And Eve Was (ePub)

And the sons of God came unto the daughters of men . . . in those days there were giants in the earth!



Excerpt



The giant ship hurtling through the inter-stellar void looked from a distance like a sun. Two thousand miles in diameter, its trans-parent leaded plastigell casing allowed the interior lights to send their rays out into space in all directions. Thus, the sunlike appearance from a distance.



At the moment the ship was spherical in shape. Yet it could change, become long and cigar like, or put out arms like a pseudopod. This was made possible by the properties of the plastigell, and the arrangement of the skeleton girders of the ship.



The girders were fitted together in ball sockets so that they could move in all directions relative to one another. The plastigell had the peculiar property of contracting under electric current, stretching to great lengths under small tensions, and being practically impossible to break.



It made an ideal skin for the giant ship. A chance hit by a fast moving projectile could not pierce it. Instead, the skin would give, absorbing part of the force of the hit. The inner walls and pivoting girders would further absorb more of the energy of the hit, until the missile came to rest. Then the rubberlike ship would return to its normal shape, throwing the bit of debris back into the void the way it had come.



The ten foot thick outer skin and the mile thick honeycomb of girders and plastigell walls on its inner side made the ship impregnable against any form of collision. Within were four billion cubic miles of gravity-free living room! If it were made into rooms with mile-high ceilings it would provide more than twenty times as much living surface as the Earth.