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Grapeliner
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| Grapeliner 15000 words Like a silver ghost the ferry rocket slid out of blackness and, briefly, transiting the dazzling globe of the five thousand miles distant Earth, checked its motion relative to the assembled passenger units with a short, savage burst of deceleration. Eighty-year-old Woodhill captains the kind of spaceship that makes any reference to atomic piles seem indelicate: ". . . he looked out at his command which now hung like a bunch of silvery grapes against the stars." The "grapes" are inflatable, twenty-foot plastic passenger capsules. (Unlike their counterparts in Lifeboat/Dark Inferno, they actually work.) It all hangs together, scientifically (including the 'senior officer' bit), but I'd sure hate to build the Airfix model kit. Things go along well enough until the 'grapeliner' encounters an alien spacecraft -- made of glass! Synopsis by graham Andrews |
First Publication:
- NEW WORLDS No 88, November 1959
Publication history:
- NW US Reprint Edition, June 1960
- Deadly Litter (see under Books).
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