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Armchair Fiction presents classic science fiction double novels with original illustrations. This first novel in this pairing is “Voyage into the Lightning” by heralded science fiction author Robert Moore Williams. Captain John Parker felt shipshape about life. Everything on his spaceship “The Star Girl” was running smoothly—things were pretty good. But then one day a nervous little rat of a man named Reedy approached him with an offer to buy his beloved spacecraft, and when Reedy wouldn’t tell him who the buyer was, Parker smelled a rat. Things started happening pretty quickly after that. First Reedy was murdered in Parker’s cabin while flying over Venus—a knife in the back! Then the ship’s power was mysteriously cut and the Star Girl went plummeting into the Hotlands, a region well known as the worst jungle country on Venus, infamous for its furtive Venusian tribes, and notable for its strange and dangerous lightning phenomenon. So Captain John Parker had his plate full: Who killed Reedy? Who sabotaged the Star Girl? What horror lay behind the electrical aberrations? And how would he and his crew, now stranded in the Hotlands, make their way to safety from this jungle hellhole? The second novel is from another of science fiction’s upper tier, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “The Colors of Space.” It was a week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and all that time young Bart Steele had stayed in his cabin. He was so bored with his own company that the Mentorian medic was a welcome sight when he came to prepare him for cold-sleep. The Mentorian paused, needle in hand. “Do you wish to be wakened for the week we shall spend in each of the Proxima, Sirius and Pollux systems, sir? You can, of course, be given enough drug to keep you in cold-sleep until we reach the Procyon system.” Bart felt tempted—he wanted very much to see the other star systems. But he couldn't risk meeting other passengers. The needle went into his arm. In sudden panic, he realized he was helpless. The ship would touch down on three worlds, and on any of them the Lhari might have his description, or his alias! He could be taken off, unconscious, and might never wake up! He tried to move, to protest, but he couldn't. There was a freezing moment of intense cold and then nothing…
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