The haunting dreams of Adam Blake’s fellow librarian Lily Torrence — now renamed Lucy — provide the springboard for The Invaders from the Golden Atom (Strange Adventures 37, Oct. 1953).
Finding that an old family ring has mysteriously appeared on her finger, Torrence, while sleepwalking, constructs a device that will permit beings from an atomic world within her ring to invade Earth.
But Captain Comet uses the machine to shrink himself, defeating the aliens on their home ground.
Just to be on the safe side, Torrence throws the ring into the ocean from the Cometeer.
Adam Blake — after figuratively giving Torrence the back of his hand for the past two years — now, bizarrely and heavy-handedly, begins to flirt.
“Too bad you had to lose your gold ring,” he says coyly. “But maybe someday I — er — a lucky man will place another on your marriage finger!”
Forgetting about Miss Torrence’s name and Blake’s aloof relationship to her suggests that Schwartz and Broome were beginning to lose focus on this series, and perhaps losing confidence in its ability to headline the Strange Adventures title.
This exploit was an homage to another story in which a subatomic world is discovered inside a golden ring — the classic 1922 SF novel The Girl in the Golden Atom by Ray Cummings.
Cummings’ novel concerns a chemist who uses a super-microscope to discover a hidden atomic world inside his mother’s wedding ring, and develops a formula to change size so he can visit that universe and the beautiful young woman he sees there.
Cummings, who was 25 years old when the novel was published, had been a personal assistant and technical writer with Thomas Edison from 1914 to 1919.
One sentence penned by Cummings — that “Time … is what keeps everything from happening at once” — is often misattributed to famous scientists such as Albert Einstein.
In 1943, Cummings adapted his 1929 story Princess of the Atom (published in Argosy All-Story Weekly) into a two-part adventure for Timely’s Captain America Comics 25 and 26. Cap and Bucky battle a giant cockroach before shrinking into a micro-world to defeat the tyrant Togaro.
Shrinking was about to make a comeback in a big way.
Three years later, in 1956, Richard Matheson’s classic science fiction novel The Shrinking Man would be published. And another Ray — DC’s Silver Age Atom Ray Palmer, who also shrinks — is anticipated in this Strange Adventures tale.
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