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"None of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Schrieber Analyzer | ||
| Superior automatic air testing - for the discriminating space traveler. |
Whenever Wayne Hillder, space scout extraordinaire, sets down on a new planet, he has to perform a few tests. Chief among them is testing the quality of the planet's atmosphere.
| Pre-exit rule number one is that air must be tested. What suited that crowd outside would not necessarily agree with him. Anyway, he'd have checked air even if his own mother had been smoking a cigar in the front rank of the audience. The Schrieber analyzer required four minutes in which to suck a sample through the pilot-tube, take it apart, sneer at the bits, make a bacteria count and say whether its lord and master would condescend to breathe the stuff. |
| Technovelgy from Diabologic,
by Eric Frank Russell. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1955 Additional resources -
|
The sarcastic tone of this story makes it a lot of fun to read.
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'A human brain snugly encased in a transparent skull-shaped receptacle.'
'The actuating mechanism that should have operated by the imprint of her image on the telephoto cell...'
'The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special air-borne food.'
'The border was defended by... a swarm of quasi-independent aerostats.'
'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
