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"I can remember when the first pulsars were discovered. I was able to go and sit down and listen to graduate students talking about what their theories, to explain what pulsars really were."
- Vernor Vinge
 |
| Space-Phone | ||
| A device for communicating with space ships, both ship-to-ship and ground-to-ship. |
| THEN, jarring my sleeping brain, came a loud, impatient clanging of the space phone bell, while the indicator light continually flashed on and off, showing that someone was at the other end of the line. My first thought was that the power impulses had resumed operation and that the call was either from Astrax or from the ship ahead of us.
"This is Prixlon Lestex in charge of inspection flier #X65U39. Who is speaking?" |
| Technovelgy from The Message From Space,
by David M. Speaker. Published by Amazing Stories in 1930 Additional resources -
|
The space-phone is assumed to have a virtually unlimited range:
This term is used the following year in Creatures of the Comet (1931) by Edmond Hamilton:
I will send twenty-five messages exactly like these which I hope will serve as a warning to any civilization which some of them may reach. Tf it were possible, I would give complete descriptions of our atomic energy production plants and our magnet-ray machines, but these were known only to the government and the inventors. If there exists a race whose science has enabled them to construct a space-phone like this or some similar instrument capable of receiving any of these messages, then my work has not been in vain.
Out in the pilot-house of the speeding rocket Kirk was making much the same comment to his companion, as with deft fingers on the firing-levers he kept the rocket roaring out from earth through the black void of space, exchanging sharp words on the space-phone with the pilots of rockets that crowded them in the space-lane.
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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...'
