Phantoms of Reality

By Ray Cummings and John Betancourt

Red Sensua's knife came up dripping—and the two adventurers knew that chaos and bloody revolution had been unleashed in that shadowy kingdom of the fourth dimension.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Oct 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667660370

Ray Cummings

Ray Cummings (born Raymond King Cummings) (August 30, 1887 – January 23, 1957) was an American author of science fiction literature and comic books. Cummings is identified as one of the "founding fathers" of the science fiction genre. His most highly regarded fictional work was the novel The Girl in the Golden Atom published in 1922, which was a consolidation of a short story by the same name published in 1919 (where Cummings combined the idea of Fitz James O'Brien's The Diamond Lens with H. G. Wells's The Time Machine) and a sequel, The People of the Golden Atom, published in 1920. Before taking book form, several of Cummings's stories appeared serialized in pulp magazines. The first eight chapters of his The Girl in the Golden Atom appeared in All-Story Magazine on March 15, 1919. Ray Cummings wrote in "The Girl in the Golden Atom": "Time . . . is what keeps everything from happening at once", a sentence repeated by scientists such as C. J. Overbeck, and John Archibald Wheeler, and often misattributed to the likes of Einstein or Feynman. Cummings repeated this sentence in several of his novellas. Sources focus on his earlier work, The Time Professor, published in 1921, as its earliest documented usage.

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Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION

PHANTOMS OF REALITY

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2022 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Astounding Stories of Super-Science, January 1930.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION

Raymond King Cummings (1887–1957) was an American author of science fiction, named as one of the founding fathers of the science fiction pulp genre in E.F. Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years. His work predates the term science fiction (and its predecessor, scientifiction). He also wrote mysteries, some of which are included in this volume, which turned on science and inventions.

Cummings was born in New York. He worked with Thomas Edison as a personal assistant and technical writer from 1914 to 1919, a background reflected in his writing. His most highly regarded work remains the novel The Girl in the Golden Atom (published in 1922 and included in this volume), which was a consolidation of a short story by the same name published in 1919 and its sequel, The People of the Golden Atom, published in 1920. Over his long career, he produced some 750 novels and short stories (sometimes using the pen names Ray King, Gabrielle Cummings, and Gabriel Wilson) and remained popular not just in the science fiction field, but as a mainstay in comics.

During the 1940s, with his fiction career winding down, Cummings turn to comic books, where he wrote stories for Timely Comics, the predecessor to Marvel Comics. He recycled the plot of The Girl in the Golden Atom for a two-part Captain America tale, Princess of the Atom. (Captain America #25 & #26) He also contributed to stories for the Human Torch and Sub-Mariner, for which his daughter Betty Cummings also wrote.

His is also famous for the quote, Time…is what keeps everything from happening at once, a sentence repeated by scientists such as C.J. Overbeck and John Archibald Wheeler. Cummings wrote it in 1922.

—John Betancourt

Cabin John, Maryland

PHANTOMS OF REALITY

CHAPTER 1

Wall Street—or the Open Road?

When I was some fifteen years old, I once made the remark, Why, that’s impossible.

The man to whom I spoke was a scientist. He replied gently, My boy, when you are grown older and wiser you will realize that nothing is impossible.

Somehow, that statement stayed with me. In our swift-moving wonderful world I have seen it proven many times. They once thought it impossible to tell what lay across the broad, unknown Atlantic Ocean. They thought the vault of the heavens revolved around the earth. It was impossible for it to do anything else, because they could see it revolve. It was impossible, too, for anything to be alive and yet be so small that one might not see it. But the microscope proved the contrary. Or again, to talk beyond the normal range of the human voice was impossible, until the telephone came to show how simply and easily it might be done.

I never forgot that physician’s remark. And it was repeated to me some ten years later by my friend, Captain Derek Mason, on that memorable June night of 1929.

My name is Charles Wilson. I was twenty-five that June of 1929. Although I had lived all of my adult life in New York City, I had no relatives there and few friends.

I had known Captain Mason for several years. Like myself, he seemed one who walked alone in life. He was an English gentleman, perhaps thirty years old. He had been stationed in the Bermudas, I understood, though he seldom spoke of it.

I always felt that I had never seen so attractive a figure of a man as this Derek Mason. An English aristocrat, he was, straight and tall and dark, and rather rakish, with a military swagger. He affected a small, black mustache. A handsome, debonair fellow, with an easy grace of manner: a modern d’Artagnan. In an earlier, less civilized age, he would have been expert with sword and stick, I could not doubt. A man who could capture the hearts of women with a look. He had always been to me a romantic figure, and a mystery that seemed to shroud him made him no less so.

A friendship had sprung up between Derek Mason and me, perhaps because we were such opposite types! I am an American, of medium height, and medium build. Ruddy, with sandy hair. Derek Mason was as meticulous of his clothes, his swagger uniforms, as the most perfect Beau Brummel. Not so myself. I am careless of dress and speech.

I had not seen Derek Mason for at least a month when, one June afternoon, a note came from him. I went to his apartment at eight o’clock the same evening. Even about his home there seemed a mystery. He lived alone with one man servant. He had taken quarters in a high-class bachelor apartment building near lower Fifth Avenue, at the edge of Greenwich Village.