The Girl in the Golden Atom

A chemist tells four friends at their club that a high-powered microscope has shown him a world inside an atom of his mother’s gold wedding ring, and a girl living in it. He has also made two drugs, one for contraction and one for expansion, and he intends to shrink himself down to her. The Doctor, the Big Business Man, the Very Young Man and the Banker eventually follow him into that inner world, where the girl, Lylda, belongs to a people called the Oroids, whose city of Arite faces the aggressive Malites. Cummings ran the story in All-Story Weekly in 1919 and joined it to a 1920 sequel for this 1922 novel. Chapter five carries the line, handed to the Big Business Man, that time is what keeps everything from happening at once.