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"[Science fiction] is the one literary medium left in which we have a free hand. We can do any damn thing we please."
- Alfred Bester
 |
| Right Angle Projectile | ||
| A missile that turns at right angles after being fired. |
| “Now look here—” His voice trailed away. The intruder was still unscrewing the supports of the easel and rejoining the sections into something which—“My God, that’s a gun!”
“Yes, ingenius, isn’t it? Now we’ll see what happens when we knock one of those black sausages out of the sky.” He raised the weapon to his shoulder experimentally. “Yes, nicely balanced.” He laughed softly. “I know what you’re thinking—you’re thinking that Mother will be able to plot back the point of impact to angle of trajectory in about ten seconds flat, only we thought of that. This little weapon ejects a rather ingenius missile; a device inside it will turn it at right angles 1.02 seconds after it leaves the barrel. Mother will, therefore, take at least six times longer than necessary to calculate the spot from which the missile was fired.” He paused and fitted a chronometer-like device to the short stock. “We call this the fruit machine; it tells me at what angle I should fie to hit the target head on. Must have puzzled you in the past—I mean the ease with which we could knock a man off without even being in the same street.” |
| From The Mad Metropolis,
by Philip E. High. Published by Ace in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Thanks to Winchell Chung (aka @nyrath of Project Rho) for contributing this item.
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