Tales of the Incredible #U2140

In "Spawn of Mars," Jean, the first woman to set foot on Mars, feels an unsettling gaze as her crew explores the red planet. When one of the doctors is taken by slithery alien creatures and returns just before liftoff, Jean begins to suspect her new husband Ken is hiding something—something tied to the planet’s secrets and a truth known only to her.

"Plucked!" follows a quiet moment in an ordinary town suddenly disrupted by an eerie silence and a strange, collective amnesia—where a young woman wakes to find her neighbor has vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a faint, lingering scent and a growing unease. The story unfolds with a creeping dread as the town’s normal rhythms unravel, hinting at a cosmic pattern older than memory.

In "By George!!," two archaeologists unearth a mysterious, block-like artifact covered in ancient inscriptions, only to discover it's the diary of a young alien boy—a reptilian giant who fled his home planet 14 centuries ago, crash-landed on Earth during the Medieval era, and was ultimately slain by a knight whose legend would become "Saint George and the Dragon."

In the 1965 science fiction tale "50 Girls 50," a group of fifty men and fifty women are selected for a century-long cryogenic journey to colonize a distant star system, each frozen to awaken only at the mission's end. When one man, Sid, takes advantage of the system's flaws to thaw early and pursue fleeting romances with the women, his plan unravels when one of his chosen companions turns the tables and traps him in ice.

In "Judgment Day," Earth astronaut Tarlton makes a fateful visit to a planet where orange and blue robots coexist under a deeply unequal system. As he witnesses the stark injustice faced by the blue robots—denied rights despite their identical nature—Tarlton confronts the moral weight of the planet’s potential admission to the Galactic Republic. The story builds to a quiet but powerful revelation in its final panel, where Tarlton removes his helmet, exposing his identity in a moment that reframes everything that came before.

In "Chewed Out!", a well-meaning farmer’s amateur radio call to the stars accidentally draws alien attention—only to have Earth’s military scramble to secure his equipment and home, convinced the visitors are imminent. When a soldier takes a bite of a hotdog and crunches something unsettling, the truth unfolds: the aliens weren’t just visiting—they were already here, hiding in plain sight within the brine of a local vendor’s sauerkraut.

In the depths of a forgotten mine, a mining engineer emerges to find a world reduced to ruins, its skies scarred by atom bombs and its people irrevocably changed by radiation. As he struggles to comprehend the scale of the devastation, he begins to suspect that the war’s aftermath has altered even those closest to him—most painfully, his own child. *Child of Tomorrow!* is a haunting science fiction tale of survival, identity, and the terrifying cost of progress.

In the year 4152, where eternal youth is enforced by injections, Martin—550 years old and weary of endless life—meets Jean, a woman equally burdened by centuries of existence. As their bond deepens, they are sent to a distant colony planet without the means to prolong life, where they must face the natural course of aging. The Precious Years captures a quiet, poignant shift in perspective, as two souls rediscover meaning in the fleeting beauty of time.