From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 20:43:55 MST
EvMick@aol.com wrote:
> I don't recall either one "lifting the cable with a space ship"....
OK I got off my lazy ass and looked it up. Turns out Clarke was
a little ambiguous. See what you think. Clarke, Chapter 26, Snowflake
Rising, from Songs of Distant Earth:
"[Lt. Owen Fletcher] was an angler, reeling in a six hundred ton
catch on a line of almost unimaginable strength. Once a day, the
self guided, captive probe would dive down toward Thallassa
spinning out the cable behind it along a compex, thirty thousand
kilometer curve. It would home automatically on the waiting
payload, and when all the checks had been completed, the
hoisting would begin."
How cleverly ambiguous is this paragraph. It really isnt perfectly
clear that the cable is being hoisted with the payload, but I
interpreted it thus. spike
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