Re: Heinlein's Role in Pressure Suits?



Henry Spencer wrote:

Cleve Cartmill. The description actually was rather vague (I've read the
story), but realistic enough to get people excited.



Want to read something scary? Paris gets nuked from H.G. Wells' "The World Set Free" from 1914: 

"Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child
might look towards its mother.

He was still serene.  He was frowning slightly, she thought, but
that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand
gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too
manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that
opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward
and with eyes upturned.

Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.

The sound struck her like a blow.  She crouched together against
the masonry and looked up.  She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
of them, there had already started curling trails of red....

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through
moments that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl
down towards her.

She felt torn out of the world.  There was nothing else in the
world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening,
all-embracing, continuing sound.  Every other light had gone out
about her and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting
pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly
flight of huge angular sheets of glass.  She had an impression of
a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened living thing
that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of
falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth furiously,
that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit . . .

She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.

She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that
a little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She
tried to raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She
was not clear whether it was night or day nor where she was; she
made a second effort, wincing and groaning, and turned over and
got into a sitting position and looked about her.

Everything seemed very silent.  She was, in fact, in the midst of
a vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing
had been destroyed.

At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous
experience.

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world,
a world of heaped broken things.  And it was lit--and somehow
this was more familiar to her mind than any other fact about
her--by a flickering, purplish-crimson light.  Then close to her,
rising above a confusion of debris, she recognised the Trocadero;
it was changed, something had gone from it, but its outline was
unmistakable. It stood out against a streaming, whirling uprush
of red-lit steam. And with that she recalled Paris and the Seine
and the warm, overcast evening and the beautiful, luminous
organisation of the War Control....

She drew herself a little way up the slope of earth on which she
lay, and examined her surroundings with an increasing
understanding....

The earth on which she was lying projected like a cape into the
river. Quite close to her was a brimming lake of dammed-up water,
from which these warm rivulets and torrents were trickling. Wisps
of vapour came into circling existence a foot or so from its
mirror-surface. Near at hand and reflected exactly in the water
was the upper part of a familiar-looking stone pillar.  On the
side of her away from the water the heaped ruins rose steeply in
a confused slope up to a glaring crest.  Above and reflecting
this glare towered pillowed masses of steam rolling swiftly
upward to the zenith. It was from this crest that the livid glow
that lit the world about her proceeded, and slowly her mind
connected this mound with the vanished buildings of the War
Control."

Pat
.

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