Ray Cummings 21 min read

In the back room of O'Connor's Grocery, stubborn Tubby refuses to believe light travels 186,000 miles a second, 'that's too fast for anything to go', and rises to prove his friends wrong.

Ray Cummings's 1920 story is a genial hard-SF tale built on a homely argument about the speed of light. Fun, folksy golden-age pulp. Read it for an early Cummings yarn where a plain man's disbelief in a scientific fact leads, by way of a marvelous machine, to a demonstration none of the grocery-stove philosophers expected.

In its time

Published in 1920, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

21 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).