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"Evolutionary success ... is going to absolutely require mobility on, at a minimum, an interplanetary scale. We either go or we die out."
- Richard Morgan
 |
| Fold Box | ||
| A chest that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. |
In the novel, an ordinary guy becomes a hero, thanks to Star, Queen of the Universes, and Rufo, her "servant."
| Rufo's baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He
opened it.
And opened it again. And kept on opening it--And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed. Since I was nicknamed "Truthful James" as soon as I learned to talk and am widely known to have won the hatchet every February 22nd all through school, you must now conclude that I was the victim of an illusion caused by hypnosis and/or drugs. Me, I'm not sure. Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory, and anyone who has had the doubtful privilege of seeing a fat woman get in or out of a tight girdle knows that this is true in practice, too. Rufo's baggage just carried the principle further. |
| Technovelgy from Glory Road,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Gregg Press in 1963 Additional resources -
|
The box had other unlikely (physically impossible in this world) characteristics as well:
Rufo's little black box was now rigged as a knapsack and I did not stop to wonder how he could carry a couple of tons on his shoulders. An antigrav device like Buck Rogers, maybe. Chinese coolie blood. Black magic. Hell, that teakwood chest alone could not have fitted into that backpack by a factor of 30 to I, not to mention the arsenal and assorted oddments.
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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.'
