Astounding Science Fiction (UK Edition) — page 4: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE STORM By A. E. van VOGT The combined military powers of all the people of that galaxy could not stand up to the tremendous might of the battleship of space. But there was one force their galaxy held that could smash that or any other ship! Over the miles and the years, the gases drifted. Waste matter from ten thousand suns, a diffuse miasm of spent explosions, of dead hell fires and the furies of a hundred million raging sunspots—formless, purpose- less. But it was the beginning. Into the great dark the gases crept. Calcium was in them, and sodium, and hydrogen; and the speed of the drift varied up to twenty miles a second. There was a timeless period while gravita- tion performed its function. The inchoate mass became masses. Great blobs of gas took a semblance of shape in widely separate areas, and moved on and on and on. They came finally to where a thousand flaring seetee suns had long before dog- gedly “crossed the street” of the main stream of terrene suns. Had crossed, and left their excrement of gases. The first clash quickened the vast worlds of gas. The electron haze of terrene plunged like spurred horses and sped deeper into the equally violently reacting positron — haze of contraterrene. Instantly, the lighter orbital positrons and electrons went up in a blaze of hard radiation. The storm was on. The stripped seetee nuclei carried now terrific and unbalanced negative charges and repelled electrons, but tended to attract terrene atom nuclei. stripped terrene nuclei terrene. Violent beyond all conception were. the resulting cancellations of charges. The two opposing masses heaved and spun in a cataclysm of partial adjustment. They had been heading in different directions. More and more they became one tangled, seething whirlpool. | The new course, uncertain at first, steadied and became a line drive through attracted contra- In their turn the . the midnight heavens. On a front of nine light years, at a solid fraction of the velocity of light, the storm roared toward its destiny. Suns were engulfed for half a hundred years—and left behind with only a ham- mering of cosmic rays to show that they had been the centers of otherwise invisible, impalpable atomic devastation. In its four hundred and ninetieth Sidereal year, the storm intersected the orbit of a Nova at the flash moment. It began to move! On the three-dimensional map at weather headquarters on the planet Kaider III, the storm was colored orange. Which meant it was the biggest of the four hundred odd storms raging in the Fifty Suns region of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. It showed as an uneven splotch fronting at Latitude 473, Longitude 228, Center 190 parsecs, but that was a special Fifty Suns degree system which had no relation to the magnetic centre of the Magellanic Cloud as a whole. The report about the Nova had not yet been registered on the map. When that hap- pened the storm color would be changed to an angry red. ) They had stopped looking at the map. Maltby stood with the councilors at the great window staring up at the Earth ship. The machine was scarcely more than a dark sliver in the distant sky. But the sight of it seemed to hold a deadly fascination for the older men. Maltby felt cool, determined, but also sardonic. It was funny, these—these people of the Fifty Suns in this hour of their danger calling upon him. He unfocused his eyes from the ship, fixed his steely, laconic gaze on the plump, per- spiring chairman of the Kaider III govern- ment—and, tensing his mind, forced the man comiclooks ©