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"I wrote many novels which … contained the element of the projected collective unconscious, which made them simply incomprehensible to anyone who read them, because they required the reader to accept my premise that each of us lives in a unique world."
- Philip K. Dick
 |
| Carryall | ||
| A flying wing (aircraft); used to pick up a sandcrawler (harvester factory) |
The most valuable substance in the universe of Dune is the spice mélange, which is only found on the desert world of Arrakis. Enormous armored worms hundreds of meters long roam freely over the spice sands. How do you mine the spice?
The primary use of a carryall is to place the mobile harvester factories used to gather the spice. Since sandworms always come to regular vibration, no permanent installations are possible. Once the harvester has fully loaded, or if a giant worm is sighted, the carryall flies in, attaches itself to the harvester, and pulls it clear.
| The solido-image of the harvester-factory was replaced by a projection of a winged device that dwarfed the images of human figures around it.
"This is a carryall," Hawat said. "It's essentially a large 'thopter, whose sole function is to deliver a factory to spice-rich sands, then to rescue the factory when a sandworm appears. They always appear. Harvesting the spice is a process of getting in and getting out with as much as possible." |
| Technovelgy from Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1965 Additional resources -
|
Here's an overflight of a spice bed:
"There's a carryall wing somewhere close," Kynes said. "It'll come in and lift off the crawler." "Rich spice bed by the color," Kynes said. "They'll continue to work it until the last minute.
Of course, you have a problem if the carryall, which also doubles as a spotter plane looking for signs of giant sandworms large enough to swallow the harvester whole, cannot be found.
The Duke banked their craft toward the sandcloud erupting from the factory crawler. "What happens now?"
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
