Spacemens Luck

 

Where Tom Corbett, Captain Video, CMDR Corry and Other Spacemen Still Live

The Federal Bureau of Missing Persons is broadcasting it’s latest coded bulletin transmission with a list of recently missing persons when they receive a CQ (SOS) radio message from a crank calling earth who claims to be calling from the Moon. Triangulating to locate the offender, radio operator Charlie Stafford discovers that the message did in fact come from the Moon from a man identifying himself as Cornelius Otterburn. Of course the call is dismissed, until a minor member of the Federal Bureau of Missing Persons begins to suspect that the call is related to a strange series of disappearances over the past several years.

Charlie Stafford tells Federal Bureau of Missing Persons records clerk Henry Stinton who recognizes the name and decides to investigate the name Cornelius Otterburn and finds only one person with that name has gone missing and he was an Atomic Physicist who had disappeared 5 years previously on June 5th 1945.

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This episode is one of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. The story begins in 1987 when the first astronauts from Earth aboard the spaceship XR-57 and a 17 Man crew have just landed on Mars. The landing party leaves the ship into a fog and the first thing they hear after emerging from their ship is the crowing of a rooster. Then they find an old fashioned lawn ornament in the shape of an iron deer sitting in the yard of a regular old fashioned house complete with a porch swing. As the fog clears the crew are shocked to discover a Rockwellian 1920′s small town, eerily similar to those they left on Earth.

Peering through the first house’s window they see a piano complete with sheet music. Their confusion becomes even greater when a little old lady answers the door bell. When they explain that they are from Earth the lady replies “you mean out of the ground?” Captain Black insists they are from earth and that this is Mars she replies insistently that this is Green Acres, Wisconsin in the United States of America in 1928.

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This episode of Dimension X was developed as a means of advanced promotion of the George Pal’s 1950 movie of Destination Moon. The Dimension X episode was based on an advanced copy of the screenplay.

Like the movie the story was based on the legendary Robert A. Heinlein’s novel “Rocket Ship Galileo” (1947) depicting man’s first flight to the moon.

In this radio adaption our story begins later in the story when General Thayer arrives at the rocket launch site to announce their permission to test the atomic motor was denied. They then anticipate that a court order will soon follow preventing them from launching and prepare for immediate launch and sure enough a court officer arrives and our crew launch to the moon.

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This is the legend of old time spaceman “Noisy” Rhysling a blind singer of the spaceways who lost his sight saving a ship and then spends the rest of his life bumming rides on spaceships singing his songs. He is the poet laureate of space, part Homer, part Robert Burns, and part Rudyard Kipling. The space-going songwriter and radiation-blinded spaceship engineer crisscrosses the solar system writing and singing songs.

The story begins when the aged Rhysling is signed aboard the Tramp Spaceship Gartalk as a Jet Man. There is an engine malfunction and and Rhysling looses his sight.

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In the future year of 1955 a mysterious visitor, named Graffious, to the Broderick Detective Agency, in downtown New York, hires Detective Broderick and his assistant “Iron Man” Doolan to find the Martian Embassy. Both Broderick and Doolan think Graffious is crazy and start to throw him out of their office. But Graffious flashes a $500.00 bank note and suddenly they are all ears.

Grafiius explains that he is an eccentric that believes that if the Martians were on Earth they would be here only as a prelude to an invasion. That if they are indeed on Earth they would have their “Embassy” in New York the center of economic and political activity. Their Embassy would act as a listening post to gather intelligence for their planned invasion.

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Based on the short story by Frederick Brown the story starts and ends with “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

The show’s announcer begins by saying “a sweet blood curdling story that is only two sentences long. The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” The story goes on and elaborates on those two sentences and builds a more complete story around them.

The story is about Walter Phelan, the last man on Earth. An Immortal space faring race calling themselves the Zan have invaded the earth and have killed off all life other than pairs of animal specimens for their zoo.

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Sometime in the far future man is exploring the galaxies of deep space and on most every planet they explore they find only rubble and remnants of a long-dead space-faring civilization. Why did this “Lost Race” disappear? Whatever happened to them happened over 100,000 years ago.

The Space Freighter Corilla based out of Earth after having been traveling in overdrive for 103 days re-emerge in normal space in the vicinity of an uncharted solar system with a sun and 3 planets orbiting it.

After they go into a low orbit to investigate one of the planets they find ruins of the “Lost Race” only unlike the thousand other worlds where the ruins of the “Lost Race” were found these ruins were not totally destroyed. Part of the city of the “Lost Race” is still standing. This is unheard of. But before they can decide what to do there is an explosion on the power deck and they are forced to make a crash landing near the city of the “Lost Race.”

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In the far flung future of 1982, no kidding, Spacemen discover The Great Galactic Barrier. Manned space flights to the moon and mars are common. Now they are trying to travel to the planet Volta (not sure where this is or eve what solar system). Volta is beyond the barrier. The Great Galactic Barrier is a strange invisible barrier which is frustrating Man’s attempts to explore the depths of space. So far five ships have attempted the voyage, but none have ever returned, their fate a mystery since no signal can pass through the barrier.

On June 2, 1987 the rocket ship Star Cloud blasts off for Volta. To avoid the fate of the first five expeditions the Star Cloud’s hull has been lined in lead. The Star Cloud is the sixth ship to attempt the trip, commanded by Captain Lewis Thorson and his crew, who are plagued even before they lift off. First there is a stowaway (Charlie who had been grounded for acceleration bends) aboard who is discovered and removed just before lift off. Then several of the crew come down with the Space Blues, a malady that seems to only effect certain crew members.

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We find our self in the far distant future of 2006. A future where the Mark 3 Electronic Brain is the latest computer and is used in places like Harvard University. Soon there will be the next generation computer the Mark 4 Electronic Brain.

First we meet Harry Underhill, manufacturer of domestic robots who finds his livelihood threatened when a new competitor appears on the market. Humanoids, which are vastly superior to his, which are inefficient and clunky, are devoted to the protection and service of mankind. Their “prime directive” is to serve man.

The first time Harry speaks to one of these new robots he calls it a robot and he is promptly informed that they are mechanicals and not robots. The mechanical offers a service contract to him but Underhill immediately declines with disgust.

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This is the first episode in the then new (1950) science fiction anthology series Dimension X. The show begins in the distant future in the year 1965 (April 15, 1965) and were standing beside the giant concrete runway of a desert testing ground somewhere in the American Southwest. Test pilot Steve Weston is getting last minute instructions from his boss Hanson and well wishes before he is to lift off in an experimental Strato Rocket the RJX-1 and fly higher than any man had gone before—to the outer reaches of earth’s atmosphere.

Once in flight everything is working according to plan when Weston suddenly reports sighting something large and shiny above his plane. Weston gives chase to the mysterious object and then disappears from ground controls radar screen with only ten minutes of fuel left. Search planes are sent out but find no sign of the downed plane.

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