It meant little to young Robert Fairlie, a serious and dedicated philologist, that in this year 1966 the United States and Soviet Russia were contentious about the Moon. He had little interest in the first two rocket landings on the moon, and the bases that the two nations had built there. He knew nothing at all of the shattering discovery that the Americans had made there.

For what had been found was of such explosive potentialities that it had to be kept top-secret—the discovery that space had already been conquered long ago by races who had once spanned the stars. So that men who had expected to spend decades in reaching the nearest planet, found suddenly in their hands the way to the wider universe.

Fairlie, drawn unexpectedly because of his special knowledge into this greatest of secrets, finds that a guarded New Mexico rocket-base is only the first step of the way. That way leads out amid the unexplored stars to the lost heartworld of those space-conquerors of long ago. And it leads Fairlie and others into the appalling reality of stellar space still haunted by the past cosmic struggle whose scale in space and time dwarfs the rivalries of tiny Earth's quarreling nations.

BEASTS, MEN . . . OR ALIENS

In that hidden valley, land of strangely forbidding beauty, Eric Nelson, soldier of fortune, faced a battle weirder and more savage than any he had ever fought.

He was hired to fight for humanity, against beings that seemed to be both more and less than human.

The weapons of the enemy included centuries-old powers of magic and superstition.. :but Nelson fought grimly, even when his mind was helplessly trapped in the body of a wolf.

Then came the climactic test of his allegiance, the knowledge that more than just humanity was at stake... and the final mind-shattering discovery of the alien secret that lay buried in the Cavern of Creation!

Here is a masterpiece of sword-and-sorcery that belongs on your shelves next to those of Burroughs, Eddison, and R. E. Howard.

Kirk Hammond was a man alone.

He had been chosen to ride in the first manned satellite to go out around the Moon and back to Earth. But when the satellite failed to orbit properly, it went on past the Moon into the vastness of outer space, and a whole world watched helplessly as he was borne toward an unthinkably lonely death.

Yet destiny decreed that Kirk Hammond should suffer, not death but a pseudo-death. And he awoke from it to find that a hundred centuries had passed and that the space age which had begun in the 20th Century had now grown into a vast galactic civilization that had carried the sons of Earth to countless stars and worlds. But, unexpectedly, the conquest of space had changed Man himself, and the human race had become not one but several species.

Hammond was plunged into the climactic struggle between the new races. And in his quest with a desperate band for the mysterious Star of Life that was the key to the struggle, in his relations with the strange and beautiful Thayn Marden who was not a human woman, in his odyssey through the mighty suns and earthly worlds of the galaxy, a man of the 20th Century found himself facing the dangers of the great space age which he himself helped pioneer.

Then the Sky Split Open

One moment Kenniston was strolling down the quiet street, lost in pleasant reverie. The next moment the sky split open!

It split wide open, and above them was a bum and a blaze of light—so swift, so violent, that the air itself seemed to have burst into flame.

Then there was silence—awful, suffocating silence.

Kenniston felt the chill of premonition—a shapeless terror that grew into a thing too evil to be borne alone.

THIS NOVEL DESCRIBES THE SHOCKING EXPERIENCE OF A GROUP OF ORDINARY PEOPLE, CATAPULTED BY A MYSTERIOUS EXPLOSION INTO THE TERRIFYINGLY STRANGE WORLD OF A MILLION YEARS HENCE. IT IS NOT A PROPHECY-BUT A WARNING!

The sun shone brightly on this fateful morning, bringing to its planets warmth and life-giving rays. The brightness increased sharply as the morning grew older. The glare was blinding; the radiation not life-giving, but deadly. By mid-afternoon the brilliant, intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence.

Someone had fund a way to poison a star!

And someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover—or destruction—of the entire universe. Who Johnny Kettrick, as improbable a hero there never was. Johnny Kettrick who was banned from the Cluster World for his not-too-honest dealings was sent back there with his three equally unholy partners to search out the Doomstar . . . to find the Doomstar before it burned out another world.

We stood petrified by horror in that foggy, stonewalled corridor, gazing cataleptically at the hideous creature whose reptilian head was rearing up from the curling white mists. Freya's slim figure had shrunk against me with a choking cry. Frey stood in front of us, his sword raised, his face wild as he looked up at the looming head.

The hideous, abnormally huge coils could only be glimpsed in the mists beyond. But the giant spade-shaped head that hung above us was clear to our appalled vision. The enormous, opaline eyes were brilliant as they stared down at us.

"The Midgard snake!" Frey whispered.

"Jarl Keith!" Freya screamed to me.

The great head of the snake Iormungandr abruptly darted toward us.

A CROWN FOR THE STAR-CROSSED

"It can't be true! It must be some kind of hoax!" These were the words that went spinning through Neil Banning's mind when the Greenville authorities told him that the house he had grown up in, the aunt and uncle who had raised him, had never existed.

So Banning found himself in jail, charged with disturbing the peace—and maybe insanity. But when a stranger from outer space came to his cell at midnight and hailed him as the Valkar of Katuun, then Banning decided that maybe the authorities were right, maybe he was crazy. Because the only alternative was to believe the impossible explanation of the Outworlder—that he really was the exiled ruler of a remote star-world, and the personality of Neil Banning was an elaborate fraud.

It didn't really matter, though, who was right. Banning was on his way to Katuun whether he liked it or not. And as Banning—or the Valkar—he would have to save that star-world from the terror of THE SUN SMASHER . . . or perish with the loyal subjects he might never even have known!

WANTED: ONE OUTLAWED SPACE PILOT!

Home, the spaceship's pilot, had been warned. "Don't forget the meteor swarm." And Home's directional calculations for the Vega Queen's course took that advice into account; the spaceship would go fifteen thousand miles out of its way to avoid those deadly celestial rocks.

But when Home went off duty, he felt himself numbed by a curious druglike leadenness. And the next thing he knew, he was in a lifeboat, speeding away from the floating wreckage of the Vega Queen.

Eighteen survivors out of one hundred and fifty-three passengers. And each one in the tiny space shell believed Home responsible . . . deliberate negligence, calculated destruction. . . .

Someone had drugged Home, he knew; someone had tampered with the ship to alter its course. But who And for what cosmic purpose