Uncanny Tales #169

Martin Hayward and his wife Carla have built a lucrative career giving flying saucer lectures with fabricated tales of a trip to Venus—until two mysterious visitors claim to be actual Venusians and offer to take them on a genuine voyage to prove it. What begins as what Martin and Carla assume is an elaborate prank becomes something far more extraordinary, forcing the couple to reckon with the consequences of their deception in the most unexpected way.

Two Martian adventurers, Bendar and Torgu, embark on humanity's first perfected spacecraft with a high-stakes wager: does life exist on Venus? As the explorers journey through space, the planet below teeters on the brink of catastrophic war between two rival nations, with desperate citizens hoping an outsider might somehow prevent disaster. When Bendar and Torgu finally pierce Venus's shrouded clouds and survey the world below, they'll discover whether the wager holds or if something far more complex awaits them.

A young boy crafts a homemade microscope from spare lenses, only to unwittingly create something far more powerful—a burning glass that draws the attention of microscopic germs plotting their own ambitions. When the boy's invention becomes a threat far beyond what his father realizes, a narrow escape teaches a hard lesson about unintended consequences.

Abner Foster schemes to build a fake oddity at his struggling resort motel to draw tourists, enlisting sculptor Milo Valdo to carve an attraction from the local granite—but the unsettling monument Valdo creates has the opposite effect, terrifying guests and emptying the property. When a mysterious force whisks the original sculpture skyward and replaces it with a beautiful statue, Foster's fortunes change overnight, though he's left wondering what really happened that strange evening.

A meek London clerk named Marty spends his days lost in elaborate fantasies—swashbuckling adventures, daring rescues, space exploration—where he's the heroic figure his mundane life could never make him. When a street accident lands him in a doctor's office that mirrors the one from his recurring dreams, Marty finds himself on the threshold of the very transformation he's always imagined, only to discover that reality and fantasy don't align quite the way he'd hoped.

When the brilliant Dr. Van Poel establishes a miraculous medical machine in the small Dutch town of Zeydam, it promises to diagnose and cure every human ailment with inhuman precision—but young Dr. Pieter Remmens grows increasingly suspicious as community leaders who question the machine begin dying one by one. As Pieter races to expose the truth before the machine's influence becomes absolute, he discovers a horrifying revelation that shatters everything he believed about his rival's creation.

Igor Marlin, a power-mad schemer imprisoned for attempting to assassinate Premier Vertos, discovers a scientist's time-travel device and seizes it to journey back to the night his assassination plot failed—determined to succeed where a snapped twig once stopped him. Armed with foreknowledge of his past mistakes, Igor believes he can finally eliminate Vertos and seize control, but fate has other plans in this 1985 tale from Uncanny Tales.