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"I identify with the weak person; this is one reason why my fictional protagonists are essentially antiheroes."
- Philip K. Dick
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| Quench Field | ||
| Stopped runaway nuclear reactions by quenching the cascades of neutrons. |
| The warning device was a result of the labors of that Edison of the spaceways, old Dr. Eonck. He’d invented the attachment to a U-235 plant that emanated a static quench-field to act as a governor to the neutron-streams that activated the uranium. It made the neutron-streams that much more inefficient, but who cared about that with all that powder to throw around? The important thing was that it blanketed the disintegration to some extent. If the thing was going to blow up with the fury that only an atomic explosion or a supernova can show, it would at least start to blow up slowly. That is, when the reaction started to accelerate beyond control, the quench-field got in the way of the countless millions of neutrons, tending to add a positron to them, and convert them into useless, harmless hydrogen nuclei. It meant a slowing down of the whole process, until the neutrons came too fast. Then — lights out.
 ('The Purple Light' by E.Walter Hunter) But at the same time it gave the poor sucker in the ship, or wherever else the plant was, a few minutes grace in which to get away from there. |
| Technovelgy from The Purple Light,
by E. Waldo Hunter. Published by Astounding Science Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
