needle-beam n.

Miko was bending over him. Miko with a heat-cylinder no longer than a finger. Its needle-beam played upon Snap’s naked chest. I could see the gruesome little trail of smoke rising.

Then he went around with an opened ion-gun with a needle beam and poked everything visible with it.

He had saved the little green man’s life, and from that time on, Omar Klegg had been the one white man who could step foot on the bad-land soil of Venus without the aid of blazing needle-beam gats.

In fact, he had not noticed that his friend was wearing anything new in the way of weapons—had he arrived unarmed, Monroe-Alpha would have noticed it, naturally, but he was not particularly observant about such matters, and could easily have spent two hours with a man and never notice whether he was wearing a Stokes coagulator or a common needlebeam.

She saw the silver mail burned away across his chest where that fierce needle beam should have bored through flesh and bone.

Sighing, Juille fired at him around the edge of the screen, her needle beam making the air shriek as it passed.

With two needle beams trained on his back, he was helpless.

Louis clawed the flashlight-laser from his belt, used its green needle beam to free Speaker from his balloons.

Silently, Malkins produced a needle-beam projector. Grayson took it, pointed it at his own right temple, and pressed the curved firing pin—as Malkins grabbed at him frantically but too late. The thin, white beam seemed to penetrate Grayson’s heed. It burned a round, black, smoldering hole in the woodwork beyond.

Both men drew compact needlers. ‘They're set to stun, and I don’t think she’s faster than a needle beam.’

Before he could change course, the droid’s right index finger, which was pointed at the stingwort, fired a needle beam of bright red coherent light at it. Without slowing his pace, I-Five carefully moved his finger back and forth, incinerating a one-meter-wide path through the dangerous growth as he passed through it.