At least a contributing factor to the current cycle of science fiction movies being made in Hollywood is the touchiness of minorities having their nationals being portrayed as villains. Cinema-makers are now trying to avoid further boycotts by using space aliens for villains. But suppose some of our Extraterrestrial neighbors are also a bit touchy?
America's greatest weapon, greater than the Atom Bomb, was its new, gigantic mechanical brain. It filled a whole mountain--and then it came to life...!
A man, identified only as the Chemist, discovers a microscopic world inside a golden ring. Soon, he becomes transfixed with a girl he observes there and determines to shrink himself down and find her. He does this by inventing two drugs, one pill to make him smaller and one pill to make him bigger. He then tells this plan to a group of friends, and asks them to safeguard the ring while he is away. Once he returns, he tells them all the story of his adventures inside the world of the ring.
Legends do, of course, get somewhat distorted in the passage of time. In the future, the passage across space to other planets may cause a slight modification here and there.
The plans for the Ziegler heat ray have been stolen and are presently in the Arvanian embassy, where they are officially off-limits to the Americans. The American Secretary of War expects them to be smuggled out of the country at any moment. Arvania will then develop the weapon and, despite its postage-stamp size, become the most powerful nation on earth. The next logical step will be for it to declare war on the United States, which will lead to its downfall inside of three months!
Zarlah the Martian is narrated by a young scientist who had hoped to make his fortune creating an unbreakable substitute for glass. By happy accident, he invented a device which allowed him to intercept communications from Mars.
How could a man tell the difference if all the reality of Earth turned out to be a cosmic hoax? Suppose it turned out that this was just a stage set for students of history?