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"What has allowed so many Psychopathic Personalities to rise so high in corporations and government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
 |
| Flight Stick | ||
| A personal flying vehicle, stripped down to the basics. |
Hanville Svetz was a time traveler, from some seven hundred years into our future, sent back on a peculiar mission. To find a horse.
| The world turned grey. Svetz caught a wall clamp to stop himself from falling...
When his head cleared, he turned to where other equipment was clamped to a wall. The flight stick was a lift-field generator and power source built into five feet of pole, with a control ring at one end, a brush discharge at the other, and a bucket seat and seat belt in the middle. Compact even for Svetz's age, the flight stick was spin-off from the spaceflight industries. But it still weighed thirty pounds with the motor off... He straddled the flight stick and twisted the control knob on the fore end. The stick lifted under him, and he wriggled into place on the bucket seat. He twisted the knob further. He drifted upward like a toy balloon. |
| Technovelgy from The Flight of the Horse,
by Larry Niven. Published by Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969 Additional resources -
|
For a wind-shield, it had a very cool paraboloid force-field.
Well-read fans will have no trouble recognizing the broomstick speedster, from Robert Heinlein's 1942 classic Waldo.
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
