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"Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."
- Isaac Asimov
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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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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
