Gun | ||
| Fires twin beams of protons and electrons. |
You know you're in good hands with Campbell:
They just don't write them like that anymore.
Two streams of nearly invisible fire reached out in lines as straight as a linear equation toward the two Patrol cruisers.
| "...their ships have a weapon we have not been able to duplicate — the protolectric gun,” replied the officer, turning smartly and walking away. Markham chuckled. The Lane Patrolman had retired in poor order.
The E. R. C. [Eugenics Research Colony] was a sore spot on the Lane Patrol’s otherwise spotless record. Thanks to a mechanism capable of projecting twin beams of highly dangerous electrons and protons from a “gun”, their ships had beaten off patrol cruisers time and again. |
| Technovelgy from Electronic Siege,
by John W. Campbell. Published by Wonder Stories in 1932 Additional resources -
|
Here's the effect that they have:
Two enormous brilliant pipes of blue-green fire leaped out and spattered against the ship. Instantly it was wreathed with an aura of shooting flame from the waste energy of the beams. The four-foot armour of the ship was glowing white-hot in a fraction of a second. In a second it was bellying out in gusts of flaming gas; in five seconds a great hole was gaping in the ship’s wall...
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'He was in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors...'
'The robant and the tiny old woman entered the control room slowly...'
'Guy named Otto Octavius winds up with eight limbs... What are the odds?'
'It is as you thought when you constructed the time crystal, my master Vaylan.'
'This was their world, their planet — this swift-traveling, yet seemingly moveless vessel.'
