Astounding Science Fiction, June 1944 (British Edition) — page 4: what you’re looking at

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

OFF THE BE By GEORGE O. SMITH Communication from ship to planet was a nice intellectual problem for Don Channing—till he was on the.wrecked ship that had to cail for help ! Tuirty hours out of Mars for Terra, the Solar Queen sped along her silent, invisible course. No longer was she completely severed from all connection with the planets of the inner system; the trick cams that con- trolled the beams at Venus Equilateral kept the ship centered by sheer mathematics. It was a poor communications system, however, since it was but a one-way job. Any message- answering would have to be done thirty hours later when the ship made planetfall, and the regular terminal office of Inter- planetary Communications could be em- ployed. In spite of her thirty hours at 2-G, which brought her velocity to eleven hundred miles per second, the. beam-director cams did their job well enough. It was only in extreme cases of course-changing to dodge meteors that the beams lost the ship; since the cams. were not clairvoyant, there was no way to know when the autopilot juggled the con- trols to miss a bit of cosmic dust. The cams continued to spear the space through which the ship was supposed to pass according to the course constants. What. made this trip ironic was the fact that Don Channing was aboard. The beams had been bombarding the Solar Queen con- tinually ever since she left Mars with mes- sages for the Director of Communications. In one sense, it seemed funny that Channing was for once on the end of a communica- tions line where people could talk to him but upon which he could not talk back. On the other hhand it was a blessing in disguise, for the Director of Communications was beginning to papér-talk himself into some ‘means of contacting the Relay Station from a spaceship. A steward found Channing in the salon and handed him a ’gram. Channing smiled, and the steward returned the smile and added: “You'll fix these ships to talk back one day. Wait until you read that one— you'll burn from here to Terra!” 3 “Reading my. mail?” asked Channing cheerfully. The average spacegram was about as secret as a postcard, so Channing didn’t mind. He turned the page over and read: comiclooks CO