Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #29

A tourist visiting the ghost town of Archer's Gulch takes a tumble and awakens in the Old West itself—caught in the rough-and-tumble world of Black Joe and Swifty Moore, two partners on the brink of a deadly reckoning over gold. Armed only with his camera, Melvin Beebs finds himself an unwilling guest of the saloon, forced to dance, drink, and witness a gunfight that history says ended in mystery. When he comes to back in the present day, the photographs he developed suggest his dream may have been far more real than anyone would believe.

A watchman's routine inspection of the Crandall family mausoleum takes an unsettling turn when he encounters Mr. Crandall testing the crypt's lock—the very night the newspaper announces that John Crandall has just died of a heart attack and his body is being shipped for burial in that same vault. The watchman's shock says everything about what he's stumbled onto during his midnight rounds.

When Captain Dave Simmons encounters Colonel Sergi Slobov on the Moon in 1962, their ideological sparring quickly turns physical—but what begins as a clash between American and Soviet rivals takes an unexpected turn. After the heated confrontation, Simmons discovers his prisoner has vanished, only to find him stowed away aboard his ship during the journey back to Earth, with a surprising request that changes everything.

Charley Brooks is a habitual survivor of catastrophic floods and disasters—a man so desperate to escape water that he retreats to the driest desert on Earth, only to strike an underground spring while prospecting for gold. When a water truck accident leaves him hospitalized with mysterious injuries, the doctors make a startling discovery about what Charley really is, forcing him to confront the truth he's been running from all along.

Space Patrolman Keith Rimmon investigates an unidentified ship in a distant galaxy when his vessel is suddenly pulled into the gravitational field of an unknown planet three times Earth's size. Captured by a world of women led by the giant King Darrog, Rimmon discovers that the strange food he's given causes him to grow to their size—trapping him on a world he can never escape. As he realizes he's become one of them, Rimmon must accept that his old life among the stars is truly behind him.

A spoiled boy named Howard receives an ant colony as a gift and amuses himself by tormenting the creatures—until a vivid dream transports him to their world, where he's put to work as a prisoner forced to repair the very damage he caused. What begins as childish mischief becomes a reckoning as Howard experiences the ants' world from their perspective and learns what genuine labor and discipline actually mean.