Speaker 1: This is Walter o'keeth inviting you to listen in on
the nightline.
Speaker 2: M h.
Speaker 1: Tonight lived the incredible life of ages yet to come
in a time that might be a million years from
now on x minus one now an incredible story of
the world beyond.
Speaker 3: God Dom for blast off X minus five four three
two x minus one Fire from the far horizons of
the unknown, comtails of new dimensions in time and space.
These are stories of the future adventures in which you'll
live in a million, could be years on a thousand,
maybe worlds. The National Broadcasting Company, in cooperation with Galaxies
Science Fiction Magazine presents he minus one tonight inside story
by Richard Wilson.
Speaker 2: But first hear this.
Speaker 4: I know a couple old friends that argue.
Speaker 3: About everything, politics, world affairs, even the time of day.
One thing they agree on, though, is perhaps blue Ribbon
Draft bears. They say it's the best, and for a change,
they're both right. Perhaps blue Ribbon Draft is a bright,
modern tasting beer that still has plenty of that old
fashioned beer flavor. Next time you see that sign that
says perhaps blue Ribbon Beer on draft, stop in order
a glass. You'll soon know why so many folks agree
on the bright modern taste of perhaps blue Ribbon Beer
of Milwaukee now x minus one and inside story.
Speaker 5: Every wire serviceman knows that when the legislature shuts down
for the hot weather, when it gets too warm for
crimes of passion, that's the start of the silly season.
It's the time when the teletype chatters about the largest
pumpkin grown and saw County, and the dog that found
its way home from Luna Base to the Coco Island
rocket Port. Well, it was the silly season. When I
reported the headquarters Martian Sector of the Galactic News Service
at Iopa. I found the bureau chief, Scott Warren, looking
sourly at a strip of copy.
Speaker 6: GNS. Sinala ed lizards, lizards lizards. No light on the
longevity span of the Martian sand lizard was shed today
by the Sonala Zoological Society.
Speaker 4: Now that is what I call hot news flash copy.
Dull day following a dull night. Was it like this
in New York? When you left?
Speaker 5: They had me covering a kitten in a tree in
Gramercy Park.
Speaker 6: I would sell my soul for a nice juicy cabinet.
Crises or else saw a little honest graft on a
spaceport contract.
Speaker 5: Oh, have you got any leads?
Speaker 7: No?
Speaker 6: The Garrison Administration of Martian Colonial Affairs is depressingly honest.
Speaker 5: When nothing's doing, you can stir it up a little,
you know, rattle the local skeleton in the closet, fan
the fires a little.
Speaker 6: Have you read the Publication's Responsibility Act of nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 4: You can get twenty years for what you were thinking?
Speaker 5: Look, what's the local canker? Saw? What would you like
most to get an inside story on something everybody covers up?
Speaker 2: Well, there's druro.
Speaker 4: Oh, but that's simon pure.
Speaker 5: What's druro?
Speaker 4: Nully sanctuary?
Speaker 5: Oh, religious institution.
Speaker 6: No, it's a quarantine set up for null gravity neurocatinosis
nulli fever. It's completely segregated. Nobody has ever gotten a
report out of there.
Speaker 5: Well, it sounds like a natural.
Speaker 6: Look, George, you're new. You don't fall around with nully
fever here on Mars. You like lighting a cigarette and
a powder magazine?
Speaker 5: Chief, how would you like an inside story out of drawer?
Speaker 4: You can't get in?
Speaker 5: I will give eight to five. Now, Look who's in charge.
Speaker 4: The Ministry of Health?
Speaker 5: But okay, Okay, don't let the sandalers that take up
all the space I will get in. It wasn't so easy.
I did fine over at the Health Ministry until I
mentioned Druro, and then I might just as well have
had a galloping case of Nully fever myself. I was
referred to the press officer, to the assistant administrator, to
the Legal Department, the Protocol division, and then back to
the press officer. Finally I got in to see the commissioner,
Doctor Marx.
Speaker 8: Just just what caused you to raise the question of Druro,
mister Gordon.
Speaker 5: Look, doctor Marx, what I want is your permission to
visit Druro and get the inside story.
Speaker 8: Visit Druro You mean inside the camp. Yes, that's right,
mister Gordon.
Speaker 9: I am a.
Speaker 8: Quoting Administrative Code Section sixty five. Any person found within
the perimeter at Druro is considered to be a Nully
fever victim. Contagion is something like ninety nine percent certain
at a range of one hundred yards. What's the treat girl,
You mean they're just shoved there to rot or nully.
Mister Gordon will rot wherever he is. He deteriorates to
the point of total sterility. Take my advice forget it.
Speaker 5: Naturally, I didn't forget it. I did more research. I
found out that nully fever seemed to be a mutated
virus that got that way in the early Earth Mars
rockets that had inadequate radiological shielding. The symptoms masqueraded as
half a dozen diseases, but the end product was the same,
a physical deterioration that I don't care to go into,
and a psychological lowering to an animal state.
Speaker 3: You're listening to inside the story the Night's Attraction on
X minus one. Now back to X minus one and
inside story.
Speaker 5: I may be a little reckless following a story, but
believe me, there isn't a bonus big enough to make
a hero out of me. I had no intention of
contracting nully fever just to provide a byline story for
old GNS. I had stumbled on to something and I
was wearing it when I dropped into the bureau and
asked Scott if he noticed anything different about me.
Speaker 4: You're putting on a little weight.
Speaker 5: No, I'll guess again.
Speaker 6: Your pants aren't hanging right, your shirt's are a bunch.
Speaker 5: Of g That's because I am wearing the latest fashion,
an invisible suit.
Speaker 4: Oh goodbye, try another one.
Speaker 5: Look, I'm not kidding. It's heat proof and air tight.
They developed it over at Mass Electronics for spacesuit use.
Speaker 4: You mean you're all buttoned up? Well, how do I
hear you?
Speaker 5: Short way from a miniaturized dental mike. It's hanging on
a front tooth.
Speaker 4: See you're not kidding. Well, how come it's invisible?
Speaker 5: It beats me. Something to do with a non refractive coding.
You need that for dark side work on airless satellites.
I got an experimental model from a pro at me.
What's it good for outside of spaceship work? Not much,
except it is my ticket to Druro.
Speaker 4: Now, wait, don't I get it?
Speaker 5: Chi, I can't be infected, not with this sounon. It's
absolutely air tight. Don't worry. I'll be safe wrapped in
plaster film like chewing gum.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but that won't get you past the perimeter into
the Nully camp.
Speaker 5: Just leave that to me. I've got that figured out too.
I picked up a sam Cat out to the town
of Druro and waited for two days. There was a
shipment of nullies, the last of the sinal around him
do at the camp. Out of respect to public opinion,
they dump nullies at night, which suited me fine. About
one hundred nullies were going over the new comers like
kangaroo caught in the frontier jail. I don't think anybody
actually got killed, but they almost tore the new bunch
to pieces, grabbing cigarettes, jackknives, but the shoes, anything, and then,
like as not, the old timers would fight each other first.
The whole thing was over at dawn and I could
get a look around the camp. There were prefab huts
and some trees. I started over to one of the.
Speaker 2: Huts, my hut.
Speaker 5: Take it easy, friend, I am not going to hurt you. Look,
I'm your friend.
Speaker 2: Sure you think you're going to steal my ration? Huh?
I'll kill you first.
Speaker 5: How long have you been here?
Speaker 2: Two years? Got a cigarette here?
Speaker 10: No?
Speaker 5: No, don't grab I'll toss you one.
Speaker 2: Don't you make a move, tarde me sure?
Speaker 5: Sure shoes? What were you before you got in here?
Speaker 2: Huh?
Speaker 10: A teacher and I open a technical I fixed them
before they got me. I cut down ten medics with
a our drill.
Speaker 5: When is breakfast? Friend?
Speaker 10: You go plenty hungry ration isn't till tomorrow. You think
there was some fight last night?
Speaker 5: Wait?
Speaker 10: Did you see ration drop last time? Somebody tried to
beat me to a ration case?
Speaker 2: I fixed her? Never mind, never mind, don't tell.
Speaker 4: Me about that.
Speaker 5: Hey, what's that over there up the hill? Looks like
a regular fortress.
Speaker 2: What are you trying to do hurt me? No?
Speaker 5: No, I just asked you what goes on up there?
Those other huts inside that barricade?
Speaker 2: You spying for them?
Speaker 9: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Sure you're spying for them.
Speaker 9: You dirty.
Speaker 5: It isn't easy to get used to dodging nasty backhand
punches that came out of the blue and were meant
to kill if possible. I got my I'm up in
time to catch about half the force, and the man
ran off with my pack of cigarettes. But there was
something up that hill worth looking into, a barricaded section
set apart from the rest. So I started up. When
I hit the woods, I stopped just three feet short
of a ten foot spear.
Speaker 11: All right, you get back down a hill.
Speaker 5: Now take it easy, will you? What's going on up here?
Speaker 11: Oh, I'm get moving. I've got to there's the kill
if I have to.
Speaker 5: You don't understand I just want to find out.
Speaker 2: Sure you do.
Speaker 11: They always do.
Speaker 7: Every time there's a new batch, there's a few still
smart enough to plan together.
Speaker 11: And they come up here spying.
Speaker 5: Spying on what.
Speaker 2: Look, I'm a knob tree.
Speaker 11: And then you get it in the belly.
Speaker 5: No hero I got before he reached one and a half.
That night I managed to talk to the ex teacher
without either of a slugging the other. I asked him
about the guard on the hill.
Speaker 10: They get all the best rations, they make us give
up our food. Do they come kill us? They've got spears, knives.
Speaker 5: You mean there's a gang up there living off the
rest of you. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I killed one of them once according from behind with
the rock.
Speaker 2: They came down and killed ten of us. Didn't get
me though, Funny, h.
Speaker 5: I got the picture. It's been the same every time.
Men are heard it together like animals. Andersonville, Bukenwaald and Dachau.
The Alaskan camps in the seventies are now druro. The
strong live off the others, a kind of racketeering in spades.
Grab the best of everything, live as rich as you can,
and don't worry how many you leave to starve. To death.
Speaker 4: We're gonna get him.
Speaker 10: No tonight, got rocks together in clubs, go up there
and we'll get them.
Speaker 2: You come.
Speaker 5: I didn't have much choice. They would have torn me
up pine. About ten o'clock at night, the mob gathered
at the foot of the hill. Every once in a
while they'd swipe at each other with a club of
a rock, but mostly they shouted up at the hill,
and then suddenly, without any signal, they charged. It was
kind of sick men and women heaven knows what they
were before, teachers, mothers, anything, screaming and running up that hill.
And then the defenders cut loose that were torture so
I could see rocks roll down, boiling water, spears, arrows
enough to cut down that unarmed mob.
Speaker 2: I was hiding behind a tree.
Speaker 5: Man, sick, good and sick when it happened.
Speaker 7: Hold on, bud, I'm gonna pull this arrow off. Oh
here it goes now Ooo? No where am I up
the hill?
Speaker 11: That's where you wanted to go, isn't it?
Speaker 4: But how did we dragged you up here?
Speaker 11: Herb had some bandages up here.
Speaker 5: Yeah you know one of them, aren't I want to
who the big shots, the kingpins gangsters.
Speaker 4: You didn't get hit in the head, did you.
Speaker 5: It's too bad they didn't wipe you out up here.
It's tough enough living in a place like this, but
to prey on the weak ones.
Speaker 11: Fella, I think maybe you got the wrong idea.
Speaker 5: Thank Heaven, I'm safe from this kind of.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I wondered when you'd notice.
Speaker 11: And fancy suit of yours got torn when the arrow hit.
Speaker 5: No lily fever.
Speaker 7: That's why we hauled you up here. We spotted something
funny about you. A kettle of boiling water splashed on you.
You didn't even notice.
Speaker 5: Who are you, George Gordon, Galactic News Service.
Speaker 4: A newsman? Listen?
Speaker 12: Does anybody know you're in here? Yeah, maybe there's a chance.
Can you tell them?
Speaker 2: They got to let us out.
Speaker 12: Tell them what it's like up here. Make them understand.
We write messages for the ration planes and they ignore them.
You can't get close enough.
Speaker 2: To the to shout.
Speaker 4: They shoot you down.
Speaker 2: They gotta let us out.
Speaker 5: Oh sure, sure, After what I've seen, that's the last
thing I do try to con somebody into letting this
loose on the population. I've seen enough nullies. Even if
I have to spend the rest of my life in
this camp. I don't want to be responsible for making more.
Speaker 4: Wait a minute, you don't get it.
Speaker 12: We're not nullies up here.
Speaker 5: What nobody gets in the camp.
Speaker 2: Who isn't a nully?
Speaker 11: That's right, We all had it when we came in,
but not anymore.
Speaker 2: Up here. We're curs You're lying.
Speaker 4: You've got to believe me.
Speaker 12: We've been living up here for four years, keeping guard,
trying to live like human beings in the middle of
those animals down there, losing maybe three or four a
week fighting them off.
Speaker 5: You know, you're more dangerous than they are down there,
because somehow you've kept some intelligence enough to want revenge
on the rest of the world by infecting.
Speaker 4: Oh no, you've got to believe me.
Speaker 2: We're cured.
Speaker 12: Nolly fever can be cured somehow because we've done it,
about one hundred of us more now with the babies.
So what babies, normal healthy babies.
Speaker 5: He pointed across the clearing to another hut, and I
saw it, a woman about thirty sitting on the doorsteps,
nursing a baby, an infant, And I heard the words
of the commissioner echoing in my ear, And of course,
total sterility these weren't nullies, not anymore. If they could
have babies, they must be cured. Living as a desperate
island in a mad world of violence. Well you know
the rest of it. You ought to It was carried
under my byline and every fact sheet on three planets.
They had a microtechnician up the hill who gimmicked my
miniature microphone with a hair and a piece of quartz crystal.
So I cut in on the main traffic beam between
Sinala and Iopia. I had Scott Warren at Government House
in fifteen minutes, struckting to blow the lid off the
whole colonial government. The babies did it aerial photographs with
micro enlargements. They had pictures of those babies on the
wire the next day. Red tape held it up a week,
but finally one hundred cured ex nullies and one reporter
were out of Druro at Iopa General Hospital for checks.
They found it. Nully fever is psychosomatic. You take somebody
strong enough to fight for survival, give him incentive, and
he'll lick it by himself. No miracle drugs needed. It
starts with a virus, all right, but it ends with psychotherapy.
A good dose of willpower. I got back to work
in a month.
Speaker 6: Welcome back, George Tea Times dead is ever back to
the longevity of the Martian Sanders.
Speaker 5: In dru Nully story played out.
Speaker 4: That is last week's Erry.
Speaker 2: Now what else is new?
Speaker 5: Maybe we can find another skeleton in the closset. How
about life on the Martian movements?
Speaker 9: Now?
Speaker 5: That WoT be good for a headline?
Speaker 3: Fred Collins again, and I'll have a word for you
about next week's X minus one.
Speaker 11: In a moment, Hey, Molly, it's me.
Speaker 2: Where are you here?
Speaker 9: Begin?
Speaker 10: What's the matter?
Speaker 5: Are you doing anything?
Speaker 13: Am I doing anything? I've got a towel wrapped around
my head, a broom in one hand, a bucket of
soap and water in the other, and the kitchen curtains
under my arm. And you ask me if I'm doing anything. Sure,
I'm vacationing in Florida.
Speaker 5: Here here, Molly, let me take this stuff.
Speaker 4: What are you doing?
Speaker 11: Just sit down, sit right here.
Speaker 5: You're a sweet maggie.
Speaker 14: But I've gone You can go back to work in
a minute. I got something big to tell you, you.
Speaker 4: Know, something really big. What have you gone down?
Speaker 5: We're going to be on monitor.
Speaker 14: Monitor NBC's fascinating, motivating, merrymaking skindle eate and ever vescerating
weekend radio service.
Speaker 13: Oh that Monitor, of course, And we're not at McGee
whan this weekend and every weekend.
Speaker 5: What do you say to that?
Speaker 13: No, that's wonderful me.
Speaker 14: So don't make any plans, folks. We'll be seeing you
this weekend all weekend on Monitor.
Speaker 3: And now a word about next week's story, The Category
Inventors by Arthur Sellings on X minus one. You have
just heard X minus one presented by the National Broadcasting
Company in cooperation with Galaxy Science fiction magazine, which this
month features Time Waits for Winthrop by William Ten. Winthrop
was literally the most stubborn and selfish man in five
hundred years. How could they convince him not to strand
them in this society of shriek fields and panic stadiums.
Galaxy Magazine on your news stand to day to night
X minus one has brought you Inside Story, a story
from the pages of Galaxy, written by Richard Wilson and
adapted for radio by Ernest Gnoy. Featured in our cast
were Bob Hastings, Leon Janney, Ralph Bell, Richard Hamilton, Edwin Cooper.
Speaker 2: And Pat Hasley.
Speaker 3: This is Fred Collins X minus one was directed by
Daniel Sutter and is an NBC Radio Network production.
Speaker 1: There's excitement in the air at night, and night Line
brings it to you here. Night Line with Walter o'kee
next on most of these NBC stations