Word: signalling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cards, the missile whistle contains five electronic filters that make it deaf to everything except a combination of five different radio waves transmitted simultaneously on narrow frequency bands. The most complex electronic babble sounds like silence to a missile equipped with this gadget, but when the five-part signal comes, it picks it out of the racket and obeys its command. The five frequencies can be varied, giving millions of combinations, so each missile of a group can have, if necessary, its own drop-dead signal...
...range safety officers at Cape Canaveral and other U.S. missile centers have a recurrent nightmare. A missile is climbing out perfectly; everything works, and there is no need to press the "destruct" button that sends a special radio signal racing after an errant missile and commands it to blow itself to bits. Yet suddenly the destruct system is activated, and the missile, possibly with a man atop it, explodes in a blossom of flame. The odds against such a mishap are small, but there is always a chance that an unintended signal perhaps from a badly adjusted ham radio...
...Signal Victory, by David Stacton. A hard, glittering, epigrammatic account of the Spanish rape of the Mayan civilization, marred by a central character who just misses coming to life...
...SIGNAL VICTORY (224 pp.)-David Stacton-Pantheon...
...strengths and weaknesses unseen by the players. It is to catalyze these dark musings, not to commemorate the players, that Stacton restages the old battles. Not surprisingly, his novels lack the painted scenery and speeches in all-purpose King James dialect that clutter other historical fiction. In A Signal Victory, the ironically titled tale of the Spanish conquest of the Maya civilization, there is not a line of dialogue. The book's most vivid presence is that of Author Stacton, brooding in mordant aphorisms about the uses of power. Everything is stated in epigrams, and he can drop...