telescanner n.

His wandering eyes glued feverishly to the eyepiece of the small but powerful telescanner. ‘Found a sunspot before the due date?’ demanded Jerry. But the little man was already at the physicist’s side, gripping his shoulder with a terrible grip. ‘What do you see?’ Vic shoved him off with a twitch of athletic shoulders, continued to stare. Then, suddenly, he swung away, blinking, blinded. His sweaty face was puzzled. ‘It may be only a meteor,’ he admitted.

ALTERNATIVE PLOT: This is easily found by reading some kind of Western story. When you are successful in choosing one suited to your purpose, twist it slightly and introduce some well-known stf-terms, such as: ‘bronco’ which change to ‘space-scout’, ‘six-gun’ [which change to] ‘Banning’, ‘lariat’ which change to ‘tractor’, ‘miles’ [which change to] ‘light-years’, ‘binoculars’ [which change to] ‘tele-scanners’ and so on.

He swept the beam across the sickly sea and up the coast-line of the continent until he saw a dark spot in the orange ground. Then, nudging the telebeam into the cave, he saw at last the few shimmering crystals that meant precious Q. He tried other apertures here and there, convincing himself that, while there was little enough in any one cave, the planet as a whole possessed more than they required. The sight of all the unobtainable Q on the telescanner screen made Donelli sweat with exasperation.

She is, you decide in a detached sort of fashion, beautiful. You wonder again what the hell she’s doing in a stupor on an empty ship that’s just drifting along without drive and without apparent direction. When you first saw the ship from your own telescanner, you thought maybe it had been pirated—such things still happen occasionally. But then, as you brought in the magnifier and studied every exposed inch of the hull and found no holes, no dents, you began to change your mind. Pirates usually shoot first—and straight.

Halfway across the plain, Randolph Saul, director of the Cultural Enlistment expedition, snapped off his telescanner, letting the bulky instrument drop back to his chest.

A silvered dome pushed out of the pit, out of the ragged shadow, into the white blaze of the near sun. The barrels of a dozen optical and radio telescopes, pyrometers, telescanners and cameras thrust out at the great orb, under the blazoned slogan that the dome displayed to the universe in letters of cast bronze: THE MIGHTIEST REWARDS THE MOST FAITHFUL. And inside the insulated, refrigerated observatory, three astronomers watched a thousand boards and gauges and dials. They were waiting. For they had been warned.

In the utter blackness, out beyond the orbit of Callisto, Joe noticed two tiny pinpoints of light and adjusted the telescanner. Clear and sharp on the video screen, the starliners came into focus—the Star Flight and the Pegasus—heading out into the galaxy with their cargo of emigrants. Tiny life ferries clung like limpets to their sides.

We step onto a balcony overlooking the station’s ground floor, which extends a quarter mile across and teems with activity. Thousands of monitors glow green and red inside an endless catacomb of cubbyholes. In an open area in the center of the floor a massive telescanner points up at the glass-domed ceiling. Bots scurry about and scores of workers in red jumpsuits tinker with an array of metal pipes that stretch hundreds of feet from floor to ceiling. The nearest workers stop what they’re doing to observe us.