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Dimension X
The Original Short Stories
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Title Page
About the Program
Bibliography
Epigraph
Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium - Fletcher Pratt
Requiem - Robert A. Heinlein
The Professor was a Thief - L. Ron Hubbard
The Roads Must Roll - Robert A. Heinlein
Universe - Robert A. Heinlein
Nightfall - Issac Asimov
Nightmare Number Three - Stephen Vincent Benét
The Embassy - Donald A. Wollheim
Almost Human - Robert Bloch
Competition - E. Mayne Hull
First Contact - Murray Leinster
A Logic Named Joe - Murray Leinster
The Last Objective - Paul A. Carter
The Green Hills of Earth - Robert A. Heinlein
Child’s Play - William Tenn
Time and Again - H. Beam Piper
With Folded Hands - Jack Williamson
. . . and the moon be still as bright - Ray Bradbury
Mars is Heaven! - Ray Bradbury
The Long Years - Ray Bradbury
Knock - Fredric Brown
Marionettes, Inc. - Ray Bradbury
The Lost Race - Murray Leinster
Kaleidoscope - Ray Bradbury
The Outer Limit - Graham Doar
The Report on the Barnhouse Effect - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Potters of Firsk - Jack Vance
There Will Come Soft Rains - Ray Bradbury
To the Future - Ray Bradbury
The World the Children Made - Ray Bradbury
Courtesy - Clifford D. Simak
Vital Factor - Nelson S. Bond
Untitled Story - Frank M. Robinson
With an echoing DIMENSION X-X-X-X, you knew you were about to be transported from your mundane, everyday existence somewhere completely different . . . possibly another planet.
Dimension X featured stories from some of the most well-known science fiction writers at the beginning of their career such as Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Isaac Asimov.
The original stories were adapted by script writers, Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts, as well as contributing their own original scripts.
Before Dimension X, only one other adult-oriented science fiction show appeared on radio, Two Thousand Plus; but, with the well-known writers involved, Dimension X had almost instant credibility with science fiction fans. Radio was an excellent medium for science fiction in the 1950s. It was easy to visit other planets, interact with aliens or fly in a space ship in your imagination. It wasn’t so easy to bring to life on television in the 1950s.
The show first aired April 8, 1950 and completed its run on September 29, 1951 including a five-month hiatus in the middle. There were 50 episodes during the shows run.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium (Fletcher Pratt), Astounding Science Fiction, May 1934
Requiem (Robert A. Heinlein), Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1940
The Professor Was a Thief (L. Ron Hubbard), Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1940
The Roads Must Roll (Robert A. Heinlein), Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940
Universe (Robert A. Heinlein), Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1941
Nightfall (Isaac Asimov), Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1941
Nightmare Number Three (Stephen Vincent Benét), Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét, 1942
The Embassy (Donald A. Wollheim), Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1942
Almost Human (Robert Bloch), Fantastic Adventures, June 1943
Competition (E. Mayne Hull), Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1943
First Contact (Murray Leinster), Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1945
A Logic Named Joe (Murray Leinster), Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1946
The Last Objective (Paul A. Carter), Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1946
The Green Hills of Earth (Robert A. Heinlein), The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1947
Child’s Play (William Tenn), Astounding Science Fiction, March 1947
Time and Again (H. Beam Piper), Astounding Science Fiction, April 1947
With Folded Hands (Jack Williamson), Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947
. . . and the moon be still as bright (Ray Bradbury), Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948
Mars is Heaven! (Ray Bradbury), Planet Stories, Fall, August 1948
The Long Years (Ray Bradbury), Maclean’s, September 15, 1948
Knock (Fredric Brown), Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1948
Marionettes, Inc. (Ray Bradbury), Startling Stories, March 1949
The Lost Race (Murray Leinster), Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1949
Kaleidoscope (Ray Bradbury), Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949
The Outer Limit (Graham Doar), The Saturday Evening Post, December 24, 1949
The Report on the Barnhouse Effect (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.), Collier’s, February 11, 1950
The Potters of Firsk (Jack Vance), Astounding Science Fiction, May 1950
There Will Come Soft Rains (Ray Bradbury), Collier’s, May 6, 1950
To the Future (Ray Bradbury), Collier’s, May 13, 1950
The World the Children Made (Ray Bradbury), The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950
Courtesy (Clifford D. Simak), Astounding Science Fiction, August 1951
Vital Factor (Nelson S. Bond), Esquire, August 1951
Untitled Story (Frank M. Robinson), Astounding Science Fiction, September 1951
Adventures in time and space
told in future tense!
DIMENSION X X X x x x
Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium
Fletcher Pratt
Many of the functions of the human organizations are subject to great beneficial or unfortunate effects from the operation of the ductless glands. Some affect the growth, making a man large or small. Many cases of gigantism are due to the pituitary gland, so that a circus giant may be looked upon as abnormal, independent of his size. We are only at the beginning of the appreciation of the functions of the mysterious glands in the human system and operations on the size of human beings may yet enter into regular , medical practise.
NOTE by the editors: The following manuscript is one of the results of the famous Grimshaw Sanitarium scandal, an event which in its day, made a tremendous stir, cost a state superintendent of hospitals his post, and turned the course of an election. But every state has its scandals of this type. It is seldom that their reveberations extend beyond the immediate locality; and for the benefit of those who have not heard of or do not remember the Grimshaw case, we will briefly rehearse the known facts.
Dr. Adelbert Grimshaw, a physician of German extraction, opened a private sanitarium for nervous cases at Gowanda, near the grounds occupied by the State Hospital for the Insane. It was a very select institution, catering to the wealthiest patients, and the high fees Dr. Grimshaw secured from them enabled him to establish a charity ward in which, with admirable public spirit, he labored to improve the condition of the indigent feeble-minded.
Dr. Grimshaw appears to have effected some remarkable cures in insanity cases; several well-attested instances of complete recovery from paranoia are recorded under his ministrations. At the same time it was noted that a good many patients died at his sanitarium, and later investigation revealed that these belonged to two classes—wealthy patients whose
relatives were at a great distance, and both poor and wealthy patients who had no relatives at all.
It was the case of Harlan Ward that led to the scandal. This unfortunate young man, the son of the famous automobile manufacturer, was committed to Grimshaw’s sanitarium by his parents and wife in the autumn of 1927 in an effort to cure him of the liquor habit. He was duly discharged as cured some eight months later, but about a year after his discharge it was discovered that he had begun to take drugs, and he was returned to the institution. Some time after this, while his wife and parents were in Europe they received a cablegram from Dr. Grimshaw announcing the death of the young man. They at once returned to the United States and made arrangements for the removal of the body from the place where it had been temporarily interred at the Trinity (Episcopal) Chapel of Gowanda to the family vault at Short Hills, Long Island. While passing through New York City, the hearse carrying the casket was struck by another car. The hearse was overturned and the casket broken. It proved to contain, instead of the body of Harlan Ward, a dummy dressed in his clothes and stuffed with sand, the face being represented by an ingenious wax mask.
There was an immediate investigation, in the course of which many facts came to light. The most striking of these was that in nearly every case of patients, whose death at the sanitarium had been reported by Dr. Grimshaw, the body was similarly missing, and a sand-stuffed dummy was substituted in the coffin. None of these bodies has ever been discovered. The death certificates had all been signed by Dr. Grimshaw himself.
This sensational discovery was followed by the arrest of Dr. Benjamin Voyna, Grimshaw’s chief assistant. Papers found in the safe of the Grimshaw Sanitarium showed beyond doubt that it had been made the headquarters of a gang engaged in distributing narcotics, and that both Dr. Grimshaw and Dr. Voyna were deeply engaged in the traffic. It was undoubtedly at the sanitarium itself that Harland Ward had contracted the drug habit that proved his ruin.
Of the other facts uncovered by the police there were two of such singular character that the present manuscript appears to afford the only adequate explanation for them, however fantastic it may seem. One of these was that while running a sanitarium and a drug ring, Dr. Grimshaw apparently found time for the breeding of large numbers of cats. Over thirty were found in and about the premises by the State Police when they raided the place. The other, and more extraordinary fact, was that Dr. Grimshaw, through a chain of agents, seems to have been engaged in the peculiar business of supplying circuses and vaudeville impressarios with dwarfs.
Most of these midgets (as is not unusual) were morons, and many of them were both drug-users and drug-peddlers.
Dr. Voyna ultimately received a jail sentence of five years; the heaviest allowable for dope peddling under the laws of the United States. Grimshaw was never apprehended. Warned no doubt by the first newspaper accounts of the bursting of the Ward casket, he took to flight and has not been found since. If he is ever arrested it is doubtful whether any charge but drug-peddling will lie against him. The laws of New York require that a body shall be produced before a charge of murder can be substantiated, the corpus delicti, and as we have stated not one of the bodies of his victims has been found. Investigation of the doctor’s past career showed that he had been a graduate of Heidelberg and Jena where he took high honors in endocrinology, but that he later lost his German license on account of malpractice. His original name was Grundhausen.
As to the present manuscript. When the State Troopers raided the Grimshaw Sanitarium they found it nearly empty. In the search for incriminating evidence, which followed, one of the troopers found three gelatine capsules in a corner by the fireplace in the reception room. He dropped them into his pocket and forgot about them until some time later. When he examined them, he found they contained something white. Imagining it might be drugs of some land, he turned them over to the State Medical Examiner.
The Medical Inspector opened one of the capsules and found that it held a small wad of exceedingly thin paper, apparently cut or torn from the edge of a thin-paper edition of the Bible. He noted that something was written on the paper in minute characters. With the aid of a microscope, he was able to decipher the writing, which was finer than anything but the finest known engraving. Like the first, the other capsules contained strips of paper, and when the whole had been deciphered and arranged in its obvious order the following manuscript resulted. It will be noted that there is a gap in the story, representing, probably, another capsule which has not yet been found.
INTO whatever hands this may fall, I pray to God that the finder will lay it before the police at the earliest opportunity. I herewith lay a complaint that Dr. Grimshaw is engaged in the drug traffic; Dr. Voyna, his assistant must be involved also.
I fear that in spite of my precautions this will fall into Grimshaw’s hands; if so, it will only provide that good doctor with a view of how he looks to other people—Sherman and Kraicki, Arthur Kaye and myself. Dr. Grimshaw, we salute you! Behold your mirror—a mirror set in a skull, as it were—for we speak to you as men already dead. And you, unknown finder and reader of this last testament of a dying man, if you be not Grimshaw himself, will you do me the last favor that even the condemned of the scaffold may ask? A small thing—merely to inform Miss Millicent Armbruster of 299 Wallace Avenue. Buffalo, that John Doherty is indeed dead.
Then put the police on the trail. The officers will no doubt be skeptical—ask them to make an examination of the coffin that supposedly contains the remains of Arthur Kaye.
I may as well start my story at the beginning, lest I be taken for one of the sad souls that infest this place, merely maundering under a delusion of persecution. I have no such mania; neither am I one of the dipsomaniacs and drug-fiends kept here for “cures;” strangely ironic word. My name is John Doherty; I am a graduate of Hamilton College, class of ‘16, a member of the Theta Alpha fraternity, and a detective by profession. I was led into the business by a certain taste for romance and a physical development that caused me to become a member of most of the athletic teams at college.
I had been working for the Pinkerton agency for some time when they sent me as additional guard with a money shipment from Buffalo to Philadelphia. The messenger in charge of it was suspected of double-dealing. It was essential that extra protection be provided, and I was locked with him in the baggage car. The journey was a long one, the motion of the train soporific. I suppose I dozed; I was wakened by a flicker of motion as the messenger drew his gun, and we both fired at practically the same moment. My bullet killed him; his just grazed my skull, rendering me unconscious.
When I had recovered from the injury, I found some difficulty in concentrating enough attention on my work to do it properly, and my employers, as a matter of gratitude, decided to send me to Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium, which had already achieved a considerable reputation through the remarkable success of the doctor in handling just such cases.
I was received with extreme courtesy, subjected to a searching series of inquiries as to my tastes, habits and past life, and then given a series of tests that were readily recognizable as modified Binet-Simon examinations. It seemed rather unnecessary, as a man with a college diploma is supposed to be beyond that sort of thing, I fancy, but I made no comment, imagining that Dr. Grimshaw knew his business. He did—to my infinite cost.
At the sanitarium I was given a pleasant room and very little by way of occupation. I was kept in at all times save during meals and for a short period in the afternoon, when all the patients were taken for exercise to a large park or garden, with a small stream running through it. During this period I encountered Arthur Kaye, a large man with a high forehead, who was under treatment for dipsomania; a man named Kraicki, a decayed Polish aristocrat of a sort who was troubled apparently with a chronic weak-mindedness; Sherman, the interne in charge of our wing, to whom I felt considerably drawn by common tastes in literature and art.
There was little to do in the park but to sit and talk with these th
ree. We formed a more or less self-sustaining group, somewhat separated from the other patients and internes about us.
For a time, we attempted to amuse ourselves by playing bridge, but this resource proved futile. Kraicki was totally incapable of keeping his mind on the game, and would ask the most absurdly naive questions about what he should do when he held four aces. Naturally, the enforced idleness began to become somewhat wearisome. I am of an intensely active temperament, and have led an active life, and I began to cudgel my brains for something to do. Even a covert breaking of rules struck me as a fascinating occupation; at least it would provide me with something to plan and accomplish.
Searching about for a rule to break in the most interesting way, I hit on the problem of the wall. At the left side of the park a high stone wall separated our bourne from that where the charity patients were confined. Sherman remarked one day that nobody but Grimshaw himself, and his leading assistant, Voyna, were allowed beyond it, and the building in which the charity patients were kept was only connected with the main body of the sanitarium by a kind of covered passage. To get over that wall and solve the mystery of the seclusion of the charity patients—that would be an enterprise worthy of accomplishment.
So one afternoon, just before we were called for the regular period of exercise, I arranged a dummy in my bed. After the exercise period, as we emerged from the dining room, a more or less disorderly group, I slipped around a corner into the operating room and waited behind the door till the attendants, who brought up the rear of the procession, had passed, then back into the dining room, and out one of the windows into the park again. There T concealed myself in a little group of maples by the edge of the stream until darkness came. I knew the night attendant in the halls would flash his lamp through the peep-hole in the door of my room, but trusted to the dummy (as I have many times done in detective work) to deceive him.
After the lights in the building went out, I searched along the wall until I found a tree growing against it, scaled it with some little difficulty and dropped down on the other side. I found myself in another exercise yard—not so large nor so well carpeted with grass as ours, and without the stream. It was entirely shut in by a lofty wall, crowned with spikes on every side save that where I came over.
