Weird Fantasy #9

In "Spawn of Mars," Jean—on the cusp of making history as the first woman to walk on Mars—finds her excitement tinged with unease as strange eyes seem to follow her from the shadows. When a crew member is taken by serpentine alien beings and returns with unsettling changes, Jean begins to unravel a secret known only to her husband, Ken, that threatens to upend everything she thought she knew.

In "The Duplicates," two scientists, each smitten with the same woman, Dora, turn to a duplicating machine to solve their dilemma—only to find their perfect solution quickly spirals into something far more complicated. As they each marry a copy of Dora, the experiment’s unintended consequences begin to show, with the copies aging at an alarming rate.

In "The Connection," a middle-aged scientist rents a basement from a young woman, using the space to build a time machine. As their lives intertwine, she shares a childhood memory of finding an old man hiding in her basement—memory that grows more haunting as the scientist’s experiments begin to unravel time itself. When love and obsession collide, his desperate attempt to change his age spirals into something far stranger, leading him to a moment where past and present blur in a single, chilling discovery.

In "A Mistake in Multiplication," a crew of spacemen stumbles upon a derelict vessel holding alien creatures in suspended animation, only to set off a chain of events that spirals beyond control when the creatures begin multiplying uncontrollably. What starts as a scientific curiosity quickly turns into a desperate struggle as the aliens—revealed to reproduce asexually—escape containment and begin overwhelming Earth.