The Gravity Professor

By Ray Cummings and Karl Wurf

Tubby said, “Why did we roll that ball?”

The professor’s face clouded again with anxiety. “To save the world,” he said. His voice trembled with emotion. “In seven million nine hundred thousand and two years, one month, six days, four hours, thirteen minutes, eight and one-quarter seconds, the world would have been destroyed if we had not moved that ball just where we did.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Oct 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9781667640662

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

THE GRAVITY PROFESSOR, by Ray Bradbury

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by Karl Wurf

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

THE GRAVITY PROFESSOR,

by Ray Bradbury

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2023 by Wildside Press LLC.

Originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 7, 1921.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

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INTRODUCTION,

by Karl Wurf

Ray Cummings was a prolific science fiction writer whose career spanned more than four decades, from the early 1900s to the late 1950s. He was born on August 30, 1887, in New York City and died on January 23, 1957, in Mount Vernon, New York.

During his long and prolific career, Cummings wrote hundreds of short stories and novels, many of which were published in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and Weird Tales. He was also a prolific writer for the fledgling comic book industry.

Cummings was a master of pulp science fiction, a genre characterized by fast-paced action, exciting plots, and imaginative ideas. He was particularly adept at creating