Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition), April 1944 — page 19: what you’re looking at

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

RECOIL No. 3’s turrets swiveled around and from the guns flashes of fire came streaming. Channing punched his lever savagely, and once again the Station was tortured by the effects of its own offensive. Ship No. 3 suffered the same fate as No. 2. Then, seconds later, armor-piercing shells began to hit Venus Equilateral. They hit, and because of the terrific charge, they began to arc at the noses. The terrible current passed through the fuses, and the shells exploded on contact instead of boring inside before detonation. Metal was bent and burned, but only a few tiny holes re- sulted. As the charge on the Station ap- proached equilibrium once more, men ran with torches to seal these holes. “Murdoch,” said Channing, you!” “Come and get me.” “Land—or die!” snapped Channing in a vicious tone. “I’m no humanitarian, Mur- doch. You'd be better off dead!”’ “Never,” said Hellion Murdoch. Channing punched the lever for the third time, but as he did, Murdoch’s ship leaped forward under several G. The magnets could not change in field soon enongh to compensate for this change in direction, and the charge failed to connect as a bull’s- eye. It did expend some of its energy on the tail of the ship. Not enough to cripple the vessel, but the Hippocrates took on a charge of enough value to make things hard on the crew. Metal sparked, and instruments went mad. Meters wound their needles against the end pegs. The celestial globe glinted in a riot of color and then went completely dead. Gun servers dropped their projectiles as they became too heavily charged to handle, and they rolled across the turret floors, creating panic in the gun crews. The pilot fought the controls, but the charge on his driver tubes was sufficient to make his helm completely unpredictable. The panel sparked at him and seared his hands, spoil- ing his nervous control and making him heavy-handed. | “Murdoch,” cried Channing in a hearty voice, “that was a miss! Want a hit?” Murdoch’s radio was completely dead. His ship was yawing from side to side as the static charges raced through the driver tubes. The pilot gained control after a fashion, and decided that he had taken enough. He circled the Station warily and began to make a shaky landing at the South end. “I want 17 Channing saw him coming, and with a glint in his eye, he pressed the lever for the fourth and last time. Murdoch’s ship touched the landing stage just after the charge had been driven out into space. The heavy negative charge on the Hippocrates met the heavy positive charge on Venus Equilateral. The ship touched, and from that contact, there arose a cloud of incandescent gas. The entire charge left the ship at once, and through that single contact. When the cloud dissipated, the contact was a crude but efficient welded joint that was gleaming white-hot. Channing said to Walt: ‘“That’s going to be messy.” “Inside of the Hippocrates, men were still frozen to their handholds. It was messy, and cleaning up the Hippocrates was a job not relished by those who did it. But cleaning up Venus Equilateral was no small matter either. Weeks went by before the snarled-up instruments were repaired. Weeks in which the captured Hippocrates was repaired, too, and used to transport material and special supplies from Terra, and Venus, and Mars. Weeks in which the service from planet to planet was interrupted and erratic. Then one day, service was restored, and life settled down to a reasonable level. It was after this time that Walt and Channing found time to spend an idle hour together. Walt raised his glass and said: “Here’s to electrons!” “Yeah,” grinned Channing. “Here’s to electrons. Y’know, Walt, I was a little afraid that space might become a sort of wild West show, with the ships bristling with space guns and betatrons and stuff like that. In which case you’d have been a stinking benefactor. But if the recoil is as bad as the output—and Newton said that it must be— I can’t see ships cluttering up their insides with stuff that’ll screw up their instruments and driver tubes. But the thing that amuses me about the whole thing is the total failure you produced.” “Failure?” asked Walt. “What failed?” “Don’t you know Have you forgotten? Do you realize that spaceships are still duck- ing around meteors instead of blasting them out of the way with the Franks Electron Gun? Or did you lose sight of the fact that this dingbat started out in life as a meteor-sweeper ” Walt glared over the rim of his glass, but he had nothing to say. oO comiclooks (©