Word: motionlessness
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When the time came for the real test last week, Polaris and her crew were ready. The SINS had the ship exactly on station. The control surfaces that could whip George Washington through the water like a startled eel now held it steady and motionless. On signal, the muzzle door atop a missile tube swung open. A small, explosive charge ruptured the plastic membrane that protected the bird from sea water, and a great blast of compressed air sent it rocketing toward the surface and its remarkable flight...
...tube holding a Polaris missile was tilted another seven degrees to guarantee that the missile would fire away from the ship. Suddenly, amid a great puff of white steam formed by compressed air, the sleek, 28-ft. missile whooshed 70 ft. into the dark sky, seemed to hang motionless for an instant, then ignited in a blinding white flash and roared 800 miles down the Caribbean range...
Ether Wind. The ether had another useful property: it was presumed to be motionless, and therefore it provided the basic frame of reference from which all motions were measured. A star, for instance, could be said to be moving so many miles per hour through the ether. When the earth swung around its orbit, it moved through the ether too, creating an "ether wind" blowing past...
...experienced Wagnerian soprano can strike an attitude and hold it motionless for what can seem like a half-hour; but the characters in this umbrous opera of moss on the manse may stay frozen for 20 years or more in the postures of their neuroses. "She did not change again," writes Author Feibleman of the hero's sweetly frigid second wife, "by so much as the amount of cream in her morning coffee." He could have added that the hero himself does not alter by a jot, after a point early in the novel, and neither...
Another Go. Flight Lieut. John Carter, an R.A.F. medical officer, kept the unconscious Moss alive by pumping oxygen down a tube. One after the other, eight men were lowered down the shaft, but only three reached Moss, and all blacked out because of the motionless, foul air. None was able to make a head-first descent and keep an oxygen mask over his face. Finally a tiny (5 ft.) printer from Derby named Ron Peters, 25, got close enough to be able to touch the trapped man's shoulder but began to gasp for air, had to be pulled...