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"I operate by a code that makes me responsible for what I do, makes me definitely, directly, genuinely responsible. I am precisely the kind of person I made myself out to be."
- Harlan Ellison
 |
| Warp Drive | ||
| Traveling across the gap between universes. |
As far as I know, the first use of this classic phrase "warp drive".
| Its volunteer crew was starting out on the first voyage into the completely unknown. The ship rested on the ground just outside the hangar of Pluto Base. It quivered as they watched. And even as they watched, it was no longer there. Beyond the spot where it had stood, the fantastic landscape of barren Pluto leered at them.
Jim Dorn heard somebody whispering. “She’s — gone...” He was surprised when faces turned blankly toward him. He was the one who had whispered. Gone! Across the void of nothingness! Into a new universe, where the tides of time and space were still flowing outward? Or into nothingness, down the fiver of no return? No one knew. No one could guess, for the dimensions had never before been bridged... Out on that eternally frozen ground, a ship was slowly taking form. It was the ship that had reached across the gap between the universes. And it had returned! Unmistakably, it had returned! That was all that mattered. Without waiting for his orders, the hangar doors were swung open. Throbbing, the ship rolled in. Out of her locks the crew tumbled. “Mr. Dorn!” the captain shouted. “We went through! There’s a world over there — a sun, lots of suns, planets, everything — ” Between the planets of the doomed Solar System, detailed plans for the construction of the Gundstetter-Halone warp drive were flowing. He could not see it. But he knew that on all the planets, workshops were springing to furious activity as the construction plans came through. |
| Technovelgy from The Tides of Time,
by R.M. Williams. Published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1940 Additional resources -
|
Just a few months later, the term "warp drive" appears again, this time in Finiti by E.A. Grosser, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1941:
Compare to space warp from Redmask of the Outlands (1934) by Nat Schachner.
Wilson helped her up, and to the ship on the roof. Then he and the last refugee watched the ship ease into the dark sky. At a safe distance from the surface, the ship suddenly vanished as Davis shifted to the warp drive.
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'My chemists are all working on the preparation of the artificial blood.'
'The image on the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of the pocket-size books found on the body...'
'Another thing space suits should have is rearview mirrors.'
'... an artificial intelligence equal to the human.'
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'Nemourlon armor of reasonable weight resists penetration by most fragments and any bullet that is not both reasonably heavy and fairly high-velocity.'
