Robert Rance, a popular science broadcaster now infamous for the terrifying Crimson Comet affair, begins by telling the true story behind the legend. With his sharp-tongued crime-reporting friend Shorty Dirk at his side, he is summoned to the White Mountains Observatory, where Dr. Johns reports impossible disturbances: the Earth's rotation and orbit are subtly off, the weather has turned wildly unstable, and a strange purple glow haunts the night sky. The source appears to be a vast, erratic crimson comet—and Rance begins to suspect it may be no natural body at all, but an inhabited world wielding some monstrous science against Earth. As the crisis widens, Rance meets the people drawn into the disaster: shabby drifter Peter Mack, glamorous stage performer Vivian La Marr, and arrogant financier J. Walter Blaine. Then, in a sudden plunge into darkness, they are all swept away to Zelos, a dying planet of crimson caverns ruled by the machine-like Radaks and their vast Great Mind. There, beneath the watch of oppressed Lei slaves, the captives face the ancient Radak Ruler, who feeds on human knowledge and power. Blaine's pride is crushed, Mack is mentally ravaged, and Vivian's defiance leads her and Mack toward a fate in the eerie "Realm of the Deathless Things." Left starving in a prison cell, Rance and Shorty meet Tahn, a mysterious Lei woman whose secret warning suggests that resistance—and rescue—may still be possible. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.