SFX: organ throughout intro
Announcer: The Thrifty Mortuary and Nursing Home, with convenient on-site pharmacy and medical equipment rental, is proud to present another episode of 'Scared to Sleep', the syndicated horror show featuring the Antimony Theatre of Fear actiing ensemble starring Torsion Bar, Amica Sway, Michael Tarragon, Edgar Allen Jones, Victim Freemason and the organ virtuosity of virtual virtuoso P.P. Flushing.


SFX: extra-dramatic chord thrown in


Ann: This evening, Scared to Sleep introduces you to another vision of a world in which the unexpected follows you everywhere, shares your bed and eats your leftovers, all without the slightest warnings. This evening's world belongs to a man named Isaac and his voice will be the next one you hear.

SFX: Organ out


Isaac: My name is Isaac and this is my voice.
My story begins in Earnest, Montana, many years ago, when I was eight. In fact, it was on my birthday.

SFX: "Happy Birthday to You" played by the original artists, two bars.


Isaac's Mother: Oh, yes, he was such a fine young man, until that day. And then everything about him just changed.


Isaac: Who let her in here? Go away!


I.M.: See? Totally changed. I took him to a Doctor and he said that Isaac had suffered some...


Doctor: Rite of passage trauma... You see, everybody, at some point in their life, realizes that growing older is not a sign of progress. You are not rewarded with success just because you've survived. Life is not a Cracker Jack box. The reward is not forthcoming as the result of a small effort. In my opinion...


Isaac: I let the air out of his tires for five years. That fellow had no idea what happened to me. If I had told him, he wouldn't have understood, either. What really happened, was this...


Mother: I think somebody slipped him a copy of Ulysses... That sort of thing can warp a child's...


Isaac: Will you get her out of here?


Mother: Such disrespect! Hmph! I'll go, I'll go, but it'll all end in tears, I just know it!


Isaac: As I was saying, what really happened was this: on my eighth birthday, a spaceship came and hovered outside my tree house. I was reading issue #6 of Apalling Tales, you know, the one with the skeletons playing cards on the cover? And the final part of the trilogy of parallel universe stories by L.P. Mapgas?

Well, I was reading the last few pages of that, where an apple tree falls on Thomasina Edison, when I saw this shiny metal tampon-shaped thing outside the door of my tree house and a strange little fellow sitting in the open cockpit whistling "I'm just wild about Harry" in three-part harmony with pedal point bass accompaniment, all by his little self.

I closed my eyes, thinking it was a vision induced by my reading material. When I opened them again, he stopped whistling and spoke:


Alien: Was I that bad?


Isaac: Oh, no, I said, it isn't that. I'm just checking to see if I'm dreaming. And he said:


Alien: I wish it were a dream. I am a messenger from your future. I have a task for you.


Isaac: I couldn't help myself. I said, Yeah! Right! Where's the camera? What's the gag?


Alien: I drew myself up to my full height and said forcefully, 'Steven Spielberg hasn't been born yet. No one in the movie industry has the ability to simulate me!' And he said:


Isaac: Oh. I'm sorry. Go on, about the mission.


Alien: So, I proceeded to tell him.

In time travel, there are many problems, but one of the worst is the Granfather Sydrome. Simply put, if you happen to startle one of your ancestors, you might never be born. Thus, research is tremendously vital to successful time traveling, although the importance of water treatment tablets cannot be ignored.


Isaac: So, he want me to investigate the decade in which I had been born. He wanted me to spend the next ten years of my life investigating ten years of my past and the world's. He told me that...


Alien: If I did it well, I would be rewarded.


Isaac: That's my line.


Alien: Sorry. I lost my place.


Isaac: If I did it well, I would be rewarded. Now, I don't know about you, but for me the promise of a reward from a small silver man with a silver flying machine was enough. I didn't even bother to ask what the reward was.


Alien: I flew away with a smug look on my face and a song in my vocal cords.


Ann: And thus, our hero was set a task, which he took to like falling off a horse. He haunted newpaper offices, stole encyclopedias door to door and kept librarians busy borrowing thick tomes from unversity collections.


Isaac: Nothing else mattered but my mission. Not girls, not fiction, not family, not school and not current events. I was totally immersed in the teens, you know, from 1910 to 1919. I watched newreels, read biographies and talked to thousands of people who had lived then.


Ann: His parents were upset. They viewed his mission as a form of obsession stemming from neighborhood rumors of a time discrepancy between his birth and their marriage ceremony.


Isaac: I already knew about that. I knew in the womb. But I had to tell them something. So, playing on their sympathies, I told them I had had a visitation from God, become a Jehovah's Witness and was investigating the events surrounding Christ's secret second coming in 1917.


Ann: That satisfied them and they joined the church themselves, taking him with them.


Isaac: I had not anticipated their gullibility, not having lived with them very long at the time. Yet, in the long run, it furthered my purpose because the JWs had some very useful archives from the period in question.


Ann: And thus, the decade progressed.


Isaac: Without me.


Ann: He became an acknowledged expert, consulted by professors, paid by magazines and color supplements for articles and called upon by quiz programs to prepare questions.


Isaac: But something was missing. While other kids had bicycles, I had a typewriter. While other kids went out on dates, I held symposiums. While they revelled in the current tunes, I was searching for the complete works of Caruso on cylinder. It didn't take long for me to wonder if it was all worth it. I hoped I was going to be reassured by periodic visits from the little fellow. But I was disappointed.


Alien: You expected me to give up Hemingway for you? No way.


Ann: So, his resolve flagged until he learned of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.


Isaac: Even if I hadn't had the mission, that subject would have caught my attention. But with the mission in mind, it set me on fire and drove me for years.


Ann: Soo, his eighteenth birthday approached. And he was ready.


Isaac: I had all my data filed by month and day, separated into two sections, fact and rumor. I was ready to answer any question. And I had begun to wonder, at last, what the reward was. What could possibly compensate me for the loss of my childhood and the alienation of my peers?


Ann: Then came the fateful day.

SFX: 'Happy Birthday To You'


Isaac: My parents had moved three times since the alien had visited. I took a bus to the city we'd lived in on my eighth birthday and snuck into the remains of my old treehouse. And waited. And waited. And waited.


Alien: I told him I was sorry. I had forgotten that they used the Julian calender back then, rather than the Clintonian calender currently in use in the future. And then, when I got to the boy's home, as indicated in the records, I learned that he had returned to the place I'd met him before.


Isaac: I was beginning to get discouraged. But I had a stack of London Illustrated News magazines to keep me company. So, the days passed, hungrily but productively. I was reading about a Bentley winning a works rallye when I looked up and saw him.


Alien: I was magnificent. It was a Nudie spacesuit, like the one Jerry Lewis wore in 'Visit To A Small Planet.'


Isaac: He looked like a glowing sausage wtih legs. I said what took him so long? He had an excuse about calenders.


Alien: I said I was sorry. And I asked him if he was ready.


Isaac: For what, I asked.


Alien: His reward.


Isaac: My reward.


Alien: I told him to get in the ship. I'd take him to it.


Isaac: I wanted to know what about my files?


Alien: I told him we had them. We recovered them from the University Library his parents had donated them to after his death.


Isaac: That set me back. Death?


Alien: Oh sure, I told him. You can't travel through time in a regular human body. All those differences in pressure, atmospheric contamination, distances above sea level and variations in solar radiation were too complex for even the photosynthetic interactive foldback computers of the future. No, we had to leave his body behind and incorporate his memories in a simulacrum.


Isaac: I asked him if it hurt.


Alien: I told him it was worth it adn to get in, we had places to be.


Isaac: So, with a fond glance around at where it had all begun ten years before, I got into the space ship and off we went.


Alien: He immediately threw up from the G forces. I had forgotten how frail the human form was, not having been human for... oh, how long has it been?


Ann: Three hundred years.



Alien: Thank you.


Isaac: Soon, we were in Iceland at a large facility I instinctively knew had been built by people from the future.


Alien: A few Quonset huts. He was a kid, what did he know?


Isaac: As soon as we landed and I had my face wiped, I was taken into custody by a talking Aardvark that sounded like Fanny Brice.


Alien: Amiga Cybernetics never managed to buidl an android that walked erect or had a pleasant voice. I don't know why, but I made sure their design team was first against the wall when the revolution came.


Isaac: I was uncertain about that death thing. The little fellow in the gaudy suit had not been reassuring. I was taken to the largest of the futuristic buildings and presented to a council of little fellows and ladies who spent days asking me questions, letting me go only for meals, potty breaks and short naps. They grilled me about major events and trivia, dates and temperatures, models and styles and fashions, personalities and celebrities, politicians and villains, military actions and sports events and when they found that I had a particular fascination with the Armenian affair, they ran me through that to the best of their abilities, but, I knew more than they did.


Alien: I got a bonus for him, I did. The Review Board was very pleased with him. I got to be an extra in all of Bo Derek's movies.


Isaac: And when it was all over, I was led to an operating theatre. I was so afraid of what was going to happen, they had to sedate me. They kept telling me it would hurt, but only a little.


Alien: None of them had been human for centuries, they didn't remember.


Isaac: It was the most horrible experience of my life.

SFX: Chord!


Alien: I don't know what he was on about. I mean, the Discorporator only takes off the top of your skull...

SFX: Saw going through wood, accompanied by scream, then sawn off piece hitting floor


Alien: then sucks your brain and spine out...

SFX: Vacuum cleaner accompanied by scream, longer than last one


Alien: and ships the body off by courier to somewhere near the last known address.


Isaac: After the major pain was over, I felt lost and cold and limbless.


Alien: His brain and spine were suspended in a nutrient gelatin until the simulacrum was ready. It had to be computer-tailored to match his DNA in order to avoid rejection.


Isaac: Then I went to sleep.


Alien: After the operation, he was transported to a place beyond space and time and cable shopping channels, where a special place had been prepared for him.


Isaac: Place?! Hell is more like it. It was a fragment of what had once been a planet, a fragment imbedded in a dead star whose remaining magnetic pulses had a music of their own.


Alien: Though I've never been there, I know of it. It's called Chronolab officially...


Isaac: and 'This Foul Place' unofficially...


Alien: and it was the remains of an ancient nuclear experiment by a race of lawyers. The had hoped to become rich off the product liability potential of nuclear weapons sold to the general public by a series of chain stores called Bombmart.


Isaac: When I awoke, I was in a house on a street in a city. House number 1915 on Second Decade Street in Twentieth Century City. My new home. The house was filled with artifacts from the year it was numbered. There were films and periodicals and my files for that year. The rest had been given to other scholars on the street, scholars I was soon to meet.


Isaac: I heard he was more of a handful during the transitional probation than most. It seems he had a problem with immortality if it meant studying the same year for the duration.


Isaac: You betcha! I bitched and moaned and burnt the house and beat people up and made them pay attention to me.


Alien: He kept them scrambling, all right. And he sufferd for it.


Isaac: They punished me. They put me in a crippled body. They locked me in the house. They starved me. They showed me a series of films called "Three's Company". But nothing broke my spirit. I had been promised a reward and I wanted one. Now!


Alien: Never in the history of the Chronolab had they ever had such a stubborn client. They almost took my bonus away, but I had a Union card by then.


Isaac: Eventually, they compromised. The said if I would go to Armenia in 1915, taking a tiny camera with me, and film a massacre, they would return me to my own time, as long as I didn't attempt to go back to my own home. They said that would complicate things. Little did they know that by that time I would have said yes to practically anything. So I went.


Alien: I was called to come pick him up and set him up to visit the proper time and place. Not just anyone can program a time machine. You have to coax and fool it, tell it lies and feed it licorice. There are only a half adozen who can do it deliberately. When it came time to set the coordinates for Isaac's trip, I had to trust his knowledge to find the proper day and location.


Isaac: It was unlike anything I had ever expected. The city was over three hundred years old and some of the families could trace their lineage back to the Crusades and before. In the timeless stone streets, time ran out for the citizens and the marauders and massacre-ers went through them without respect to sex or age. My own pain during the operation seemed like a festering pimple compared to the suffering of those people, members of the oldest Christian state on earth. And it was all I could do to keep from being slaughtered myself. Only superior strength and speed of the simulacrum body kept me out of reach of the bayonets and bullets. I took quite a few of them out, too, and dare say that if given a few months, I could have planned a defense that would have repelled them. When it was over, the little fellow came to take me back. They had to devalue my body so that I wouldn't stand out in my own time. When I woke from that operation, the little fellow took me home. Well, close to it.


Alien: I dropped him in Akron.


Isaac: As I watched the ship slide away into the night, I thought I had won. Until I found occasion to sleep. Then I learned that they had made themselves a good revenge. I could not dream, but every night as I tried to sleep, I saw the footage I had shot in Armenia.
I thought about it as I raged within against their treachery and soon I saw what the reward would have been. By keeping alive history so that far future generations could learn as much as they chose, I would have helped keep such things from happening again.
I had spurned my reward and wasted my gift.

I live now among the ruins of the city I saw destroyed, hiding from the occasional patrols, for this ground is off-limits, a target for an artillery school. Though so many died so long ago, it is comforting to wake from the nightmare and see some of the ancient streets, some of the stone buildings still holding their own. And some day, when the land is free, I hope to coax those who remember the city as it was back again.


Ann: And so our hero ends his tale of strangeness, and example of what you can expect but probably never find in the weird worlds where many are 'Scared to Death'. Brought to you by the Thrifty Mortuary, Nursing Home, and Pharmacy, this time every week.