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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.
 |
| Torch | ||
| The orifice from which issued the reaction mass of an atomic powered space craft. |
| The Mayflower was shaped like a ball with a cone on one side—top shaped. The point of the cone was her jet—although Chief Engineer Ortega, who showed us around, called it her "torch."
If you count the torch end as her stern, then the round end, her bow, was where the control room was located... The torch and the whole power plant space were cut off from the rest of the ship by a radiation shield that ran right through the ship. |
| Technovelgy from Farmer in the Sky,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Scribners in 1950 Additional resources -
|
As far as I know, the first use of the word "torchship" occurred several years later, in Heinlein's 1953 story Sky Lift (see the entry for torchship).
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'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'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.'
