Writer: Gardner Fox

Penciller: Sid Greene

Inker: Sid Greene

Synopsis: On a remote planet, Rick Purvis waits for Homer Glint and Karel Sorensen, who were supposed to meet him in order to share adventure stories. He soon sees two strange spaceships land and prepares for trouble. An old man emerges from the first ship and tells Rick not to shoot, since he's Homer, and a teenaged girl comes from the second one, identifying herself as Karel. They tell Rick that something happened to them on the planet Kolunn, and that Rick would have to save Earth. Rick tells them to tell him what happened. Karel tells him that she was on Kolunn, shooting at flower-targets that fly around at odd angles and shoot back at anyone who shoots them. She hhad hit one, but it shot at her as it was falling to the ground. She ran from it and found her feet getting stuck in a sticky substance on the ground, but she forced herself to keep on moving, and found, to her pleasant surprise, that the substance actually allowed her to jump farther than before it was on her feet. When the flower finally fell, she picked it up and brought it to her ship, but she was ambushed by lizard-like natives of that planet and taken to a laboratory. The lizard-men told her that they intended to conquer Earth by using a time-weapon, and were going to experiment on her to determine which would be the more effective use of that weapon, aging the Earthlings or youthening them. They explained to her that the weapon can't be used twice, as exposure to the weapon immunizes the subject against future uses. They put her in a youthening machine and she felt an electrical tingle run through her body. She later escaped from their imprisonment, visibly younger. Homer then tells his story, about how he was on Kolunn trying to capture an animal by using a boomerang. His tactic worked and he knocked the creature out, but before he could get to it, the lizard-men captured him and subjected him to an aging machine. He grew older at an extremely fast rate, and he managed to escape before he turned too old to move quickly. Karel begs Rick, who will only have time to destroy one machine, to destroy the aging machine, as it appears to be the more effective of the two, since Homer appears to have aged more than Karel youthened. Rick tells the two of them that he has thought about their stories, and that he will destroy the device that youthened Karel. Rick rockets to Kolunn and, using his athletic abilities, manages to locate and destroy the youthening machine. He returns to the planet where Homer and Karel are and finds that they reverted to normal...Homer immediately after he left, and Karel about five hours earlier, when he destroyed the machine. He then explains to them that he deduced from Karel's story that the sticky substance on her shoes was actually rubber, and that it insulated her from the worst effects of the youthening machine, which worked through an electrical charge, but, had she received the full force of the machine, she wouldn't have survived...unlike Homer, who reverted to normal on his own. They then head to Earth to warn them of the Kolunn plot.

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