Word: swoopings
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...will have its own rocket engines. By firing those engines briefly, the crew will be able to put their ship into an elliptical orbit that will dip to within ten miles of the moon's airless surface. As they swoop through perigee, the men in the bug will study the barren geography below, trying to recognize places that they have seen on maps and photographs. They will be able to correct their orbit as they climb back to apogee...
...course is a clutching jungle of harsh gorse, spiny Scotch broom and impenetrable whin bushes. Ditchlike burns and sheerfaced bunkers dot the threadbare fairways; the postage-stamp greens are stubbly and unpredictable. Commuter trains clatter past while golfers sweat over tricky putts, and yowling jet airliners swoop low to land at Prestwick, only two miles away...
...promptly trapped by the earth's magnetic field. Most of them will get entangled in the atmosphere, creating artificial auroras. A few that travel higher may drift around the earth until they are over the Atlantic Ocean, where the lopsidedness of the magnetic field will make them swoop lower; then the atmosphere will absorb them...
...farmer is found dead, and blood streams from his empty eye sockets. A flock of birds swoops down on children returning alone from school. Slowly, the people of the town realize that the birds have declared war on them. Soon dark flights sweep down everywhere, pecking the helpless to death-and corpses soon become skeletons. Great winged armies form-crows, hawks, seagulls, ravens, eagles, finches, starlings. The birds swoop down chimneys, chip through windows, even doors, whipping every corner with angry wings. There is nowhere to hide. No one is safe...
...Galapagos, that Melville wrote: "In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist." And it is "on the beach of the Encantadas" that Sebastian, the poet of Suddenly Last Summer, who later would himself be eaten, saw, as his mother relates it, a skyful of carnivorous birds swoop and attack myriads of newly hatched sea turtles, "tearing the undersides open and rending and eating their flesh . . . and when he came back, he said, 'Well, now I've seen Him'-and he meant...