Speculate for a moment on the enormous challenge to archaeology when interplanetary travel is possible . . . and relics are found of a race extinct for half a million years! A race that was so far in advance of ours that they held the secret of life restoration! What happens when a member of that race is brought back after 500,000 years of death . . .

That night the comet was the only thing in the whole sky. All the stars were smothered by the light of its copper-yellow flame, and, although the sun had set two hours ago, the Earth was lit as with the glow of a thunderous dawn.

In Mayfield, Ken Maddox walked slowly along Main Street, avoiding collisions with other people whose eyes were fixed on the object in the sky. Ken had spent scores of hours observing the comet carefully, both by naked eye and with his 12-inch reflecting telescope. Still he could not keep from watching it as he picked his way along the street toward the post office.

The comet had been approaching Earth for months, growing steadily tobigger proportions in the sky, but tonight was a very special night, and Mayfield was watching with increased awe and half-dread -- as were hundreds of thousands of other communities around the world.

Tonight, the Earth entered the comet's tail, and during the coming winter would be swept continuously by its million-mile spread.

Mayfield was a typical small town in rural America. Nothing much ever happened there. Then, one day, cars stopped working, the bearings seized and pistons welded to the cylinder walls. Generators stopped working. The railroads ceased to run. Bit by bit the trappings of civilization no longer functioned. Was it a new additive in the gasoline? Or was it something brought on by the strange comet that hung ominously in the sky? Whatever it was, the citizens of Mayfield knew that life would never be the same after The Year When Stardust Fell

Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic science fiction double novels. The first novel "Outpost Infinity" is a terrific tale by Raymond F. Jones. The Tantalus Express was a top-of-the-line passenger ship, carrying her travelers incredible distances amounting to thousands of light years. But tonight she was overdue-late by a meager six minutes. Yet those back on Earth knew that even being a few seconds late spelled disaster for the 2500 passengers and crew. They knew the Express was lost somewhere in an unknown realm that even the most brilliant scientists could only conceive of in abstract theoretical terms. And now, adrift in the terrible grayness beyond the universe, the passengers and crew of the Express waited hopelessly for death...while Carl Mayhew, the only man who could aid them, plunged ever deeper into the multiplying coils of outer darkness-where every road leads away from safe, normal Earth, toward-Outpost Infinity The second novel is "The White Invaders" by master science fiction writer, Ray Cummings. It was an invasion from another dimension. When a young boy told Don Livingston that he'd seen what he thought was a ghost, Don could only chuckle at the young man, to whom he gave assurances that ghosts were far from real. However, to prove the boy wrong, and perhaps even out of a strangely compelling sense of curiosity, Livingston and one of his pals checked out the distant hill where the boy had seen his apparition. The boy had described it as "a ghost that had floated toward him and passed through a rock." Livingston, with shotgun in hand, soon discovered he wasn't dealing with a ghost. Nor was it a wild animal. Much to his amazement Don Livingston discovered that he was facing the very real threat of an invasion from another realm-the fourth dimension. They came to be known as "the White Invaders," and every human on Earth was faced with extermination if they weren't stopped.

Raymond F. Jones is perhaps best known for his novel This Island Earth, which was made into a movie of the same name. However, from the 40's to the 60's he wrote numerous short stories and novellas dealing with aliens and alien worlds and their affects on humans. This collection brings back nine of his magazine works in Raymond F. Jones Resurrected. Stories include: - Correspondence Course - Tools of the Trade - Noise Level - The Colonists - The Unlearned - Cubs of the Wolf - Human Error - The Memory of Mars - The Great Gray Plague - Special Preview: The Blood Red Sands of Mars - by Greg Fowlkes