Word: inert
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Paperback Freud. Rachel stands in the "exact middle" of her existence: she is 35. She is also at dead center, emotionally inert. Like a cold moon, she rotates around her widowed mother, reflecting all of Mamma's neuroses and ailments. When parents and children stay together too long, the relationship slips into reverse. Edging toward middle age Rachel becomes an adolescent. She seeks solace in masturbation, the first refuge of the child, the last hiding place of the isolated. Like a teen-ager making tentative explorations, she writhes with a suffocating guilt and murmurs to herself...
Schumacher aims his electrons through a series of chambers from which pumps are continuously evacuating the air. By simply blowing a steady stream of inert gas past the final hole-the muzzle of the gun - he stops dirt and debris from being sucked back into the vacuum. No wider than a sixteenth of an inch, the electron beam, says Schumacher, can cut iron bars, granite blocks or slabs of concrete. Only requirement is that the gun be kept virtually on top of its target. From a half inch out, it can burrow up to four inches into the toughest stone...
...liquid did come from the tubes. Yet when he mashed the tubes, expecting to find the enzyme, no enzyme was present. One of Kafatos' typical brainstorms saved the day. He realized that the liquid he had been collecting was produced by two glands. The old silk tubes produced the inert part of the liquid while a special gland on the face secreted the enzyme itself. Kafatos substantiated these findings by proving that the moths could produce the enzyme even if the silk tubes were removed at an early stage of the pupa's development...
...moon, American scientists discover an identical black monolith, apparently buried over four million years before, completely inert save for the constant emission of a powerful radio signal directed toward Jupiter. The scientists examine it (touching it tentatively as the apes did) at a moment when the earth and sun are in conjunctive orbit. They conclude that some form of life on Jupiter may have placed the monolith there and, fourteen months later, an expedition is sent to Jupiter to investigate...
...given planet, as well as the presence of ape or human at a stage of development where they are ready to make the significant progression. The monolith, then, begins to represent something of a deity; for our own purposes, we will assume that, given the three conditions, the inert monolith actually teaches or inspires ape and man to make the crucial advance. Therefore, it becomes a major force in man's evolution: man is not responsible for his own development, and perhaps the monolith even brings the men to it at the precise moment of the conjunctive orbits...