Space suit

“ You could not live a minute here without your suits; and, efficiently insulated as those suits are, yet your incandescent body temperature makes our rooms unbearably hot—so hot that any of us must wear a space-suit while in the same room with you, to avoid being burned to death."
"The incandescently hot" Terrestrials were wafted into the open airlock of their lifeboat upon a wand of force, and soon had prepared a long overdue supper, over which Stevens cast his infectious, boyish grin at Nadia. ”

“ We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff to get in the ship."
"Right," growled Burleigh again. "Brawn and Carol, you'll keep ship. The rest of us wear suits. We don't know what that stuff is outside."
Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a suit. Modern space-suits weren't like the ancient crudities with bulging metal casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took the place of metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical nowadays. A man could move about in a late-model space-suit almost as easily as in ship-clothing. ”

“ I was beginning to think we couldn’t see out of all this gear; space suit, invisibility harness and all.”
“Oh yes,” returned Dos-Tev. “We can see all right when there is anything to see, which there isn’t right now. Thank our lucky start we’ve got the latest television-plate head-gear tho. If we had the old type of glassite goggles we couldn’t see out of our own force-field.” He was referring to the hexagonal hemispherical television-screen built directly into the inner face of the space suit head-gear, an important advancement since the old type Lemnisian glassite goggles. ”

“ That was what Hawk Carse had planned.
A voice of authority roared up over the general hubbub.
"Rantol! Guard! Rantol, you fool! What happened? What attacked you? Cut that crazy yelling! Answer me!—you, Rantol!"
"Space-suit! Space-suit! Space-suit! Space—"
"Lar Tantril!" A man with suspicious eyes caught the attention of the one who had spoken first. "Space-suit, he says! A flying space-suit! Only Ku Sui has space-suits that fly; or only Ku Sui had them, rather. ”

“ Every so often one of the hot-heads decides to escape. The tetrarchs love it. Sometimes, they deliberately give them the chance.”
He pointed to the oxygen cannisters attached to the back of Rod’s space suit. “The cylinders in our human space suits supply enough air to last for eight hours. When the air is exhausted it seems to be a natural reaction to rip the suit open. ”

“ The job of getting into the dome was a hazardous one. About every thirty seconds the asteroid described a complete rotation, making the rim turn at a speed of half a mile a second, and that made the task of entering extremely dangerous to a man whose only protection was the metal and fabric of a space-suit. ”

“ She put on her helmet and climbed down through the airlock.
I hung up my helmet and started to peel off the rest of my suit, then stopped and went to the forward window. I tried to imagine a certain amount of grace in the movements as she clambered up the side of the cab and got in through the hole I'd cut in the crumpled roof. But I've never known anybody who could move gracefully in a space suit.
Except Mary.
Helene was not graceful. Not even a little. ”

“ A big meteor tore out your belly, or your fuel gave out, or any of a million things happened to crack up the beautiful great spaceship that was your vehicle and your pride and almost you, an extension of yourself, an expression of your yearning to conquer the stars. So you got into your slugjet suit and walked out an air-lock, if you had enough warning, that is. ”

“ Laro said.
“But, damn it, this suit itself would re-radiate ...”
“The suit is self-decontaminating, Master.”
Hilton was appalled. “With such stuff as that, and the plastic shield besides, why all the depth and all that solid lead?”
“The Masters' orders, Master. Machines can, and occasionally do, fail. So might, conceivably, the plastic.” ”

“ Inertialess machines, extravagantly equipped with devices to keep them inertialess, were taken "ashore"; nor were any of these ever to be returned to the ship. Kinnison had ordered and reiterated that no unnecessary chances were to be taken of getting any particle of nth-space stuff aboard Space Laboratory XII, and none were taken.
Since men cannot work indefinitely in spacesuits, each man had periodically to be relieved; but each such relief amounted almost to an operation. Before he left the planet his suit was scrubbed, rinsed, and dried. ”

“ The three suits of Triplanetary space armor had been sealed into a cabinet whose doors Costigan literally blew off with a blast of force, rather than consume time in tracing the power leads.
"I feel like something now!" Costigan, once more encased in his own armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along--we'll carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it up after we've wrecked the works." ”

“ I’d switched my suit radio off for a bit, because, working in space, Jeff had taken to just gabbling to me nervously all the time—maybe because he figured there couldn’t be room for Joseph with him in his suit.
I finished up and paused for a last look at the ship. She was sweetly slim from her conical living quarters to the taper-tail of her ionic jet, but she had more junk on her than an amateur asteroid prospector hangs on his suit the first time out. Every duty orbit, fifty scientists come with permission from the Commandant to hang some automatic research gadget on the hull. ”

“ That Martian suit—how'd you get it?"
"They had come this far. We found the suit, with its occupant long turned to dust. We kept it for such emergencies. When the space ships foundered nearby a few years ago, we refrained from molesting this woman, thinking that she might some day be a fine decoy."
"You watched me in the suit," said Circe.
"We did. We had not seen a human in a long time." The djinni paused, then said, "The Martians had space travel when Earthmen were barbarians. They came to Terra, and we, sensing danger in them, drove them out. ”

“ Slowly the lock of the other ship slid back and two space-suited figures appeared—the Ambassador, Quelf Tharkol, and his pet. The Ambassador was invisible within his spacesuit but he stood upright and looked to be about the size of a man. I was happy about that; it's always a lot easier to negotiate with a humanoids-type alien than with something totally bizarre.
I chuckled when I saw the space-suited cat—for so I thought of it. It was cat-size, in a little form-fitting spacesuit, and it scampered after its master on four legs, space-suited tail wagging behind. ”

“ Then—and Farradyne had to admire the vandal's precautions—he would make his way to the escape hatch and let the helpless passengers go on ... and on....
Victims of another case of "Lost in Space."
The saboteur was well prepared. His suit was a high efficiency job capable of maintaining a man alive for a long time in space. It had a little radio for calling and a small and expensive chemical motor for mild maneuvering, even though it would not be strong enough to permit planetary landing. The man had friends, obviously, lying in wait out there, who would pick him up. ”

“ They're tricky, and if one goes sour on you, out in space, it's just too bad—you're lucky to get back alive. A lot of men are still out there somewhere because of the sloppy check-ups."
"'Scuse it, please—I'll be good," and the careful checking and testing of every vital part of the space-suits went on.
Satisfied at last that the armor was spaceworthy, Stevens picked up the coils of drag-line, built of a non-metallic fiber which could retain its flexibility and strength in the bitter cold of outer space, and led the girl into the air-lock. ”

“ After the air-tight doors have been closed the men who serve these guns will go into action in space-suits, breathing the air around them but having the suits fitted with automatic valves that will close down the moment the compartment begins to lose air. ”

“ By means of long, flexible tubes, air could be continually supplied to the wearers of the suits, and by an ingenious contrivance a store of compressed air sufficient to last for several hours was provided for each suit, so that in case of necessity the wearer could throw off the tubes connecting him with the air tanks in the car. Another object which had been kept in view in the preparation of these suits was the possible exploration of an airless planet, such as the moon. ”

“ Faster than the mighty spaceship the awful Thing caught it in mighty talons that ripped through solid relux. Scratching, fluttering enormous, blood-red wings, the silvery claws tore away great masses of relux, sending them flying into space. ”

“ The apparatus, practically as you see it here, was discovered but a short time ago, in a small, rocket-propelled space-ship which we found some distance outside of the orbit of Jupiter. Its source of power had been destroyed by the cold of outer space, but re-powering it was, of course, a small matter. The crew of the vessel were all dead. They were, however, of human stock, and of a type adapted for life upon a satellite. I deduce, from your compact structure, your enormous atmospheric pressure, and your, to us, unbelievably high body temperature, that you must be planet-dwellers. ”

“ In the glare of the overhead lights, he could see a figure running desperately for the edge of a further Quonset—running in the airlessness of the exposed surface without a spacesuit!
More lights snapped on, and a guard in a suit came around the corner, throwing up a rifle. There was a tiny spurt of flame from the weapon, and the running man pitched forward. The guard started toward him just as a few men began to dart out of the huts in hastily-donned spacesuits. ”

“ Man was on his way to the stars. MAN—the peripatetic quester. For just an instant he felt a pang of jealousy. He'd be pinned to his vacuum while men were conquering the planets. Or would he? But the mood passed. Pickering Field, he realized, would play an important role in the future of space flight. If it weren't the stars, at least it was the jump-off. In time it would be a vast Air Force Base housing rockets instead of stratojets. Pickering Base—the jump-off—the road to the stars. ”

“ Earthling sailors, white, negro, Chinese and Eurasian, most of them in the drab blue of space-ship crews, but each with a ray-gun strapped to his waist; short, thin-faced Venusians, shifty-eyed, cunning, with the planet's universal weapon, the skewer-blade, sheathed at their sides; tall, sweaty Martians, powerful brutes, wearing the air-rarifying mask that was necessary for them in Satellite III's Earthlike atmosphere. Business men and sight-seers, except the most bold, were apt to stay in their houses after their first visit to the Street of the Sailors. ”

“ You’re going to hijack the Maid of Mercury, Duncan, and get that radium.”
“Hijacking a spaceship? It’s crazy.”
“It’s never been done, sure. Nobody’s dared go into space without a Helmet. And the government issues the Helmets. ”

“ Patience, sir? Look, sir, I took this sedentary duty until I'd had it up to here, and then I began to pry into the question of why we have a Space Force, complete with spacecraft, and still do so little space traveling. I found out. We're limited to a maximum range of seventeen light-years to the point of no return. Even a trip to Eden, Tau Ceti, our nearest colony, is eleven-point-eight light-years, and that takes prodigious power. ”

“ Robots leaping across eighty battleships armed with weapons man had no defense against. Then—
Quietly smiling young men departing. Ships of alien design winking out abruptly like burnt-out light globes in a subway between stations.
Two thousand and eighty ships in arrow formation, the arrow pointed at Target Earth. Nine times the speed of light, but in a tight little space-time where only relative values exist and the relation of the fleet to the rest of the cosmos is tied to the magic number, the square root of minus one. ”

“ A man in a spacesuit could easily be chained to one of them. With him was a small, sun-powered engine and tanks of liquified food concentrates and oxygen. Kept under the influence of hibernene, and kept cool by the chill of space, a man could spend the rest of his life there—unmoving, unknowing, uncaring, dead as far as he and the rest of Mankind were concerned—his slight bodily needs tended automatically by machine. ”

“ From a chest of repair supplies the younger boy took a can of metal-seal and a self-contained acetylene torch. These he fastened to his belt while Jak was getting, from a wall hook, a coil of thin but terrifically strong, light, plastic rope that would neither freeze nor lose its pliability in the utter cold of space. While spacesuits had magnetic shoe soles to keep their wearers in contact with the hull, a lifeline was a safety factor in case they happened to break that contact and drift away from the ship. ”

“ With those large, incredibly hard claws, designed for rooting in the metal make-up of the asteroids for vital elements, the spacehound could easily have shredded the man's spacesuit and helmet, could, at any time, tear huge chunks out of men's fine ships. ”

“ The case summaries were released to a small number of Washington newsmen, to continue planting the space-travel thought; this decision being made after True’s reception proved to the Air Force that the public was better prepared than had been thought.
In regard to the flying saucers themselves, I believe that in the majority of cases, space ships are the answer:
1. The earth has been under periodic observation from another planet, or other planets, for at least two centuries. ”