No streams of dark fiber spun out the machines' back ends, to collect on huge spools.
It went smoothly at first, as a huge motorized spool in the shuttle's 60-foot payload bay turned and the five-foot white satellite slowly rose and floated out of sight.
Suddenly, the highway popped into a clearing, where cut hay baled in huge flaxen spools lay in open fields.
Winding and unwinding a tether thousands of feet long, and keeping a bobbing ship or oil platform from jerking the robot around, requires a huge spool or drum that is lowered into the water with the robot.
It's in the form of a huge spool and we feed in just what we need.
And he turned his unseeing eyes away from the young priest and focused once more on the electric winch with its huge spool of cable and decided once again that Jack had had an inspired idea here.
When he saw a young girl eating a huge spool of blue cotton candy, he followed her for several strides.
To do that several blocks around the station have been closed to traffic and are crowded with cranes, construction equipment, huge spools of cable and fleets of trucks and trailers.
His principal task had been to carry a huge spool of fuse to help detonate dynamite.
Robot tractors shove huge spools along ceiling tracks, delivering acres of finely woven mesh that shimmers in ways that no natural eye can bear to look upon-the diffraction spectrum of raw soul-stuff.