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On June 1st 1963 Donald Bailey set out on a hiking tour. For twelve days it was mountain and lakes, rivers and fells, healthy exercise and the magic of a starlit campfire. On the thirteenth day they found a cave and decided to explore. A rock fall cut off the entrance and they searched desperately for another way out. Exhausted and battered, they finally scrambled through a small shaft into a strangely changed countryside which was familiar, yet not familiar.

From a cottager who fed them and tended their wounds they learnt that somehow they were back in the days of the Civil War. Roundheads and Cavaliers battled desperately across the country and they found themselves involved in the bitter struggle for power.

Unwittingly they gave information to a Roundhead spy, which resulted in the death of a Cavalier Commander. He returns from the dead in monstrous form, trying to exact a terrible vengeance on the bewildered pair who are desperately seeking to return to their own time.

Valli had always lived for the Dance. She expressed her very soul through the sinuous, mystic movements that were as old as the East itself. Like all true artists she was a perfectionist. Her mind, as lithe as her body, was always searching for new material. At last she discovered a temple, old and deserted, hidden by Time and the mysterious, impenetrable jungle. In the temple she saw a series of carvings depicting an ancient sacred dance. It was a dance such as she had never imagined possible. Slowly at first and then with increasing speed she began to copy the movements recorded so faithfully by the timeless stone.

A strange feeling possessed her as the rhythm of the ancient dance obsessed her whole being. Dark beings of terrifying supernatural aspect glided from the crumbling walls an joined in the ancient rhythm.

Not until it was too late did Valli realise that the Forbidden Dance had resurrected forces of cosmic evil which had been sleeping in the lost temple.

Psychic investigators have long been intrigued by the question of the existence of Elemental Spirits. Is it possible that Beings of incredible age wander unseen through the wild, lonely deserts, and drift above the peaks of barren, desolate mountains? Is there any connection between such speculation and the legends of ancient mythology? Could it be that the djinn and devas of India are only other interpretations of the same inexplicable phenomena?

Man feels that he has progressed beyond magic and even the most rational of civilised religions are undergoing periods of theological revolution and fundamental re-appraisal in the mid-60s.

But what if an Elemental Spirit invaded the safety and comfort of everyday life? What if something over than mankind burst like a tornado into the security of ordered human society? Could the logic and science of the Twentieth Century defeat the terrifying power of a thing which was alive yet not alive, dead yet undying?

They were trying out a new drive when a cosmic accident took them incalculable light years off course. A miracle of courage and astrogation meant than there were some survivors from the inevitable crash. The ship itself did not escape unscathed. What had been their vehicle became their prison. The buckled lock could not be opened from the inside and they had no other means of getting free. The air was slowly running out.

The planet they had hit was raw and primitive by their own standards, but it did hold intelligent life. One of the natives found the ship. Dare the trapped space travellers hope for a miracle? If they go out what kind of strange life forms would they be involved with? Could they hope to find the kind of raw materials which would get their crippled ship into space again? If not, could they face life sentences on this strange, unknown, primitive world . . . ?

Faced by a thousand fantastic difficulties the astronauts battled untiringly for their right to survive.

A strange new race of modified men had fantastic powers and a kind of immortality. But something the human touch itself had been lost, and in consequence a terrible barrier grew. It looked as if a cataclysmic war would be inevitable.

‘The Night Walker’ began as an ordinary country legend. No two stories agreed on the details and Paul Donovan’s attempts to sift out the facts seemed doomed to failure. He was on the verge of omitting it from his new series of articles on East Anglian Folklore when a sudden, sinister coincidence brought the old story sharply back into focus. An eccentric old wildfowler was taken to hospital where he babbled incoherently about “the man in the stove-pipe hat” before dying of inexplicable injuries. Donovan restarted his enquiries and found an unexpectedly determined ally in Shelia Morrison, an outcast from her village, who had been befriended by the dead wildfowler. together they hunted for intangible clues across the lonely reed beds and slow mysterious rivers of Broadland – the areas holiday-makers rarely see. Piece by piece the puzzle fitted together to reveal a chain of horror linking the past and present…connecting the mid-1960s with the ghoulish outbreak of body-snatching at the start of the Nineteenth Century. Not all the victims had gone for medical research…

‘The Night Walker’ is abroad again and fear treads beside him.

Legends of the living dead have filled the pages of mythology since time immemorial. If ninety-nine point nine percent of the stories can be explained as hallucinations, tricks of the light, moving shadows or sheer imagination, a hard core of disquieting fact remains.

The vampire lives in the minds of men. When was it born? Perhaps in the dim distance of the remote past when the racial subconscious was being moulded. What keeps the vampire tradition alive in the mind of modern man? The two tiny words of “what if…?”

Leroy Thompson met a girl in a dark country lane. He offered her a lift. He met her again and again, but always by night. Then he looked in the driving mirror and saw only his own reflection… She cast no shadow in the headlights… She screamed and leapt from the car before he reached a bridge that crossed a moonlit stream… What if?

Thursday began as an ordinary day as far as Estelle was concerned. Breakfast… Tube… Office… Lunch… And then the sane, sane, simple everyday world began to fade. One moment she was walking along the pleasant tree-lined familiarity of her home town… the next she was involved in a strange translucent sphere and life had turned into a nightmare.
Without warning and without explanation she found herself alone in a strange new environment. There were strange stars in the unknown sky above her and the flora and fauna of her new surroundings were disturbingly unfamiliar. Most minds would have yielded to the easy escape of insanity. But Estelle Wilde was made of sterner stuff. She fought back at the strangeness of her new setting and tried desperately to establish a new set of survival data before it was too late.
Piece by piece she collected her information and sat down to the mammoth task of answering the great questions. Where was she? How had she been brought there? And why?
Above all… was it possible to get home?

Life at the Station had ceased to hold any drama. The only enemies were boredom – a psychic inertia – and the innate weakness of the human element. Reading and samplings, data analysis and stereotyped daily radio reporting filed the long bleak hours.

Suddenly they lost all contact with the outside. No radio…No television…No physical contact with patrolling ships…Nothing… Their universe had contracted until life was bounded by the beryllium alloy fuselage of the Station.

Martia, the assistant astro-physicist, woke from a strangely deep sleep to find herself unable to get out of her cabin. None of the others could reach her… When the door was finally cut away Martia had vanished.

One by one other crew members and scientific personnel disappeared until Kersh, the radio-operator, found himself alone on the vast echoing station…

Along with progress in other spheres, criminology and remedial treatment for the socially unacceptable will undoubtedly make rapid strides in the Twenty-second and Twenty-third centuries.
Purely retributive justice is not a satisfactory answer to the enlightened Welfare Officer of the Future. Psychiatry, criminology and electronic mind control could combine into an entirely new concept of reclamation. In the right hands this would be an advance into something close to Utopia – in the wrong it would be leave 1984 looking like a pleasant week-end in the country.
This thoughtful new novel is a daring attempt to handle the deliucate theme of advanced criminology and the unresolved conflict of Society versus those who will not or cannot conform. Try as they will to be impersonal and humane, the psychiatrists of the future – even with electronic aids – will be as human as we are today. Their problems will be ours…

Helen Powell was a punch card operator in the test office of Elcomp, the largest and most dynamically progressive computer manufacturing company in the West. A saboteur, acting for a totalitarian regime, eluded the security network and attempted to destroy the new top secret Mark IX, the greatest computer Elcomp had ever constructed. Unfortunately for the saboteur, the Mark IX had inbuilt defence mechanisms and the secret agent died in a holocaust of high voltage sparks.

From that time onwards Helen began to notice strange changes in the great electronic thinking machine. It seemed to her that the Mark IX was developing something which might almost have been described as a personality. She tried to dismiss the thoughts as imagination . . . then the face appeared . . . if it was a face!

Helen saw an image on the computer’s main screen. It was a face, yet not a human face in the accepted sense. The most horrible thing about it was the resemblance it bore to the dead agent.

Humanity played with fire once too often. It was atomic fire and its ravages produced an almost complete annihilation, but there were survivors. The radiations had not been entirely malevolent in their influence. Genes and chromosomes danced like dervishes in the gamma bombardments, and settled back into fantastic new patterns. God-like beings strode proudly athwart the devastation. Half-human demons lurked in the shadowy ruins. The twilight of humanity faded into a new heroic epoch, behind which the forbidden secrets of the ancient atom gods bided their time…

Everything was ordinary. Men worked in factories and fields. Women were shopping. Children were at school. Then came the four-minute warning. Wires hummed madly between heads of governments. Just before the massive retaliation went into the air the world realised that no-one had despatched the first rocket.

The retaliation was checked with seconds to spare. Experts examined the ruined city. There was something else besides radiation. Deadly bacteria from an unknown source spread across the planet. More alien bombs followed the first. But there was no real pattern in the attacks, if they were genuine attacks.

At last the detectors found the alien ships. They were fighting among themselves and earth was the battle-area. Could the remnants of humanity interfere? What would be the result if they did?

Unless life itself is a pathetic cosmic accident, man cannot be the only intelligence in the universe. It is unlikely that man is the highest intelligence. Compared to other planetary systems, our solar system is quite young. Its raw materials have barely been touched. If older intelligences wanted those raw materials only the primitive mind of man would stand in their way. Our so-called defences would perhaps aid the aliens more than aided us…
Ken Andrews was a research worker in electronics. He had a sensitive mind and a vivid imagination. When he has a strange experience with the radar-screen his chief said he had been overworking. His doctor explained it as hallucination, but the so-called delusion persisted. If Ken Andrews was sane his world was in danger…. If he really was in communion with an alien intelligence, could that alien intelligence be trusted? The intriguing thought behind this story is that it could be true. It could happen today or tomorrow …. It might even have happened a few minutes ago in a top-secret research station somewhere in England…

Mike Sterne was a man with problems. His environment included an unknown quantity in the form of an eccentric alien scientist and a determined corps of totalitarian militia with orders to liquidate him.
A rigidly imposed authoritarian social structure can only be undermined by a superior ideology. Sterne encountered that ideology on the other side of an electronic gateway through the X dimensions, a gateway to the infinite universe of the microcosm and the macrocosm.
His enemies also discovered a route through the continuum… but they didn’t reach the same world that Sterne had found.

Man is an intelligent mammal. His intelligence lies in his brain. In mammals the tissues of the central nervous system are irreplaceable. The human brain contains something like 100,000,000,000,000 neurons, but 100,000 are destroyed on average each day of a man’s life. Cosmic rays and general internal and external radioactivity account for most of this destruction.

Hunger and Gradey decided on an illegal experiment. They brought up a small group of children in a strange artificial setting where there was practically no radiation. The setting was improved. The environment grew more shielded as generations passed. At last the Thinkers exploded into a world that had not dreamed of their existence. The world was facing other complications at the moment. An alien had appeared from the other side of the cosmos! Humanity was faced with two potentially deadly enemies; could they be turned against each other, or was one a secret friend?

Alexander Blish was the security chief at Tomloy’s, the new nuclear physics research centre. They were doing things in the plant that had never been done before. They were tapping power sources so terrible that their ultimate conclusions could be heaven on earth or a hell of destruction. Armageddon might be just around the dangerous corner which humanity called tomorrow.

Blish had problems. There were alien forces to consider. There were human traitors who were prepared to sell out the Empire if the price was right. The price could be as high as planetary control.

Wilkie Gordon was Alexander’s second problem. Wilkie was an outworlder with strange wild talents. He could be an invaluable ally or a deadly enemy. Blish had to decide and decide at once. If he made the wrong choice there was just a chance that Gordon could detect the aliens and renegades before they reached the J-Pile…

Dakos was an alien humanoid who hated earth; he detested the planet; its people were anathema to him. He loathed its cities; its countryside was an abomination to him. He lived for one thing only… the destruction of the world which had rejected him.
Dakos was no mean enemy. His hatred was allied to a brilliant mind and a very superior technology. He was a man of action… highly destructive action!
Security agents Blanthus and Croberg were after him, but Dakos covered his tracks with all the cunning of a diabolically clever homicidal maniac.
He could so easily pass as a terrestrial humanoid.
…Are you sure that man sitting beside you in the bus isn’t the alien? What’s in that case?
His clothes? His lunch? His business documents? Or an alien bomb?
This is the story of a world reeling from a war of nerves with a sinister secret enemy.

Rudolf Mallory was one of the many pathetic pieces of human flotsam on the tide of the 20th-century neurosis. He was a man who had reached the end of his rope, death seemed pleasant by comparison… He tried to take the easy way out, but something went wrong. Unknown to Mallory other men had problems too. Separated by vast distances of time and space, Rumal, citizen of an advanced humanoid society, with a strangely different technology had also decided to end it all…

Time and Space are almost perfect but rare warps and blemishes do exist in the continuum. They can produce peculiar events.

The Englishman from 1963 suddenly found himself on the other side of the galaxy. Rumal found himself in England. They had been unable to solve their own problems – could they solve each other’s?

In the realm of science things are often far from what they seem. In the science of sociology this is truest of all. Those who seem to control human affairs may only be figure-heads. The real power lies in unsuspected places…sinister…alien…

Mervyn Wayne called at the offices of an apparently normal, respectable, old-established city firm and overheard intrigue of nightmare quality. He found himself a fugitive from an organisation whose ramifications extended everywhere.

Society was being master-minded by someone, or something, so irresistibly powerful that Mervyn’s first reaction was hopeless fear. Gradually, however, he learnt how to distinguish allies from organisation men and began building a counter-group of his own.

After being sent to the planet from which no one had returned and was guarded by barrier rays, Mac is able to return. But the rays had affected him and made him wish that death had been swift as the unknown menace began to spread.

Alex was a pioneer. Like all pioneers he had problems. He had more problems than most; when things start to go wrong in space they go wrong in a big way. One by one the perils of the void took their toll of his companions. Alex was alone, alone with a vision, the vision of a town, home.

Only thoughts of home kept him alive. He remembered trees, houses, shops, churches, peoples…above all people. At last he reached earth…or perhaps it wasn’t earth? Things had changed unbelievably. Perhaps he had changed. How long had he been away? How far had he drifted? There was a sinister possibility that this wasn’t home at all. If the things that looked like people weren’t people but aliens, what was he to do?

Alex was a realist. He knew what space could do to a man’s mind. He was disinclined to trust the evidence of his own senses. A mine that has had far more than it can take can produce from very peculiar perceptions…

The engines died first, then the ship. Hope died. Men lived on. Then men died one by one… Accidents… quarrels… illness… age. One man remained. One man sat in the quietness of the drifting ship and wondered why Death didn’t want him.
The Others found the incredible derelict and approached her cautiously. The last spaceman watched them come and went to greet them. He was too old and tired to have any emotions left. Then they went to work on him. One by one his feelings came to life again. He took an interest in the New World on which he found himself. There was something strangely worrying about the planet. Things looked vaguely reminiscent of other things from long ago… A mountain range reminded him of Earth. A vast stretch of water looked like an ocean he had once crossed. Could the impossible have happened?
Could the incredible be reality?

Tharnos, assistant to the High Priest of the Holy Mysteries at Karnak was disturbed when strange alternation appeared in the ritual. Was it Kakos the silent High Priest who was introducing these dark ceremonies….? If not was there a presence from Beyond lurking in the shadows of the great temple?
A dying slave warned Tharnos of the plot that was being launched against him . . . Too late! There were other victims waiting in the secret cells below the temple; a retired Roman Centurion; a giant Nubian; a Greek mariner with the cunning of Odysseus.
Only the sacred Temple Virgin could help them to escape. If she would help them, there was a slim chance that the Dark Powers could be held in check…. If not… the world was threatened with an Aeon of darkness such as it had never witnessed before.