Word: vapor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Sleep sets the tone for most of the other stories by introducing Author Herlihy's obsessive interest in the "foetal" world of prehistory, when the "gray vapor-covered earth" was ruled by "giant serpents and tiny-headed monsters." Weeping in the Chinese Window describes the cruel seduction by a tiny-headed monster in human form of a spinster who has never suspected the existence of primeval, serpentine masculinity. A Summer for the Dead features a lusty gal who is rejected by a man dead from the waist down and settles for one who is only dead from the neck...
Most pre-evolutionists agree, said Dr. Calvin, that life first appeared something like 2 billion years ago when the earth's atmosphere was dominated by hydrogen compounds such as methane, ammonia and water vapor. Such simple organic compounds as acetic acid and glycine (an amino acid) are formed in the laboratory when ultraviolet light or electric sparks pass through such mixtures. Presumably, solar ultraviolet and natural lightning would do the same in nature...
...last passages of Lolita, as Humbert waits for the police, he comes to understand the true nature of his crime. He recalls how, on a dark hillside, he heard from below a "vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute . . . divinely enigmatic . . . and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Thus it was when James Joyce's hero Stephen stood in the school study listening to the voices of boys at play. "That is God,'' said Stephen, "a shout...
...Britt). Instead, the red-blooded rat turns true blue; he bellylands his plane, heaps Philips over his shoulder and reels (about 25) back to their own lines. There Philips' repentant wife waves disconsolate farewell to Mitchum, but he does not even notice. He is staring at those vapor trails...
...small, probably a cylinder a few feet in diameter, but it will have to generate something like 100 times the energy of the massive reactor of Britain's Calder Hall nuclear power station. This means that it will run very hot, and will be kept from flashing into vapor only by the stream of liquid hydrogen forced rapidly through it. On the other hand, the core need work for only a few minutes. By that time the propellant will have been exhausted, and the rocket will be on its way into deep space...