Robert A. Heinlein was born on 07/07/07. Here are some passages from 7 of his works ... can you figure out where each one comes from?
Your choices are:
Orphans of the Sky
Sixth Column
The Puppet Masters
The Man Who Sold the Moon
Starship Troopers
Glory Road
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Ready?
A mile and eight-tenths— A little closer than I liked, especially without company. The inner egg had reached steady speed, no more help to be gained by staying inside it, and its skin temperature indicated that it would not open automatically for a while yet—so I flipped a switch with my other thumb and got rid of it.
Not as sound—it was a white noise, a roar in all frequencies, sonic, subsonic, supersonic, so incredibly loaded with energy that it struck him in the chest. He heard it with his teeth and with his bones as well as with his ears. He crouched his knees, bracing against it.
Backed down fast and out of there, blind-dogging both hatches, then blind-dogged every pressure door on way back. Told Mum, then told her to put one of the boys on back door with a laser gun—here, take this one.
My mind was distracted from this string of lies by a wench pitching hay
just across the ditch from the road. She had remarkable pectoral muscles
and a lava-lava just suited her. She saw me eyeing her and gave me the
eye right back, with a wiggle tossed in.
That was a mistake. The surface of the globe, being featureless silvery white, had nothing to lend it perspective. It might have been a hundred feet away, or a thousand, or many miles. He had never experienced an unbroken height greater than that between two decks, nor an open space larger than the village common. He was panic-stricken, scared out of his wits, the more so in that he did not know what it was he feared. But the ghost of long-forgotten jungle ancestors possessed him and chilled his stomach with the basic primitive fear of falling.
He dropped into a light sleep and dreamed that he was flopping around on the end of the longest lever conceivable, a useless lever, for it rested on nothing. Part of the time he was Archimedes, and part of the time Archimedes stood beside him, jeering and leering at him with a strongly Asiatic countenance.
On the other hand, would a skilled cowhand have destroyed a well-trained work horse in favor of an untried, strange mount? That may be why I was hidden and saved—or perhaps I don't know what I am talking about; what does a bee know about Beethoven?
Science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer was born in Ottawa, Canada, on April 29, 1960. So today's his birthday and I thought I'd mark it by sharing a few items:
