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Other reviews:
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding p. 125-126

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Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant

Fiction:
The Storm • novelette by A. E. van Vogt ∗∗∗+
Fifty Million Monkeys • novella by Raymond F. Jones ∗∗
Paradox Lost • short story by Fredric Brown ∗
The Proud Robot • novelette by Henry Kuttner [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗+
Willie • short story by Frank Belknap Long ∗
Symbiotica • novelette by Eric Frank Russell ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x10), Hall (x2), Frank Kramer (x5), Alfred (x1),
Concentration • by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Tidal Waves • essay by Malcolm Jameson
The Analytical Laboratory: August 1943
In Times to Come

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This issue has three stories (by van Vogt, Kuttner and Russell) that are not only 1944 Retro-Hugo nominees but also appear in Asimov and Greenberg’s Great Science Fiction Stories #5: 1943.¹ I imagine, therefore, that many would rate this the best issue of the year: let’s come back to that at the end of the review.
The fiction leads off with The Storm by A. E. van Vogt, the second of his ‘Mixed Men’ series. This follows on from last issue’s story, Concealment, where the human spaceship Discovery (commanded by the imperious Grand Captain Lady Laurr) discovers an outpost of Dellian civilization, android robots who fled humanity after a massacre thousands of years before.
After a short introduction that describes a ferocious galactic storm, the story opens on one of the robot planets, with Laurr’s ship about to go back to Earth with news of their discovery. The Dellians do not want Earth to learn of their existence, so they send Captain Maltby, one of their navigators, to the ship to supposedly guide the Earthmen through the nearby storm: their secret plan is to get Maltby to steer the ship into the storm’s fringes, so they can disable and capture it.

In light of the problematic history between the humans and robots, Laurr prepares her crew for Maltby’s arrival:

“There’s no doubt, Captain Turgess,” she commented once, savagely, “that we’re being lied to on a vast scale. But let it be so. We can use psychological tests to verify all the vital details.
“For the time being it is important that you relieve the fears of everyone you find it necessary to question. We must convince these people that Earth will accept them on an equal basis without bias or prejudice of any kind because of their robot orig—”
She bit her lip. “That’s an ugly word, the worst kind of propaganda. We must eliminate it from our thoughts.”
“I’m afraid,” the officer shrugged, “not from our thoughts.”
She stared at him, narrow-eyed, then cut him off angrily. A moment later she was talking into the general transmitter: “The word robot must not be used—by any of our personnel—under pain of fine—”
Switching off, she put a busy signal on her spare receiver, and called Psychology House. Lieutenant Neslor’s face appeared on the plate. “I heard your order just now, noble lady,” the woman psychologist said. “I’m afraid, however, that we’re dealing with the deepest instincts of the human animal—hatred or fear of the stranger, the alien.
“Excellency, we come from a long line of ancestors who, in their time, have felt superior to others because of some slight variation in the pigmentation of the skin. It is even recorded that the color of the eyes has influenced the egoistic in historical decisions. We have sailed into very deep waters, and it will be the crowning achievement of our life if we sail out in a satisfactory fashion.”  p. 11-12

The central section of the story takes place after Maltby joins the ship, and involves the probing of Maltby by Laurr and her crew. They learn, after psychologically surprising him on launch with a scene that makes it seem as if he is floating over the planet, that Maltby is a mixture of both Dellian and non-Dellian robot, a “Mixed Man”. Later, when Laurr suspects he may there for nefarious reasons, we see his ability to switch between his dual minds to evade human probing and interrogation:

These people might be more dangerous than she had thought. She said with unnatural sharpness for her: “As you know, we have to question you. We would prefer that you do not take offense. You have told us that Cassidor VII, the chief planet of the Fifty Suns, is twenty-five hundred lightyears from here. Normally, we would spend more than sixty years feeling our way across such an immense gap of uncharted, star-filled space. But you have given us a choice of orbits.
“We must make sure those orbits are honest, offered without guile or harmful purpose. To that end we have to ask you to open your mind and answer our questions under the strictest psychological surveillance.”
“I have orders,” said Maltby, “to cooperate with you in every way.”
He had wondered how he would feel, now that the hour of decision was upon him. But there was nothing abnormal. His body was a little stiffer, but his minds—
He withdrew his self into the background and left his Dellian mind to confront all the questions that came. His Dellian mind that he had deliberately kept apart from his thoughts.
That curious mind, which had no will of its own, but which, by remote control, reacted with the full power of an I. Q. of 191.
Sometimes, he marveled himself at that second mind of his. It had no creative ability, but its memory was machinelike, and its resistance to outside pressure was, as the woman psychologist had so swiftly analyzed, over nine hundred. To be exact, the equivalent of I. Q. 917.

Maltby answers all Laurr’s questions satisfactorily, and he has dinner with her later that evening—the same time that the course he has plotted will cause the ship will hit the storm’s edges! During the meal one of Laurr’s psychologists interrupts them: she has worked out that Maltby’s Mixed Man heritage means he has two brains, and that he may have used them to conceal his intentions. Laurr orders an emergency course change, and Maltby is taken away to be interrogated. This latter process involves breaking down his resistance by conditioning him to love Grand Captain Laurr.
Despite the course change, the ship hits the storm:

If she had had time to slow, the storm would have meant nothing.
Striking that mass of gas at half a light-year a minute was like running into an unending solid wall. The great ship shuddered in every plate as the deceleration tore at her gigantic strength.
In seconds she had run the gamut of all the recoil systems her designers had planned for her as a unit.
She began to break up.
And still everything was according to the original purpose of the superb engineering firm that had built her. The limit of unit strain reached, she dissolved into her nine thousand separate sections.
Streamlined needles of metal were those sections, four hundred feet long, forty feet wide; sliverlike shapes that sinuated cunningly through the gases, letting the pressure of them slide off their smooth hides.
But it wasn’t enough. Metal groaned from the torture of deceleration. In the deceleration chambers, men and women lay at the bare edge of consciousness, enduring agony that seemed on the verge of being beyond endurance.
Hundreds of the sections careened into each other in spite of automatic screens, and instantaneously fused into whitehot coffins.
And still, in spite of the hideously maintained velocity, that mass of gases was not bridged; light-years of thickness had still to be covered.
For those sections that remained, once more all the limits of human strength were reached. The final action was chemical, directly on the human bodies that remained of the original thirty thousand. Those bodies for whose sole benefit all the marvelous safety devices had been conceived and constructed, the poor, fragile, human beings who through all the ages had persisted in dying under normal conditions from a pressure of something less than fifteen gravities.
The prompt reaction of the automatics in rolling back every floor, and plunging every person into the deceleration chambers of each section—that saving reaction was abruptly augmented as the deceleration chamber was flooded by a special type of gas.
Wet was that gas, and clinging. It settled thickly on the clothes of the humans, soaked through to the skin and through the skin, into every part of the body.
Sleep came gently, and with it a wonderful relaxation. The blood grew immune to shock; muscles that, in a minute before, had been drawn with anguish—loosened; the brain impregnated with life-giving chemicals that relieved it of all shortages remained untroubled even by dreams.
Everybody grew enormously flexible to gravitation pressures—a hundred—a hundred and fifty gravities of deceleration; and still the life force clung. The great heart of the universe beat on. The storm roared along its inescapable artery, creating the radiance of life, purging the dark of its poisons—and at last the tiny ships in their separate courses burst its great bounds.
They began to come together, to seek each other, as if among them there was an irresistible passion that demanded intimacy of union.
Automatically, they slid into their old positions; the battleship Star Cluster began again to take form—but there were gaps. Segments destroyed, and segments lost.

Perhaps the story’s best passage, and the, “They began to come together, to seek each other, as if among them there was an irresistible passion that demanded intimacy of union” phrase telegraphs the final section of the story.

Maltby and Laurr end up shipwrecked together on a nearby planet, where they are out of touch with the partially reconstituted ship, and have to work together against a group of hostile aliens. During this Maltby’s love conditioning becomes apparent. We later find out that Laurr is, if they are not rescued, under a legal compulsion to reproduce with Maltby and populate the planet! This narrative arc means that the story changes from an excellent superscience space opera into more of a boy-gets-girl piece which, while not badly done, is not as good as what preceded it (some of the relationship material is a little dated and corny). The pair are (spoiler) eventually rescued by the ship, by which time Laurr is carrying Maltby’s child.
Notwithstanding the weaker last part, the story is still an impressive piece.²
Fifty Million Monkeys by Raymond F. Jones starts off on a future Earth, in the offices of Jamieson & Son, a firm of “Consulting Physicists” who apparently have a world-wide monopoly on “brain-teaming” (science has become too complicated for individual specialists and they now work together in psychologically matched teams). Craig, the son of the owner, is greeted one morning by Carlotta, the Director of Psychological Engineering, with the news that she has cancelled his appointments. She tells him that Team Thirty Four are cracking under the burden of “some knowledge which is causing them tremendous fear”. We learn the team were working on a problem involving Maitland Company spaceships and their navigational errors during long flights.

Craig orders the team’s psychological tapes and the pair put on their headsets:

The first wave of near-paralyzing fear threw a giddy, shimmering cloak about him. He groped blindly amid darkness for a chair. Carlotta helped him to one.
Surging, mounting—that fear filled the Universe and had nothing to do with personal security. It was fear that existence itself would cease to be existence and become a black and nameless nothingness.
He tore off the headset and sat in momentary trembling. Impassively, Carlotta stood beside him. Her eyes were closed but the cap was still on her head.
No expression showed on her face as she let that terrible sensation flow over her mind and rebuffed it calmly.
In wonderment, Craig watched her.
He knew that such ability was the result of her long years of training in peering into the dark, mysterious, amplified depths of men’s mind. Yet still he wondered how she could do it day after day and remain sane. He glanced down at the headset in his hands and let her go on.
After a moment, she opened her eyes. “Here’s the part you should know. I’ll turn it down a bit.”
He refitted the cap to his skull once more and the subdued impulses throbbed in his mind again. He sensed something more definite than the blinding fear. He sensed a conflict. And he sensed the cause of it. There was the impression of a vast, overwhelming curtain that hung threateningly over all creation, like a wrap of night about to fall forever.
Then it was over. The spools had run to the end.
He wiped his brow. “They must have sent up the wrong spools. That could only come out of a psychopathic ward.”  p. 41

After this they decide to give the “Maitland Problem” to Team Sixty Eight and monitor their progress while they investigate what has happened to Team Thirty Four.
We then get some backstory about the origin of these science teams before Team Thirty Four turn up in Craig’s office asking to be disbanded. During this conversation, Craig finds out what the problem is: the Stillson drives powering Maitland’s spaceships are creating regions of polarised space which, when it eventually meets its opposite, will cancel out and result in the immediate extinction of the universe. According to the team, who have already looked into the problem, there is no solution.
After Craig’s initial attempts to find a cure with another team fail, he becomes personally involved and forms a super-team. He also follows up a hunch that the problem is solvable by extracting the answer from “randomness”. This concept is initially not very convincing, or clear. Moreover, it results in an obsession with the idea of a group of monkeys randomly typing all the books in the British Museum, to the point that he actually orders a batch of monkeys and sets them to work in the basement.

This experiment is soon discontinued, and instead they set up several machines producing random English and maths, later adding a selector that prints only the coherent parts. Eventually one of the machines produces a math theorem that lets the teams manipulate time, which speeds up the process even further. Meanwhile, the English machine produces an alternate history of a human world, which they think may be in another existence:

One page near the middle told of the beginnings of the horrors.
“After the days of the hungry ones came the Paralytic Year. It was first observed in the Great City on the fourteen of four of thirty eleven. During the morning of that day several persons were found standing upon the streets, entirely unmoving and unable to move. They stared ahead with a look of despair upon their unchanging faces. They could not be persuaded to move or make any intelligent sign and when they were moved to hospitals they responded to no stimulus whatever.
“Through that night and during the next day the condition spread to other cities and by nightfall of the second day a million of the paralytics were stone rigid.
“It was, of course, impossible to locate all or even a small part of the unfortunates, especially in isolated districts. The majority of them remained where they were stricken, and as the days passed, they simply starved to death. They toppled where they stood, dying in an agony that could not express. Their corpses were everywhere. During that one terrible year over three hundred million died in that fashion.
“What it was or where it came from, no one ever knew. It was only another of the results of the Broken Law. Again the Light Master appeared in all the stricken cities throughout the world, and men hid their faces from the being. It touched the dead and stricken and a new plague of horrors swept over the world. Some were winged creatures that were seen to fly only against the Moon in the great cities. Others became crawling things that oozed into the sea and were drowned. Still others slunk about the street, mere rotting corpses that seemed possessed of some unknown, unholy mobility.”
When Craig finished the History, it was morning and the night was gone.  p. 68-69

As you would expect (spoiler) they finally discover a solution, but the minor plot complications aren’t over yet, and Craig has to sort out a personal dispute between his father and Maitland’s owner over a “chessmath” game before they can get access to the Stillson drives. This is a minor and unnecessary twist in the plot on the way to the big transcendent ending, which has the final random machine (amid warnings of its self-awareness from the team) giving birth to a “being of light”, who sorts out the problem and infuses Craig with god-like Powers. The being shows him another plane of existence and says he can go there and take Earth too—and that Craig can become the Light Master. When Craig hears this he heeds the warning in what he has previously read and goes back to Earth, putting his energy back into the machines and blowing the roof off the company building in the process.
Initially I wasn’t looking forward to reading this one—I haven’t been a big fan of Jones’ work so far—and it took me a long time to get through this as I could only read it in ten page chunks (it is a 26,000 word novella). The reason for my inability to read much more in a single sitting is that the story is generally clunky and expository, and uses several odd or unlikely concepts against the background of an unconvincing future world. However, around the halfway point it developed a momentum of its own and I warmed to it a little, although not to the point that I actually liked it particularly—but enough to concede that this ambitious piece is not entirely without interest.
If you are up for a story that involves pulp metaphysics (maybe if you are a fan of Barrington Bayley’s early work) you may find this worth a look.
Paradox Lost by Fredric Brown gets off to a lovely start:

A bluebottle fly had got in through the screen, somehow, and it droned in monotonous circles around the ceiling of the classroom. Even as Professor Dolohan droned in monotonous circles of logic up at the front of the class. Shorty McCabe, seated in the back row, glanced from one to another of them and finally settled on the bluebottle fly as the more interesting of the two.
“The negative absolute,” said the professor, “is, in a manner of speaking, not absolutely negative, this is only seemingly contradictory. Reversed in order, the two words acquire new connotations. Therefore—”
Shorty McCabe sighed inaudibly and watched the bluebottle fly, and wished that he could fly around in circles like that, and with such a soul-satisfying buzz. In comparative sizes and decibels, a fly made more noise than an airplane.
More noise, in comparison to size, than a buzz saw. Would a buzz saw saw metal? Say, a saw. Then one could say he saw a buzz saw saw a saw. Or leave out the buzz and that would be better : I saw a saw saw a saw. Or better yet; Sue saw a saw saw a saw.  p. 83

McCabe then sees the bluebottle disappear, apparently in mid-air, and when he explores the same space with his fingers they disappear too. He eventually finds himself in a dark void talking to another man who later takes him back in time (the hole in space is a time warp) to hunt dinosaurs.
After the captivating opening this eventually deteriorates into a talking heads story about how the dinosaurs died out. It is an unconvincing explanation.

The Proud Robot by Henry Kuttner is the third and best of the ‘Gallegher’ stories I’ve read so far. In this one the scientist, who can only invent things when drunk and invariably forgets what the inventions are for when he sobers up, has to contend with both a disobedient, narcissistic robot called Joe, and a disgruntled client called Brock, whose VoxView cinema business faces ruin because of pirated material. While Brock is berating Gallegher for not having completed the job he has been paid for (developing a content protection system for Brock’s tri-dimensional movies), Joe the robot introduces himself:

“No,” the robot said suddenly, “it’s no use. No use at all, Brock.”
“What the—”
Gallegher sighed wearily. “I forget the damned thing’s alive. Mr. Brock, meet Joe. Joe, meet Mr. Brock—of VoxView.”
Joe turned, gears meshing within his transparent skull. “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Brock. Allow me to congratulate you on your good fortune in hearing my lovely voice.”
“Ugh,” said the magnate inarticulately. “Hello.”
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Gallegher put in, sotto voce. “Joe’s like that. A peacock. No use arguing with him either.”
The robot ignored this aside. “But it’s no use, Mr. Brock,” he went on squeakily. “I’m not interested in money. I realize it would bring happiness to many if I consented to appear in your pictures, but fame means nothing to me. Nothing. Consciousness of beauty is enough.”
Brock began to chew his lips. “Look,” he said savagely, “I didn’t come here to offer you a picture job. See? Am I offering you a contract? Such colossal nerve— Pah! You’re crazy.”
“Your schemes are perfectly transparent,” the robot remarked coldly. “I can see that you’re overwhelmed by my beauty and the loveliness of my voice—its grand tonal qualities. You needn’t pretend you don’t want me, just so you can get me at a lower price. I said I wasn’t interested.”
“You’re cr-r-razy!” Brock howled, badgered beyond endurance, and Joe calmly turned back to his mirror.
“Don’t talk so loudly,” the robot warned. “The discordance is deafening. Besides you’re ugly and I don’t like to look at you.” Wheels and cogs buzzed inside the transplastic shell.
Joe extended his eyes on stalks and regarded himself with every appearance of appreciation.  p. 97

The story continues in the series’ usual rambling way (Gallegher goes to one of the pirate cinemas, and later meets some movie types before ending up in court) but it improves as it goes along, building to a reveal about the robot’s function that is a mini-tour de force. In this scene Gallegher simultaneously regains control of Joe, and (spoiler) finds out what the robot is for (it is a can-opener cum content protection device!) I know that this may not seem impressive in summary, but in the context of the story this is both amusing and ingenious.
Noted in passing is the story’s prescience about the idea of home TV putting cinemas out of business, and the latter’s later revival.
Willie by Frank Belknap starts with Monitor 236 looking at domed cities in a valley before realising he is wearing an animal skin around his loins. He doesn’t know why he is standing there but, before he can process the situation, he hears a noise behind him and sees a Prowler, which prompts him to throw his axe. After the Prowler dies, Monitor 236 cannot remember how he got into his current situation, so he decides to go to the city and find Willie, his robot.
As he approaches the city he gets on one of the moving sidewalks. When he gets there he finds it is deserted—apart from a young woman, who is also wearing animal skins. Together they go to meet the rest of her tribe and, when they arrive, they discuss the threat of the Prowlers. Throughout all this, Monitor 236 intermittently says things that don’t make any sense to the rest of them.

The story climaxes with a battle when the Prowlers attack. The city’s robots join in to vanquish the threat, and Monitor 236 is finally reunited with Willie the robot. We find that Monitor 236 has accidentally time-travelled a million years into the future, and that Willie has been dutifully waiting.
This story is little more than a series of random events and, as I mentioned last issue, I’m not a big fan of stories where men wake up in bodies/rooms/situations/etc. wondering how they got there.
Symbiotica by Eric Frank Russell is the third of the ‘Jay Score/Marathon’ stories about a robot that is part of a spaceship crew. Score plays a minor part in this one (I haven’t recently read the others so do not know how prominent he is in those), and the story mostly concerns itself with the kidnap of the crew by the natives of an alien planet. The crew’s subsequent problems with the native flora and fauna—which is all interdependent³— is initially a pretty good read (Russell writes crisp, fast-paced and absorbing prose):

Reaching the monstrous growth, we made a circle just beyond the sweep of its treacherous leaves, had a look to see where [our Martian crewmate] was wrapped in glue. He wasn’t wrapped in glue. We found him forty feet up the trunk, five of his powerful tentacles clamped around its girth, the other five embracing the green native we’d pursued. His captive was struggling wildly and futilely, all the time yelling a highpitched stream of gibberish.
Carefully, Kli Yang edged down the trunk. The way he looked and moved made him resemble an impossible cross between a college professor and an educated octopus. His eyes rolling with terror, the native battered at Kli’s glassite helmet. Kli blandly ignored the hostility, reached the branch that had caught Jepson, didn’t descend any farther. Still grasping the furiously objecting green one, he crept along the whipping limb until he reached its leafless end. At that point, he and the native were being waved up and down in twenty five-feet sweeps.
Timing himself, he cast off at the lowermost point of one beat, scuttled from reach before another eager branch could swat him.  p. 138

That said, you will need to ignore some idiotic behaviour on the part of the crew (who appear to be practising for the role of short-lived extras in the Alien movies), and the inordinate amount of back-biting that goes on between them. The story also goes on for too long (there is seemingly endless trailing about on the planet’s surface) and it ultimately descends into one of those ‘humans-slaughter-aliens’ tales, or more accurately, ‘dumb-humans-who-don’t-get-on-with-each-other-slaughtering-aliens’ tales. A more likely ending is that they would all have collected their Darwin Awards.
It is okay overall, I guess, but I’m a bit surprised that this made the Retro Hugo final ballot.

This issue’s Cover by William Timmins is a bit drab, and it isn’t helped by the text box used for the lead story title—a rather thoughtless piece of cover design
Around two-thirds of this issue’s Interior artwork comes from Paul Orban (ten illustrations), most of which seem competent if uninspired (although it’s hard to tell from the poor scan I was reading). My favourite of his is probably the drawing of the alien tree from Symbiotica. Hall’s two line drawings for the Jameson aren’t bad, as is Alfred’s single contribution. I liked Frank Kramer’s can opener/robot illustration best of all, I think.
In Concentration, Campbell uses his editorial to tell readers that, having just changed from bedsheet to the smaller pulp size format, they are changing again to a smaller digest size:

Beginning with the November issue next month, Astounding goes into a yet smaller size—the smallest it has ever attained. The reason should be obvious by now—paper shortage. There’s plenty of wood for wood pulp, plenty of machinery for production of the paper, and plenty of all the necessary chemicals—except chlorine, used for paper bleaching but needed more urgently for war-products processing; it’s an extremely useful general reagent—but there is a decided shortage of two sine qua non’s—manpower and transportation. So we use less paper.
But there will be surprisingly little reduction in content, because we will omit all advertising material; every page of the magazine will be a page of editorial material. The size will be somewhat larger than the “pocket” size books, but smaller than the present standard; there will be one hundred sixty pages of regular newsprint paper, plus sixteen pages of special material—a total of one hundred seventy-six pages. The sixteen special pages will be done in rotogravure, making it possible to print a number of articles which have absolutely required photographic articles and which, because of that, have been impossible heretofore.
The regular text will not be printed on the usual high-speed rotary press, either; we’ll be using a slower, older, but definitely cleaner letterpress-type press. The letterpress type has never attained the speed of production required for the enormous runs needed for a chain of magazines as voluminous as the Street & Smith Publications, or for a modern major newspaper. But the high-speed rotary press has never succeeded in producing the clean, sharp, and really black type impression the older, slower method did. Since only two of the Street & Smith magazines will be using the small size, it will be practicable to run them on the slower letterpress.  p. 6

Tidal Waves by Malcolm Jameson is a science article about tides that isn’t entirely clear in places—it could have done with some diagrams—but I learnt that the moon overtakes the tides it creates, and what with varying local geography, etc., it makes them quite complex events. I also learned fleetingly what “perigee”, “perihelion”, “meridian”, and “ephemerides” meant. Gone now.⁴

The Analytical Laboratory: August 1943 was commented on in that issue’s review.⁵
In Times to Come mostly plugs a new ‘Venus Equilateral’ story from George O. Smith:

The lead yarn is another of George O. Smith’s Venus Equilateral stories. George Smith is—as you might conceivably have guessed from the tone of familiarity with which his characters handle radio and electronic work—a radio engineer, research division in particular. Most of the gadgetry of Venus Equilateral exists as a fairly coherent reality in his mind. I imagine—the type of tubes, physical size of coils needed, etcetera. And some of the sour experiments he’s personally encountered, I suspect, led him to the basic idea of “Recoil.” the novelette coming up in November.  p. 162

There is no Brass Tacks in this issue.
Returning to my original comment at the start of this review, I’m not sure I’d say that this is the best issue of the year (that’s probably February) but it’s certainly worth getting for the van Vogt and the Kuttner.  ●

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1. My review of Great SF Stories #5, 1943 edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg is here.

2. The Storm is one of the stories that Brian W. Aldiss talks about in detail in Trillion Year Spree (his history of science fiction which he expanded from his earlier Billion Year Spree in collaboration with David Wingrove):

A. E. van Vogt was talking confidently of interstellar winds back in 1943, and dropping in casual word of large dollops of space—as when a survey ship reports that a small system of stars “comprises two hundred sixty billion cubic light-years, and contains fifty million suns.” Van Vogt was the ideal practitioner of “Doc” Smiths billion year spree. He was not hard and cold and unemotional, in the manner of Clement, Asimov, and Heinlein. He could balance his cubic light-years and the paraphernalia of super-science with moments of tenderness and pure loony joy. Intimations of humanity surfaced now and again among all his frenetic mental powers and titanic alien effects.
Van Vogt is not seen at his best in longer work (he becomes as hopelessly snarled up as his readers in World of Null-A). Among his short stories, one of the best—because it exhibits all his talents in dynamic balance—is “The Storm” (1943), which contains some moments of love between Maltby and the Lady Laurr (Van Vogt was a sucker for a title). Indeed, there’s a hint that the story’s title is intended to refer also to an internal storm of emotion. Very sophisticated! But, of course, it was the intergalactic storm which interested readers, and that was what they got:
.
In those minutes before disaster struck, the battleship Star Cluster glowed like an immense and brilliant jewel. The warning glare from the Nova set off an incredible roar of emergency clamor through all of her hundred and twenty decks.
From end to end her lights flicked on. They burned row by row straight across her four thousand feet of length with the hard tinkle of cut gems. In the reflection of that light, the black mountain that was her hull looked like the fabulous planet of Cassidor, her destination, a sun at night from a far darkness, sown with diamond shining cities. Silent as a ghost, grand and wonderful beyond all imagination, glorious in her power, the great ship slid through the blackness along the special river of time and space which was her plotted course.
Even as she rode into the storm there was nothing visible. The space ahead looked as clear as any vacuum. So tenuous were the gases that made up the storm that the ship would not even have been aware of them if it had been travelling at atomic speeds.
Violent the disintegration of matter in that storm might be, and the sole source of cosmic rays, the hardest energy in the known universe. But the immense, the cataclysmic danger to the Star Cluster was a direct result of her own terrible velocity. If she had had time to slow, the storm would have meant nothing.
Striking that mass of gas at half a light year a minute was like running into an unending solid wall. The great ship shuddered in every plate as the deceleration tore at her gigantic strength.
In seconds she had run the gamut of all the recoil system her designers had planned for her as a unit.
She began to break up.
.
The writing has clarity and brevity, ably conveying Van Vogt’s excitement at his immense drama. Later, and beyond the pages of Campbell’s magazine, Van Vogt was never to recapture his first fine careless rapture. Nor that mixture of kookie science—half a light-year per minute, indeed!—with lyric excitement.  p. 236-237

3. Martin Greenberg says this about Symbiotica in the Great SF Stories #5: 1943:

Although the concept of symbiosis (the idea that species are linked together in mutually beneficial ways in nature) had long existed in biology, it did not receive widespread attention until the ecological concerns of the 1960s. “Symbiotica” beautifully illustrates the concept, and is a fine story besides.  p. 306

4. “Perigee” is the point in the orbit of a satellite, moon, planet, etc. at which it comes closest to the object it is orbiting; “perihelion” is the point in the orbit of a planet or other astronomical body at which it comes closest to the sun; “meridian” has various meanings, but here I think it was referring to a line of longitude (I should have known that one); “ephemerides” are tables listing the positions of the planets.

5. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in December:

As usual the longest story tops the poll. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way that you could get any sense out of these results is if you adjusted each set depending on its length (novella, novelette, etc.), how many stories are in the issue, etc. It would be a massive job, and I suspect it would still be garbage in, garbage out.
Campbell’s comments about Brass Tacks being taxed by the Post Office are interesting—why one Earth would they insist that reader’s letters are advertising matter? Bonkers.  ●