Thanks to NBC

I was just a skinny kid.  A skinny kid who knew all about the planets, who liked thinking about rocket ships and outer space.  Who knew the future was bound to be far more exciting, even bizarre, than the dull life of his small, peaceful town in the Northwest Corner.

I was just a skinny kid with my ear pressed to the speaker of our radio console, a large combination radio-phonograph, disguised as mahogany furniture, that sat in the place where -- a few years later -- one would expect to find a television set.

Because I was a skinny kid back in the days before -- well, not the days before television existed, but the days before my family owned one.  Before TV signals could actually be received in my home town's remote corner of the then very remote Northwest Corner.

I was scrunched up on the floor, ear to the speaker, listening to a strange story.  A story of men who traveled to Mars in a rocket ship, and who discovered not the sandy desert revealed by today's unmanned Mars landers, but something far more wonderful.  They discovered their own small towns, just as those small  towns had appeared when they were children, in about 1926.  And they discovered their long-deceased relatives -- mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents -- welcoming them with love and joy, just as the men recalled them from the past.

They had found Heaven, and Heaven was apparently only a few months distant by rocket ship from Earth.

But things are never as they seem, apparently.  Especially on Mars.  Martians, it appears, are skilled at telepathy and at mass hypnosis.  They could read the fondest dreams and wishes of the crew members of the expedition.  They could create the world the Earthlings dreamed of.  They could make them extraordinarily happy -- and unsuspecting.  Then, while they were all asleep ...

But one crew member lay in bed and began to have doubts --

Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them back.  He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother's voice said, 'Where are you going?'
'What?'
His brother's voice was quite cold.  "I said, where do you think you're going?'
'For a drink of water.'
'But you're not thirsty.'
'Yes, yes, I am.'
'No, you're not.'
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.  He screamed.  He screamed twice.
He never reached the door.

Heady stuff, for a small town, skinny kid.  I've never forgotten the story.
A decade later, while idle on a rainy day in San Sebastian, Spain, poking around a bookstore, I found an American paperback of science fiction stories.  The cover read:  The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury.  I read for the first time the name of one of the great, if idiosyncratic, writers of science fiction.  And spent that rainy day reading one of the landmark books in sci fi literature -- a collection of short stories, published in 1950, describing the exploration and settlement of Mars from 1999 to 2026 (we were more optimistic, in those days!).  

The stories, unlike much sci fi literature, used Mars as a vehicle to focus on our own problems as human beings, and on the devastation and ruin we bring with us like a plague, wherever we venture. 

The radio program I remembered so well was an adaptation of the sixth chapter in the book -- entitled "The Third Expedition," but had been republished from a sci fi magazine where it had appeared in 1948 as "Mars is Heaven!"

Nowadays, I belong to a British book club that releases classics from all ages in carefully printed and bound volumes.  Today I received my bound copy of The Martian Chronicles.  On thumbing through the book, I immediately recalled the radio program, and wondered if there was any present record of that early broadcast.  Thanks to the internet, I learn that there is indeed, and moreover  that I can now date the program to which I listened with wide-eyed excitement as a child.

From April 1950 to September 1951, NBC radio carried a science fiction series called "Dimension X."  The program presented 50 dramatizations of science fiction stories during that period, including stories by such masters as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, and George Lefferts; numerous stories by Bradbury -- and even one by L. Ron Hubbard. 

Dimension X broadcast its adaptation of "Mars is Heaven!" on July 7, 1950, and rebroadcast it on January 7, 1951.  For either broadcast, I would have been ten years old -- just about the age I would have estimated.  I'm delighted to discover what literate programing NBC was able to offer in the mid-twentieth century, and I'm happy to recognize how lucky I was -- as a small, skinny, ten-year-old kid, living in Podunk, WA -- to be introduced to one of the most enjoyable of science fiction authors.