Astounding Stories #152

In the 1980s, off the Pacific Coast, the Heli-Carrier Fury and Jimmy Woo crash-land on a remote volcanic island where a reclusive scientist named Centurius has turned paradise into a living laboratory. Now wielding godlike power over resurrected and invented life, Centurius aims to cleanse the world with a firestorm—forty days and nights of flame. With the help of a visiting film crew and their surprisingly useful robot gorilla prop, Fury and Woo must stop him before the countdown to apocalypse begins.

In "Sorry, Wrong Planet," an alien dispatched to colonize Earth makes a fateful mistake when he asks a passing stranger if he’s on Earth—only to be met with a dry "No, it's Mars." The alien takes the reply at face value, vanishes, and soon after, scientists on Earth spot colonization efforts unfolding on Mars. Written by an unknown author and illustrated by an unknown artist, this brief, clever tale turns cosmic miscommunication into a quiet, perfectly timed punchline.

In "Witch Who Wouldn't!" from Astounding Stories #152 (1980), Ben Talbot raises an infant he finds in the New England woods, only to face a chilling reckoning when she grows into a woman who refuses his love and his ambitions. As her true nature awakens and time bends against him, Jo—once a child of the wilds—becomes something ancient and terrible, returning to the forest where her fate unfolds in silence and shadow.