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"I've taken some stick for passages in Altered Carbon which people complained had sickened them, but then violence should be sickening."
- Richard Morgan
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| Robotic Tail | ||
| A sleek coiled length of robotic segments. |
| The Wabbler went westward, with a dozen of its fellows, by night and in the belly of a sleek, swift-flying thing... The Wabbler lay in its place, with its ten-foot tail coiled neatly about its lower end...
The Wabbler hurtled downward through blackness... The Wabbler’s tail uncurled and writhed flexibly behind it.
Splash! The Wabbler plunged into the water...
It wabbled to one side and the other, straining, and presently its body was free, and a foot or two and then four or five feet of its tail — but it still writhed and wabbled spasmodically — and then suddenly it left the sea floor and floated free.
A long, long time afterward — years afterward — salvage divers finished cutting up the sunken warship for scrap. The last irregularly cut mass of metal went up on the salvage slings. The last diver down went stumbling about the muddy harbor water. His heavy, weighted shoes kicked up something. He fumbled to see if anything remained to be salvaged. He found a ten-foot, still flexible tail of metal. The rest of the Wabbler had ceased to exist. Chronometer, tide-time gear, valves, compressed-air tanks, and all the balance of its intricate inwards had been blown to atoms when the Wabbler achieved its destiny. Only the flexible metal tail remained intact. |
| Technovelgy from The Wabbler,
by Murray Leinster. Published by Street and Smith in 1942 Additional resources -
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'Jason had been guiding the caravan of cars as usual...'
"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
