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"Beyond a thousand years from now humans are not quite recognizably human, and I have trouble finding characters."
- Larry Niven
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| Seetee Blinker | ||
| A marker of contraterrene matter (antimatter) asteroids, to aid in interplanetary navigation. |
If your standard matter ship encountered a seetee asteroid, annihilation would result!
| The seetee blinker was Drake's own invention, made many years ago. It was a necessary task of the Guard to mark the contraterrene bodies, whenever they were identified, so that ships and miners might avoid them - yet no man, or work of man, could touch them unconsumed...
The blinker was a spiderlike frame of meteoric iron, set to circle in a narrow planetary orbit about the body to be marked. The whirling arms carried mirrors of sodium foil, tilted to reflect the Sun's rays through colored filters in a sequence of warning flashes. The signals were listed, with data on the objects marked, in the "Ephemeris and Register". The oldest beacons had been spinning for nearly forty years, perfect machines, requiring neither fuel nor attention. |
| Technovelgy from Collision Orbit,
by Jack Williamson. Published by Astounding in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to the space beacon from Troubled Star (1952) by George O. Smith and to the hyperspace beacon from The Repairman (1959) by Harry Harrison. Also, distinguish from the space-beacon (in the sense of a landing signal) from Exploration Team, a 1956 story by Murray Leinster.
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'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
'Then he became aware of a gentle pressure pushing him away from the ship.'
'And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...'
'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
