Behold the glory that is me.
“to the everlasting glory of the infantry, shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young!”
My name is Sapphire. That’s Steel. He’s a bit serious, but you get used to it.
“Houston, Be Advised: Rich Purnell is a Steely-Eyed Missile Man.”
The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.
Give me all your money, bookworm, or I blow your brains out. Now fill it up on number seven. Don’t do nothing stupid, man. I’m a good shot. I can hit you from here. Hey, man… what you reading in there? You a college boy or something? I’ll bet you think you’re smart. Think you could outsmart a bullet? What do you say we find out, huh? I’m talking to you! What do you say, huh? I’m talking to you!
“But if you’ve never been in love…?”
“Don’t be dumb. I mean, I’ve never had a bullet in the head, and I know I wouldn’t like it.”
We know he’s fast, but is he, say, faster than a speeding bullet?
Alfred: Hmf. I suppose you’ll take up flying next, like that fellow in Metropolis.
“The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
Tourists sometimes pity us loonies because we have no chance to swim. Well, I tried it in Omaha and got water up my nose and scared myself silly. Water is for drinking, not playing in; I’ll take flying. I’ve heard groundhogs say, oh yes, they had “flown” many times. But that’s not flying. I did what they talk about, between White Sands and Omaha. I felt awful and got sick. Those things aren’t safe.
They were off. I was still wondering what kick they got driving an obsolete machine on flat concrete when they could be up here with us. They were off, weaving slightly, weaving more than slightly, foolishly moving at different speeds, coming perilously close to each other before sheering off — and I began to realize things.
Those automobiles had no radar. They were being steered with a cabin wheel geared directly to four ground wheels. A mistake in steering and they’d crash into each other or into the concrete curbs. They were steered and stopped by muscle power, but whether they could turn or stop depended on how hard four rubber balloons could grip smooth concrete. If the tires lost their grip, Newton’s first law would take over; the fragile metal mass would continue moving in a straight line until stopped by a concrete curb or another groundcar.
“The big groundcar jerked to a stop centimeters from the vehicle ahead of it, and Armsman Pym, driving, swore under his breath. Miles settled back again into the seat besides him, wincing at a vision of the acrimonious street scene from which Pym’s reflexes had delivered them.”
Despite the name “automobile” these vehicles had no autocontrol circuits; control, such as it was, was exercised second by second for hours on end by a human being peering out through a small pane of dirty silica glass, and judging unassisted and often disastrously his own motion and those of other objects. In almost all cases the operator had no notion of the kinetic energy stored in his missile and could not have written the basic equation. Newton’s Laws of Motion were to him mysteries as profound as the meaning of the universe.
She was still sending encouraging thoughts in the clouds’ direction when the cargo shuttle swept almost silently up and over the tree-covered ridge north of the farm. Its air-breathing turbines were much quieter than Nordbrandt’s clattering helicopters had been, and it moved with the peculiar grace of a counter-grav vehicle which had slipped the trammeling bounds first formally described by Sir Isaac Newton, so many weary centuries before.
Those with a touch of psi talent could tell whenever a starship was about to lift off. Waves of muzzy uncertainty, caused by leaky gravitics, made a few onlookers blink quickly moments before another great-strutted spacecraft rose above the haze and lumbered off into the cloud-dappled sky.
But right now they are using a supplementary gravitic engine to hasten progress, fleeing unexpected chaos in this stellar system.
The ripping-cloth sound of the gravity polarizers suddenly became much louder. The hull seemed to shift and waver randomly beneath them as the fabric of space itself bent and twisted.
This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.
Yes, Brad, it’s something we ourselves have been working on for quite some time. But it seems our friend here has found a means of perfecting it. A device which is capable of breaking down solid matter and then projecting it through space and, who knows, perhaps even time… itself!