tractor beam n.

Dressed in his heavy space-suit and supported by a tractor beam well out of range of what seemed to him terrific heat radiated by the bodies of the Terrestrials, he floated along unconsciously.

‘We'll carry off the pieces of that ship, too, Quince—we may be able to get a lot of pointers from it,’ and Brandon swung mighty tractor beams upon the severed halves of the Jovian vessel, then extended a couple of smaller rays to meet the two little figures racing across the smooth green meadow toward the Sirius.

‘General call! Attention! Battle stations! By stations, report!’ ‘Station 1, tractor beams—hot!’

Simultaneously, the tractor beams, hitherto exerting only a few dynes of force, stiffened into unbreakable, inflexible rods of energy, binding the two ships of space into one rigid system; each, relative to the other, immovable.

By the way they’re braced, there are tractor beams and pressor beams and—there are vacuum tubes that have grids but apparently work with cold cathodes.

It captures three different scanner-scouts, holding them with some sort of a tractor beam, whirling them around like a stone on a string, and letting them go straight at the nearest planet.

Sections which should have fitted together very often had to be modified to make them join properly, and this necessitated moving the sections together and apart several times with massed tractor and pressor beams.

As the tractor beams had seized it, as the vibrations penetrated its ebony hull and tore at his flesh, Corgo had called…and died just as the words and the tears began.

Bridge to Briefing Lounge. Object is now within tractor beam range.

Spock, can we reach him with a tractor beam?

Several light tractor beams did not have the power of one heavy-duty one, simply because it was difficult to coordinate them. To be at all effective, paired tractors had to lift at the same time and yank in the same direction.

Gradually Flinx activated the posigravity tractor beams, used for manipulating large cargo.

The up-and-coming weapon for ship-to-ship fighting in the last couple of years seemed to be the gravitic imploder lance, a modification of tractor-beam technology; variously-designed artificial-gravity shields were still lagging behind in protection from it.

Everyone moved as if in a tractor beam, glasses in hand, all other thoughts gone as they came to the tent coping at the edge of the waterfront.

Worst of all, he pictured a ‘tractor beam,’ seizing and dragging him down to torment in some Jophur-designed hell.

It’s a real, honest-to-God anomoly [sic]. Either time travel or a portal to an alternate Earth. I’d say a tractor beam used by an entity who couldn’t quite handle it.

They finally have the sense to turn their tractor beam in the right direction.