Search Worlds Without End

By the twenty-first century the world was drowning in its own population. A solution had to be found quickly - and it was, in 'gravi-power'. Wonderful, unending source of power - only the scientists knew that its use was reducing the Earth's distance from the sun at a dangerous rate. But if another planet's gravi-power could harnessed...

An expedition was launched to Mars, known to be uninhabited - except that a woman was wandering around its surface who claimed she had come from another galaxy to warn Earth of a terrible menace, and there was a huge poly-hedron of metal emanting a force very much like that of gravipower.

Someone else had discovered it! A thousand years ago, or now? Friend, or enemy?

Wandl the Invader

There were nine major planets in the Solar System, and it was within their boundaries that man first set up interplanetary commerce and began trading with the ancient Martian civilization. And then they discovered a tenth planet - a maverick!

This tenth world, if it had an orbit, had a strange one, for it was heading inwards from interstellar space, heading close to the Earth-Mars spaceways, upsetting astronautic calculations and raising turmoil on the two inhabited worlds.

But even so none suspected then just how much trouble this new world would make. For it was WANDL THE INVADER and it was no barren planetoid. It was a manned world, manned by minds and monsters and travelling into our system with a purpose beyond that of astronomical accident!

Wandl the Invader is the second in the Gregg Haljan series.

I Speak for Earth

'One citizen of your planet shall go to the capital of the Federation of Worlds. He shall live there for thirty days. If your representative can survive and demonstrate his ability to exist in a civilized society with creatures whose outward appearance and manner of thinking differ from his own, you will pass the test. You will be permitted to send your starships to other planets of the galaxy.

'If he fails the test, if prejudice, fear, intolerance or stupidity trip him up, then you world will be sealed of from the stars for ever!'

This was the ultimatum from space. The task before the world then was - who shall go? What man or woman could be found to take this frightening test for the whole of humanity and be certain not to fail?

Captives of the Flame

SAMUEL R. DELANY considers Captives of the Flame to be the first of a trilogy dealing with the same epoch and characters. It is, however, his second published novel, his first being The Jewels of Aptor, Ace Book F-173, which has received considerable acclaim.

A young man, resident in New York City, Delany is a prolific and talented writer, whose work in poetry and prose have won him many awards. Asked for comment on his literary ambitions, he preferred to quote one of the characters from one of his works:

"I wanted to wield together a prose luminous as twenty sets of headlights flung down a night road; I wanted my words tinged with the green of mercury vapor street lamps seen through a shaling of oak leaves in the park past midnight. I needed phrases that would break open like thunder, or leave a brush as gentle as willow boughs passed in a dark room.... The finest writing is always the finest delineation of surfaces."

The Psionic Menace

The Darkness Before Tomorrow by Robert Moore Williams. Were all humans their guinea pigs?

The Ladder in the Sky by Keith Woodcott (pseudonym for John Brunner). Black magic or unimaginable super-science?