Adventures into the Unknown #87

Henry Winston, a middle-aged stock broker with a twenty-year passion for collecting crystal, discovers that three identical antique crystal balls possess a remarkable power—at midnight, they glow and form a pyramid of light that reveals images of upcoming events. As Henry and his brother Elliot learn to interpret these visions, the crystals predict a financial fraud that saves Henry a small fortune, and then show him the face of a woman from his past; when Carole Harrison unexpectedly visits his office the next day, Henry realizes the crystals may be guiding him toward something far more personal than profit.

A man decides to attend a Halloween costume party as a space man from the planet Korendor—only to have his elaborate joke taken at face value by a real alien astronomer. When Phreno and his wife Lanly are abducted by Rekkchuff, chief of espionage for the planet Modalion, they find themselves caught between their desperate attempts to convince their captors they're just ordinary Earthlings and a sinister alien plot that hinges on believing them to be exactly what the masquerade claims. With only their wits and the cold courage to maintain the charade, they'll have to navigate a deadly web of mistaken identity to stop a conquest of Earth itself.

Ben Harrow, a government scientist who's developed a nerve gas that turns people into obedient automatons, dreams of using his discovery to create a perfect society ruled by the wise—until he takes a wrong turn down a mysterious tunnel and finds himself enslaved in ancient Egypt, forced to labor on the pyramids. Desperate to escape a sacrificial fate, he makes a harrowing bid for freedom, only to realize something troubling about the world he's stumbled into. A cautionary tale about the seductive appeal of absolute control and what utopia might really cost.

Howard Foxx, an ear specialist, takes on a young patient named Larry Carlyle who faces progressive deafness—but finds unexpected inspiration in Beethoven's example to pursue music anyway. As Larry's talent flourishes in his final months, a shocking discovery emerges when his compositions are compared to the master composer's original manuscripts, leaving Foxx confronted with an inexplicable mystery that will haunt him forever.