Friday Radio: The Incident at Switchpath (Beyond Tomorrow)

Based on the story "The Sky Was Full of Ships" (aka "The Cave of History") by Theodore Sturgeon, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947.

Remember when I said we'd run through all the stories from Thrilling Wonder adapted for radio? Well...

I've read "The Sky Was Full of Ships," and seen the television adaptation from Tales of Tomorrow. So when I started listening to this episode, it seemed kind of... familiar. Oddly, the announcer twice says that "The Incident at Switchpath" is the title of Sturgeon's story.  But there's no such story, and this is clearly "The Sky Was Full of Ships."

This episode was intended for radio, but there's no evidence it was ever broadcast. Beyond Tomorrow recorded a pilot and three episodes (one of them a re-recording of the pilot). All the sources show that this episode was recorded on April 11, 1950, but it doesn't seem right to me. Dimension X premiered on April 8, 1950 with an adaptation of "The Outer Limit." But the fourth and final recording of Beyond Tomorrow, supposedly set to disc ten days later, was... "The Outer Limit." Go figure.

Another Theodore Sturgeon story from the original Thrilling Wonder appears in our upcoming Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 2. See a preview of "The Golden Helix" here.