 Family Theater presents Stephen McNally and Gene Hagan. From Hollywood, the Mutual Network in Cooperation with Family Theater presents After the Ball, starring Stephen McNally. And now, here's your hostess, Gene Hagan. Thank you, Tony LaFranco. Family Theater's only purpose is to bring to everyone's attention a practice that must become an important part of our lives if we are to win peace for ourselves, peace for our families, and peace for the world. Family Theater urges you to pray. Pray together as a family. And now, to our transcribed drama, After the Ball, starring Stephen McNally, as Will. Am I that poor at answer, Annie? Oh, no, I'm sorry. I was just thinking about something else. This is the night for it. How long do you think it'll be before you start? Half hour. 40 minutes, maybe. If you don't mind, Mr. Hope. You want to talk to your uncle? I think it's a good idea. I don't... I don't seem to see him, do you? Not for half an hour or so. There's Frank. He might know where he is. I'll ask him. Will you excuse me, Mr. Hope? Sure thing, honey. I was wondering if you were going to get around to me. You've danced with all the other good-looking fellas. Can I have a rain check? I'm going to be awful scarce around here in about a half hour. You may never get another chance. You shouldn't say things like that. Every precaution's been taken. All five of you'll come right back and unschedule, too. And I hope you're right. Have you seen Uncle Will? I think he went outside. I'm not sure about it, though. Want me to help you find him? There's his horse. Can't be far away. Probably just taking a breath of air. Sure you don't want me to help you scouting him up? No, thanks. Hey, give him a holler. If he knows the prettiest gal at the ball is looking for him, he'll high-tail it back here quick enough. Say, he might be over at the bus station. I think I know where he is. Thanks. Over here on the footbridge! Well, I've been looking all over for not here. Well, I'm up to your old tricks. Trying to wish water into the dry old Healer River. Having a look at the stars. And trying something new. What? Well, something I haven't done in 12 years. Not just sitting here being scared to death. Of the trip? Of the trip. Of hard radiation. And I'm not the only one. Don't you think there's enough lead shielding in the bus? Honey, it's not generally known, but last week, Doc Ryan remembered an old room at the hospital that had been used for X-raying people. We tore out the walls and found more shielding than we know what to do with. Well, why not let the people know about it? Honey, right now, that greyhound weighs about twice what it's supposed to weigh fully loaded. There's a little risk, but it gives us some margin for error. If word got around though, they might delay us again. So, this is just between us, huh? Until you get back. Come on, let's take a little walk. Why do you have to go, Uncle Will? Well, somebody has to. There'll be four others with me. It just doesn't seem fair. I read your last poem in the paper. Did you like it? It made me feel a lot closer to God. I'm glad. Watch your footing, honey. Oh, regular mountain goat. Considering you've never seen one, that's a pretty good description. I guess I've never seen much of anything. Well, as much as any other 16-year-old girl. But not like the older people. Well, most of them are trade what they've seen to be able to write poetry like yours. Still, I wish I'd seen things. Like mountain goats, you mean? Things like you have seen. They must have been beautiful. San Francisco with its bridges and spires and green hills and blue ocean. Los Angeles with its groves of orange trees and beautiful homes. I wish I'd seen Colorado's mountains and Nebraska's wheat and Washington's pine woods. New York with its tall buildings and steamboats on the Hudson. Did I say something? No, but it's been a long time since there were any steamboats on the Hudson. For that matter, Annie, it's most likely been a long time since there's any kind of a boat on the Hudson. Let's sit down here. Getting my shoes full of sand. That's nice out tonight. Uncle Will? Yeah? What happened? Oh, honey, you must have heard it a hundred times at the high school. I know, but each time they tell it a little differently. Besides, you were right in the heart of things. Think you might write a poem about it, Annie? Maybe a ballad. I might. It wouldn't be a happy thing. What about nobody ever coming to town and nobody in the right mind ever leaving? And you'd have to put in about the earthquake and the waiting? Tell it from the beginning. Well, I don't think I ever talked about it before, but... All right, I'll tell you what I can. Have you ever heard of a couple of little boys arguing? My pop can lick your pop, that kind of stuff? Yes. Well, I guess you could say that's about the way it started. Only it was nations, not little boys. And they were talking about weapons. Some professor in the East had come up with a string of mathematics that would make Euclid look like a hole in the ground. He called it the theory of relativity. That was Einstein. That's right. Well, one little piece of this theory of his had a lot about the structure and the qualities of atoms. And that's what led to atomic weapons? Indirectly. And much to the disgust of the professor I might add. Atomic power was the name of the bandwagon everybody jumped on. Well, I suppose only a few knew it was a wagon headed for oblivion. Every nation was trying to build bigger and better bombs than its neighbor. And while they were doing it, the Cold War was going on. That's the, my pop can lick your pop business. A lot of torque, a lot of muscle flexing, but no fighting. Well, this backward kind of diplomacy made us all a little fidgety, but we just sort of let it ride. A Cold War was a lot better than a heart one. Didn't people pray? Oh, I suppose some did, honey. But the people who lived in the world then were a lot different than the people living in Globar now. The day it happened, I guess that's the day we all got religion. A kid never shouts for popper until he needs him. And we were about the same. We didn't shout for God to, we were about scared to death. What about the big day? The big day. Well, Annie, 12 years ago the radio station was part of a network. A whole lot of radio stations all over the country tied together with telephone wires. Oh, we had our own programs, but for the most part we carried the network's programs from New York to Hollywood on phone wires. It was a Sunday and even though I was station manager I was handling the announcing shift too. Frank was the engineer then just like he is now. And he and I were alone the station. I was in the control room, which was where most of the broadcasting was done. And Frank was fooling around behind the transmitter trying to catalog his spare tubes. The voice of the Globe Miami area, Arizona. Our next newscast one hour from now at 10 a.m. We now rejoin the network for the Sunday morning symphony, a program already in progress. If you're through yakking in there... Hey, hey, you haven't got... No, I haven't got the mic open. But shouting is hardly the way to find out. We're writing the network for a while, huh? Yeah, yeah. Hey, is that all you've done? Got a lot of tubes to catalog here. What did you order so many for? Well, you can't hardly get them things no more. Hey, anything interesting in the news? I just read the newscast. Why didn't you listen? I was too busy. Besides, I like your condensed version. Anything going on? The Russians are testing their A-bombs, and we're testing ours, and it's about all. Yeah, those things give me the willies. Every morning when I get up, I'm surprised the world is still here. What was that bulletin you read about that station going off the air suddenly? Oh, some station in Newfoundland, weather station. Just stopped sending in the middle of a report. Those outfits usually have auxiliary transmitters, but there still hasn't been a peep out of this one. Yeah, I wonder why they made a bulletin out of it. Must be more to it than that. Oh, maybe there has, but... well, what difference would it make anyway? Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this program to bring you the following news bulletin. Hey, what's this? I thought for a second we'd lost the line there. This afternoon at 12.56 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, just 10 minutes ago, the Navy announced sight... Hey, now we have lost the line. What a time for it. Slap a filler record on the turntable, will you, Frank? What do you want? Oh, anything, anything. Oh, hold it now, huh? I'm going to turn on the mic. Right, right. Ladies and gentlemen, network service has been temporarily disrupted due to technical difficulties beyond our control. Until service can be restored, we offer a brief interlude of transcribed music. You want me to call the phone company? No, I'll do it. What a time to lose a program. Yeah, probably a tree across the phone line somewhere. Ed, don't give him too hard of a time. Hello, operator? Green on duty? Let me talk to him. Well, I don't care if he's busy, he's chief lineman, and we lost a line. This is the radio station. You what? What's up? No, I can't hear you. Wait a minute. Frank, turn on that monitor, will you? Yeah, sure. Operator, see if we can put Green on for a second, huh? Yeah, yeah, I'll wait. Yeah, what's her story? Operator said something happened on the side of Denver. They lost all their eastern transcontinental lines at the same time. She doesn't know what's wrong, but she says the phone office is a madhouse right now. Could be the... Hello? Hello, Green? Listen, Pete, what's this all about? I mean, you think maybe there's a plane crash or something across the lines? Oh, bigger than that, huh? But why don't you re-route our program through Phoenix by way of Salt Lake City or... Hello? Hello, Pete, Pete? Are you still with me? What did you say? Oh, for the love of mine. Please, Frank. All three blew up on you. Yeah. Yeah, all right, Pete. Bye. While I was talking to him, they lost their Salt Lake, El Paso, and Phoenix trunks all at the same time. He says beyond Miami, six miles away, he can't get anything but the harm of line amplifiers. El Paso, Salt Lake, and Phoenix? Oh, this is screwy. It doesn't make sense, Will. Hello, hello. In here, honey. Hi, Frank. Oh, hello, Alan. Been listening to the car radio? No. Just brought over the Sunday paper and some coffee for you. Why, something going on? Did something happen at the mines? I noticed the flash. Flash? What flash? Well, didn't you see at the whole skylight up for a second? It was kind of startling, what, with the sun being out. Where in the skylight? What direction? Oh, let's see. I was driving down Broad Street near the railroad bridge to the left, I'd say, in the general direction of Miami. Why, what's this all about? It's about the direction of Phoenix, too, Will. I'm afraid this is beginning to make sense. Oh, well, not to me it isn't. It must be something else, it must be something else. I hope so, Frank, but if there were an explosion in Phoenix, how long would it take the shockwave to reach us? Shockwave? We love the speed of sound. Phoenix is 90 miles, six or seven minutes, maybe? Oh, but Will, Will, it just can't be. Well, maybe we'd better stick our necks out anyway, Frank. You call Miami, call the mines. If they run a Sunday shift, better tell them to get their miners to the surface. I'll get in the mic and tell the people that... I'll tell them that maybe they can expect an earthquake. But Will, for an explosion in Phoenix to send a shockwave all the way to globe, what that would take? Well, an atomic bomb, at least. Yeah, at least. That's what we're afraid of, Helen. When I made that announcement, I was scared. If I were wrong, I knew I'd never hear the end of it. They'd be treating me like the village idiot. On the other hand, the last thing I wanted was to be right. As nearly as we could figure, about eight and a half minutes after Helen saw the flash, the shockwave hit us. I saw it knock our 220-foot transmitted tower sprawling, root up the trees behind the station, crack off laws, then open a great jagged fissure in the highway in front of the station and dump Helen's car into it. I didn't see anything after that. I was too busy holding onto the floor. Well, what happened to the station didn't count for much when we saw the town. Don't you remember any of it, Annie? Well, I remember the noise and the confusion and the fires. That's about all. Well, it was plenty of that, all right. They made emergency hospitals out of the depot, the high school, and the city hall. And then the mayor declared us all under martial law, but there weren't any members of the military to enforce it. So he split up the char between the lions, the Rotarians, and the Qwanis. That is those who weren't busy carrying stretches or fighting the fires. Klob looked like Armageddon right after the battle. But we had it a lot better than Miami. There wasn't much of that town left. When did you find out about the rest of the country? Well, as a matter of fact, it was that night. Clyde Hope, he was mayor then, came to the station and met with a couple of city fathers and a few assorted citizens to have a try at working out a plan of action. Oh, hello, Clyde. Hello, Will. Are you and Frank having any luck getting her back on the air? No, I ought to be able to fire up the transmitter inside of an hour. But the tower is... Oh, Pete Green gave us a couple of telephone poles. We've got the antenna strong between them. Well, it worked. Well, it worked when the Healer River flooded us out in 1943. It ought to work again. And I hope so. Now, where are the others? Inside the main studio. We're depending on you, Frank. We need help. Got to have something to holler with. And you'll get it. Come on inside, Clyde. All right. Lord, I never thought anything like this would happen when I ran from there. Well, wait. Wait a minute, William. What's the matter, Clyde? Is the family you lose someone? No, no. My brother took the jeep on one of his prospecting trips, but I'm not worried about him, not with the kind of luck he's got. It's just... Well, what am I going to say to those people in there? All right. I don't know, Clyde. What am I going to tell them that the government's going to rush aid just as soon as you get this station back on the air and ask for it? Will, I don't even know if there's any government left. I don't know if there's anything left on North America outside this town. If the communists got Phoenix, it's a cinch they went after L.A. and New York and Washington and every other big town. What can I say? Well, what do you feel like saying? I feel like saying my prayers. That's what I feel like saying. Well, then why don't you, Clyde? I think maybe I might just do that will. All right, let's go in. Clyde did open the meeting with a prayer. It was a good one and it was a good meeting. We made a lot of decisions about rebuilding the growing of foodstuffs in case we didn't get any more from the outside. We made a law about fuel conservation. We wrote a law against hoarding food, voted on it and passed it. Then we started speculating on sending out an expedition to take a look at Phoenix. Well, gentlemen, I wouldn't do that if I were you. I don't believe I've seen you before. Well, you haven't. My name's Ted Boucher. I was staying at the hotel when I heard the warning on the radio. I don't live here, but since it looks like I'm going to, at least for a while, I'd like to put in my two cents worth. What's on your mind, Mr. Boucher? Well, gentlemen, I live, maybe I should say I lived in L.A. I just came out here to do some prospecting. Prospecting? Oh, that's not my regular business. I just heard about this area, how you'd had gold and silver and then copper here, and I thought maybe there might be a little uranium, too. Now, I don't know a whole lot about it, being one of those weekend diggers, but I have got some information that might interest you. What is it? This town's not doing as well as you think. What do you mean? This whole area is hot. You mean radioactive? Close to it? Well, how do you know how? This gadget I have here with me proves it. Here, I'll put it up on the table so you can all see it. What is it? It's called a scintillometer. Like a Geiger counter, but more sensitive. What does this thing have to say? Now, the normal reading is about 40. Globe, as of Saturday afternoon, had a reading of 50, which doesn't mean a whole lot. A couple of hours after the shockwave hit us, well, just listen. It's registering 3,000. That's not much hotter than a pretty fair uranium. It's safe? It's safe enough. Will you turn that thing off, please? Sure. What I want to tell you is this. The count stays the same right here in town. But it goes up the farther you go out of town. In any direction? In either direction on the main highway. I tried them both. What it boils down to is this as far as I can make out. Any place outside this town is poisoned. So if you're planning on going out of here to take a look, you'd better give the countryside 10 or 12 years to cool off first and then have plenty of lead shielding anyway. That's my advice, my two cents worth. And if you don't want to take the word of a stranger, the chances are you can read up on it at your own library. We'll take your word for it, Mr. Boucher. The first weeks were hard on everyone. A few extra problems came up. The survivors from Miami straggled in. A dozen or so tourists who had been caught on the highways made it. Most of them died of either burns or dry and diagnosed as radiation sickness. And the radio station took on a double chore. We listened. On two dozen assorted radios, we listened to every band used by commercial broadcasters. I don't see how you expect to talk to anybody, even if you do hear them. You can't hear this station a hundred miles away anyway. You can now, Helen. See, when all other stations are off the air, one station can be heard for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of miles. Oh. If the conditions are right, yes. But what if the conditions are right? Wait, wait, wait. Hear that? Hey, we've got something here. Hello, Globe. I am monitoring you on 1240. Do you read me? Give me that mic. Yeah, here. Start the tape recorder. Yeah. Right. Hello. Hello, this is Globe. We read you. Who are you? Commercial Broadcast Station, C.J.F.X., in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. Where are you? Globe. Do you know what happened? Is Globe near Montreal or New England? We need medical help. You're the first contact we've made in this country. Are you near us? Nova Scotia. That's way up above New England, isn't it? Yes, quite a ways. Hello, Antigonish. We're roughly 4,000 miles away from you. You said first contact in this country. Have you heard from abroad? Talked with a Swedish freighter at sea. Can they help you? They say they cannot make port without being contaminated. They said they have contacted other ships at sea and that Europe and Asia are silent. They think radioactive dust fallouts is the cause. They can give no aid. As to what happened, your navy cited enemy guided missiles in flight over the Atlantic. When one destroyed a city and weather station in Newfoundland, a retaliatory missile attack was launched by your government and mine. Apparently both sides lost. Hello, Globe, are you still with me? We're still with you, Antigonish. We're sick here. We need medical aid. Will you relay our message? Yes, we'll relay your message. Sorry, we can't do more. We'll talk again in four hours. Four, four hours. Pray for us, Globe. Well, we did as they asked. We relayed the message. We prayed for them too. And we prayed for ourselves as we watched the skies for dust clouds. But thank God they never came. We never heard from a station in Nova Scotia again. Maybe weather conditions were never right for the transmission again. Maybe there was just no one left to talk to. After the end of the first year, we stopped trying to reach them and beamed our transmitter towards South America. But you never heard from them? No, not from anyone. But we figured they'd have to be a few towns left, scattered maybe through the Rockies or Idaho or the Sierra Nevada's. Perhaps too small to have a radio station of their own. But if they could hear us, it'd give them some hope. So we kept broadcasting. But then we ran into the fuel shortage. We cut transmission back to four hours a day, stopped driving automobiles, went back to horses. And little by little, we sort of established a new kind of existence, a new way of life. And it's pretty much like the life Globe knew a hundred years ago when there was a gold mining town. In the trip out? Well, Annie, we've always figured on that. Boucher had said ten or twelve years. We checked his figures and decided on twelve. Then we planned everything. We picked the last bus that had come to town to take us out, spent the best part of a year and a half letting it and getting it all ready. We've even been planning this party for years. The grand ball to give us a royal send-off. Oh! Well, I guess the ball is over. Come on. I've got a bus to catch. I... I don't know, Uncle Will. I'm still worried. Well, I guess I am too. A little bit. If only there was something I could do. There is, honey. What? You can pray for us. This is Gene Hagen again. It can't happen here. You've heard that before. It's something nearly everyone thinks and usually without having any real reason at all. There's a kind of a parallel. An army captain stood before a group of American soldiers. He said, men, only one of you will come back from this mission alive. Every man in the group immediately started feeling sorry for the others. Every man thought, it's too bad about what's going to happen to those other guys. But naturally, it can't happen to me. It can't happen here. Actually, that's a very good way for a soldier in battle to think. It makes him do things he might otherwise be too afraid to do. But it's not a good way for civilians to think. In fact, it's a very dangerous thing, complacency. It's true that another war might not be quite as destructive as was shown in tonight's program. But it's not beyond the realm of possibility. Fortunately, there is something we can do about it. We can pray for peace. We can ask God to direct our leaders and the leaders of other nations to a workable solution to the world's problems. Prayer can ensure the future for us and for our children. For through it, we attain divine assistance. Through prayer and prayer alone, we can make sure that it can't happen here. For a world at prayer is a world at peace. And when you pray, pray together as a family, and you'll be assuring yourselves of the same security in your family that you ask for the world. The family that prays together stays together. More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Leo Curley, John Daener and Howard Culver. The script was written and directed for Family Theater by Robert Hugo Sullivan with music composed and conducted by Harry Zimmerman. This series of Family Theater broadcasts is made possible by the thousands of you who feel the need for this type of program. By the mutual network which has responded to this need. And by the hundreds of stars of stage, screen and radio who give so unselfishly of their time and talent to appear on our Family Theater stage. To them and to you, our humble thanks. This is Tony LaFranco expressing the wish of Family Theater that the blessing of God may be upon you and your home and inviting you to be with us next week when Family Theater will present Who am I starring Barbara Britton? Jean Lockhart will be your host. Join us, won't you? Family Theater has broadcast throughout the world and originates in the Hollywood studios of the world's largest network. This is Mutual, the radio network for all America.