spindizzy n.

The waste inherent in using the spindizzy only in a ship could not be disguised. Once antigravity was an engineering reality, it was no longer necessary to design ships specifically for space travel, for neither weight nor aerodynamic lines meant anything any more.

There was no longer any reason why a man-carrying vehicle to cross space needed to be small, cramped, organized fore-and-aft, penurious of weight. The spindizzy could lift anything, and protect it, too.

I won’t bother to trace the succeeding steps, because I think you can work them out for yourself. It’s enough to say that there’s a drive-generator on board this ship which is the complete and final justification of all the hell you people on the Bridge gang have been put through. The gadget has a long technical name, but the technies who tend it have already nicknamed it the spindizzy, because of what it does to the magnetic moment of any atom—any atom—within its field. While it’s in operation, it absolutely refuses to notice any atom outside its own influence. Furthermore, it will notice no other strain or influence which holds good beyond the borders of that field. It’s so snooty that it has to be stopped down to almost nothing when it’s brought close to a planet, or it won't let you land. But in deep space….well, it’s impervious to meteors and such trash, of course; it’s impervious to gravity; and—”it hasn’t the faintest interest in any legislation about top speed limits.

Kennon’s thoughts about Alexander’s spindizzy design. A hyperspace converter like that couldn’t be less than four millennia old.

And then she made a noise like a spindizzy going sour.

He’d still used his ‘spindizzy’ field as a mere means, of course, though to a greater end. But the readers were happy. Not he. He had to go back and write a story of the great engineering study of Jupiter’s gravity that led to the spindizzy.

There are rumors about secret work on the Heim drive, HTS, the spindizzy as some call it—after a science fiction story—all over the net.