But every office has its share of keyboard thumpers, people whose goal seems to be not producing a document but destroying the equipment before one can be created.
A patient with heart failure (caused, for example, by a muscle-damaging heart attack) may benefit from a transplant, but there are not enough spare thumpers around for all those who need them.
Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had come with their escape pack.
" You must stand close enough that you can mount it as it passes, yet not so close that it engulfs you." With abrupt decision, Paul released the thumper's latch.
Until he did this thing himself, even the great southlands—the area some twenty thumpers beyond the erg—were denied him unless he ordered a palanquin and rode like a Reverend Mother or one of the sick and wounded.