Word: footpad
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...Distant Orders. Tilted at a 20° angle on the side of a small crater, Surveyor almost immediately began transmitting high-quality photographs of the surrounding landscape, including a shot of its own footpad covered by lunar soil kicked up by the landing. On orders from distant Pasadena, it again briefly fired its verniers while its cameras peered at the surface to observe blast effects...
Surveyor had serious reasons for its frisky behavior. Rotating a series of color filters in front of its TV camera, it shot pictures of the soil scattered on its white footpad-which made an ideal photographic background. Scientists will compare the shade of the soil in black and white pictures with a color-coded wheel that is attached to Surveyor's leg and is visible in each picture. From the comparison, they hope to determine the approximate color of the soil. "We placed the soil just where we wanted it," said Caltech Engineer Ronald Scott, who supervised the experiment...
...started into an elevator. Then the smile vanished-and squat (5 ft. 5 in., 170 lbs.) James Riddle Hoffa, 44, one of the most powerful leaders of U.S. labor, stood frozen-faced while agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation closed in on him, frisked him like a common footpad, and took from him the onionskin document. The paper had come from the files of the U.S. Senate committee investigating labor racketeering (see below), and Jimmy Hoffa had paid dearly for it. It might, in fact, have cost him his spectacular career...
...temporarily well-to-do businessman suddenly decided to "invest" his savings of $80,000 in one glorious day at the races. Two special agents who spotted the man peeling off thousand-dollar bills at a pari-mutuel window put a purposely obvious "tail" on him, so that every footpad within miles would keep hands off. The businessman got home safely-but broke...
Even a modern bandit (not necessarily a common footpad but, say, one of those Hangchow hotelkeepers who right now are charging five days' key money for two days' hotel reservation) might solace himself with Li Shê's impromptu verse which so delighted the brigands who had seized him that he was set free...