Bob Readick stars in a Robert Arthur story that was originally used on 1952-03-18 for the The Mysterious Traveler series. It is a two-person play, with Ralph Camargo as co-star.
Readick’s character is a professor who has received a grant to find the lost “City of the Fire God” in Central America. He gets the assistance of a local man who has a small, ancient Mayan statue that his grandfather claimed to find near the lost city. The professor needs a helpful guide and any plausible leads about the location. The two men make a deal to share whatever treasure they find, and they embark on the search together. A helicopter takes them to a remote volcanic region and start exploring an extinct volcano. They discover the ruins of an ancient city inside. There is a temple filled with gold human-form statues, but they have dog-like heads. The statues have their eyes pointed to toward a black disc in the floor. The professor realizes it is a map of the moon’s mysterious dark side, never seen from the Earth.
The men find a passage, by going through the “black door,” that leads underground. There, they find vast mushrooms, human bones with bite marks, and signs that something is still alive. They hear howling echoes from below and decide to flee. They are pursued by dog-headed creatures that look similar to the statues they saw in the temple. The professor shoots one. The two men escape. The professor fears what might happen if these dog-headed creatures went into the world, and decides to dynamite the tunnel to collapse it. The explosion triggers an earthquake, causing the dormant volcano to erupt, destroying the city. The professor speculates that the creatures were “extraterrestrial refugees” that settled in Central America and Egypt thousands of years ago and devolved into animal-like forms. The conclusion of the story is a warning: when humans explore the moon, especially its dark side, those dog-headed creatures might still be there.
The dark side of the moon was always a matter for sci-fi conjecture and storylines. Because of the combined rotation of the earth and the moon, only about 60% of the surface of the moon is visible from earth. Exploration of the “dark side” did not begin until spacecraft started to photograph it years later. It is rockier than the side visible to the earth.
What makes the story sound very odd to modern audiences is that we know much more about the moon than the listening audience of 1961 did (and even more than the 1952 Mysterious Traveler audience). Less than eight years after this broadcast, humans would land on the moon… and a few expeditions later, one of the astronauts would hit a golf ball as an amusing demonstration of the moon’s low gravity! This was not a particularly good Suspense story as it is so out of place in the series’ tradition. Suspense did present science fiction stories effectively, but this one is a much lesser story compared to those.
The main lesson of the story is to leave such things as searching for treasure in dangerous or legendary places alone, because you’ll probably return empty-handed anyway (and its corollary, “be careful what you ask for, you might just get it”). The episode Door of Gold had a similar pattern. It makes one wonder if Edgar Scott Flohr listened to the original Mysterious Traveler broadcast and used it as a springboard idea for his Suspense script.
The program was recorded on Thursday, November 16, 1961. The session started at 1:00pm and concluded at 6:00pm.
There are two surviving network aircheck recordings. The better one is likely from WROW. There is a lesser aircheck from WDNC of Durham, North Carolina that has narrow range and some station drift. There are very few recordings from this particular station, but it is clear that there were fans around the country who recorded the shows for convenience and sometimes for preservation.
This is the first appearance on Suspense by Readick since he left the lead role in Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar for personal reasons in June 1961. Readick's difficulties with depression would probably been treated more successful today. It is interesting to note that wife Barbara Kasarr's appearances on Suspense and YTJD began after he exited that lead role. Her appearances ended when he returned to Suspense as an actor and a writer. He made ten appearances on Suspense after he returned, only one of them with wife Barbara in the same production.
LISTEN
TO THE PROGRAM or download in FLAC or
mp3
https://archive.org/details/TSP611119
THE CAST
Robert Readick (Richard Landry), Ralph Camargo (Pedro Ramirez)
###
