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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
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Here's a description of the device in use:
A THIN ROD of intense light shot out. The haze in its path glowed like tarnished silver. Flitting insects reflected the glare like bits of incandescent magnesium, before their smoking bodies dropped to the ground. The beam seared into the green foliage.
It also had the property of being able to slowly emit the light that it absorbed - including pictures!
...Marwell almost chuckled. “Remember when we first found the thing?” he asked. “I was fussing with the lever. I didn’t press it much — just enough to release the tiniest bit of stored-up rays. But you can see what happened.”
“And now for an explanation of the pictures themselves. When the disk absorbs the sun’s rays, it, of course, absorbs an impression of the sun’s image, as well as impressions of the images of the various surrounding objects that are capable of reflecting light...
Then, when the plate is acted upon by the exciter, it gives up its images. If you can imagine a mirror whose reflective action can be delayed indefinitely, you have a crude analogy of what takes place. Only, since the last images to be absorbed, are given up first, and the first last, the sequence is, of course, in reverse.
Compare to the slow glass rod from The Exhalted, a 1940 short story by L. Sprague de Camp and the scenedows from Bob Shaw's 1968 story Light of Other Days. Probably the earliest references to the idea occurred in The Mirror That Remembered" (1932) by Christopher Blayre.
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