Astounding Stories #82

When Flight 101 takes off for Chile with perfect conditions and clear skies, no one aboard suspects the impossible mystery waiting at its destination. The plane lands on schedule, but when officials finally breach the sealed cabin, they find it completely empty—passengers, crew, and all—with no parachutes deployed and no explanation in sight. A baffling vanishing act that has never been solved, told in the pages of Astounding Stories.

In "Portrait of Father," Elgin Manley reaches across the veil in a dream, speaking to his son Marc through the painted eyes of his portrait—revealing the chilling truth behind his own murder at the hands of Jerome Courtny. A haunting, intimate moment unfolds in the quiet of a son’s sleep, where memory and loss blur in a single, unforgettable confession.

When Peter Kraft wakes up as a ghost in Nemesis's care, the supernatural detective discovers something impossible: the young man's name isn't even in the Book of Death, and his body still bleeds. After reuniting Peter with his grandmother and his mysteriously revived body, Nemesis takes a well-earned vacation—but a psychic vision warns him that Peter faces mortal danger, forcing the ghost detective back into action to uncover who's behind the attacks. With clues pointing to Peter's inherited circus and amusement park, Nemesis and a mortal detective devise a risky plan to draw the killers out of hiding.

Eugene Latour, last survivor of an ancient French family with command over natural forces, has abandoned his ancestral magic to become a stage illusionist in 1908 Paris—only to find himself conscripted into the trenches of World War I. Wounded and stripped of his memory in no man's land, Eugene discovers his dormant powers awakening when American soldiers pinned down by German tanks face certain death. As his instinctive magic responds to his desperate will to help, Eugene learns whether the gift his bloodline has guarded for centuries can turn the tide of modern warfare.

Bull Morgan feels certain he knows what's best for the town of Mayville—and he's determined to expose a young stranger living on the Sanford farm, convinced the boy is a threat because he's from Mercury. But when Morgan pushes his campaign to drive the Mercurian youth away, he discovers that some in town have far different ideas about who belongs and who deserves a home.

When H. Rider Haggard wakes from a vivid nightmare about his dog Bob, he becomes convinced the dream foretold something real—and his worst fears are confirmed when the dog vanishes and is found dead by the railroad tracks, exactly as the dream depicted. A chilling tale of premonition that suggests some visions from the sleep may carry more truth than waking reason would allow.