Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition), April 1944

About this issue

This April 1944 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction contains three novelettes. "Recoil" by George O. Smith concerns Walter Franks, acting director at Venus Equilateral Relay Station, who is developing an electron gun to destroy meteors that threaten spaceships traveling between planets. The massive weapon, modeled on cathode-ray tubes, fires a focused beam of high-velocity electrons into space. When a meteor appears, Franks tests the prototype but the results are inconclusive; the beam seems to have no effect on the target, and an insulator fails under the extreme electrical stress. The story also features Lewis Padgett's "Gallegher Plus" and A. E. van Vogt's "The Beast," though their content is not recoverable from the provided OCR text.