After a while, Ray Palmer-G began to notice that Wonder Woman-G was going to Paradise Island far more frequently. He wondered if the Amazons were in any sort of trouble.

“Maybe Diana feels she can’t confide an Amazon secret, but I want to help,” thought the Atom-G.

So he reduced himself to even tinier size, the next time Diana had to leave, and concealed himself in the long tresses of her hair, watched her board her invisible jet and fly to Paradise Island. When she entered her bedroom, he saw that there was another tiny person there, who was only a teenaged boy.

As Atom-G watched on in shock, he saw Diana greet the boy with a passionate kiss and then proceed to eat him, after announcing that she would soon “cough him up as usual.”

He waited until the routine was over and bided his time until Diana was ready to leave. As soon as her plane reached Ivy Town again, he grew to regular Atom size and spoke.

“Don’t bother knocking on my door, Diana. I was in your hair the whole time. I know all about your toy boy. Is he from earth-M?”

“Yes,” said Diana.

“How could you do this to me?” asked Ray, “I thought you liked eating ME.”

“Except that you’re so often busy with your scientific experiments. Jason was there for me, and he offered to be eaten forever. Coughing him up was an afterthought.”

For hours they tried discussing the issue, but deep down, both of them knew it was over. Wonder Woman returned to Paradise Island to declare her complete love for Jason. It would be years longer before the boy caught up with her age and overtook her. She would most likely enjoy spending his twilight years with him too. They were already inseparable.

Atom-G felt such a need for a fresh start, that he went to the cave and came out in earth-M.

“I’m normal sized to these people as the Atom,” he thought, “I need never grow to Ray Palmer’s regular size again, but I can still be the Atom here, by shrinking even smaller, as the limits of my reduction capacities are still undiscovered. This world’s Wonder Woman is in love with the Mouse Man, but I doubt I could see myself with the image of Wonder Woman after what’s happened anyway.”

He began to make his way through the jungle, until he saw two teenaged super heroes battling a team of criminals with shotguns. One of them was about to take aim at the girl. Shrinking down to the Atom size of his earth-M counterpart, Atom-G jumped at the man’s hand, using a substantial weight to force him to drop the gun in shock. He punched the man unconscious, and then reduced his weight and floated towards the super heroine, until he landed on her shoulder, shrinking even smaller, so as not to be noticed on earth-M yet, as the fight came to an end.

“It’s finished, Vicki,” said the boy, “We can change back now.”

“Sure can, Chris,” said the girl.

Before he knew it, the miniature Atom-G was somehow drawn into a strange wrist watch on the girl’s wrist, which had the letters H, E, R and O on it. Having dialed H for HERO in the 1980s, Vicki and Chris returned to their regular lives, unaware that the Atom-G was now trapped on the inside of the glass surface of Vicki’s watch. For weeks he looked up at her, unseen as she sat in classes at school, walked from one place to another, ate meals and put the watch on her bedside table while sleeping.

Finally another emergency came up, and Vicki dialed the letters and became a completely different super heroine. At that point, the watch also released the Atom-G, who quickly fled the scene. Apparently, the scientist realized, the watch had the power to transform the girl into a number of heroines, releasing the power from its surface when the dialing was done. When the super heroines changed back into the girl, the watch drew super power back into it, including the unnoticed Atom-G.

He realized that he could not be around when the girl changed back again, or he would once again be trapped in the watch. He would just have to avoid that heroine, which would be difficult, because her identity changed with each use of her dial. Nonetheless, he would eke out a new life for himself on earth-M. He soon noticed that the top of his mask had been torn off and retained by the watch when it had released him. From then on, he would have a slightly different costume, but that would only serve to distinguish him from the local Atom-M. He would need a new name too, for that purpose, and decided to call himself the Neutron.

In 1985, a powerful but insane super villain named Chade the Shaving Man brought about the Crisis of Infinite Beards, which struck every bearded man on the planet dead overnight. Neutron was commissioned by Big Bearda and given the help he needed to defeat Chade, but the bearded men could not be brought back to life. As Neutron introduced himself to Atom-M and began to move in super hero circles, he soon learned that Donna Troy Long and Dinah Lance had been left without their partners.

Both girls were keenly interested in him, and he suddenly realized that he had gone from being the unfortunate man in a triangle between Wonder Woman-G and two males, to being the man who had to choose in a triangle between himself and two females: Black Canary and Wondergirl.

“I’ve never dated a younger girl,” thought Ray-G, “But would Wonder Woman-M’s sidekick remind me too much of what I went through with Wonder Woman-G? On the other hand, is it wise to enjoy myself in Black Canary-M’s mouth, given what could happen if she needed to let loose her sonic canary cry?”

He did not want to become involved in a process of two-timing, something for which he felt he could never excuse Wonder Woman-G having done to him. He decided to stay active with both of the girls and get to know each of them over time, giving no noticeable definite interest in either girl, until he had made up his mind. This way he would keep the door open, without betraying either girl’s feelings.

He was too old to actually join the Teen Titans, and too confusingly similar to Atom-M to join the Justice League. However, he could still go out and aid either girl on solo missions.

Occasionally he returned to earth-G and confided in his friends Jean and Paul Hoben about the whole affair. Both promised to keep his secret identity, but asked if they could write his memoirs purely from the Atom’s perspective, without mentioning that he was Ray Palmer. His story to date was published on earth-G under the title ‘Vore of the Atom’, in reference to the number of times that Wonder Woman-G had eaten him.

Jason’s identity was kept secret, as well as the location of the connecting cave to earth-M. The exact means of travelling between the earths was never mentioned. Not that it would have done the giants any good, as Miniscula was the only inhabitant of earth-G who had received shrinking power from the cave, in order to enter it. The only other thing which Ray kept from the Hobens-G (and hence from the world) was the super heroine identities of Dinah Lance-M and Donna Long-M, as they would be the same for their earth-G counterparts. The super heroine careers of Atom-G’s two potential earth-M love interests would never be revealed to anyone on earth-G, except for the one person in the story so far who already knew:

At one point, Wonder Woman-G paid a call on Ray-G and the Hobens-G, while they were discussing the success of the book.

“I don’t mind the publicity,” she said, “It’s not as if the world is learning that I cheated on a husband, just that I dated two guys at once until I made my choice. I would like to know what your little Dinah and Donna are like though.”

“Not that different from the Dinah and Donna of our world,” said Ray-G.

Dinah or Donna? It had quite a ring to it, when said like that.

The meeting broke up and Ray-G returned to earth-M.

“I could be Dinah-mite or Tag-a-Long Neutron,” he thought.

In the past, he had found Diana’s age and experience exciting. The woman had been widowed thousands of years before he had been born. Yet there was something about Black Canary-M that reminded him more of Diana-G than Wondergirl-M did. The younger girl had no baggage, unlike Black Canary-M who had been widowed once to Larry Lance and then lost the second great love of her life Green Arrow.

Wondergirl-M had only been widowed once, and at a much younger age, to an older man to whom she had not been married for nearly as long as Diana-G or even Dinah-M. There was a sweetness and fresh outlook on life in the younger girl, one which added to the considerations floating about in Neutron’s mind.