Home - Humor from a.r.k Matt McIrvin mmcirvin@world.std.com

Scientifiction Playhouse:

The Mysterious Doctor Socrates

(by Matt McIrvin, with script doctoring by James "Kibo" Parry)

PROLOGUE

(Music. Superimpose title on a rotating, dish-like object with a spiral painted on it, mounted on top of an oscilloscope cabinet:

SCIENTIFICTION
PLAYHOUSE
A GIX Television Production

The camera pans past a row of tuning forks and a bank of blinking lights, to a metal box bearing a single red button. Enter Coolidge Mercer.)

MERCER: Good evening. Welcome to Scientifiction Playhouse. I'm your host, Coolidge Mercer. No doubt you are wondering what this strange device might be. It is perhaps just an ordinary button...or perhaps the most important button in the history of science. You may have heard of the famous "nuclear button." This is that same button, loaned to us courtesy of President Eisenhower and the United States Air Force. And now, I'm going to push it.

(Mercer pushes the button. It makes a soft click. Nothing in particular happens.)

MERCER: Even as I speak, my action is setting automated teletypes into motion, relaying orders to the bomber pilots of Strategic Air Command. Within ten minutes, hundreds of planes will be launched, carrying their cargoes of atom bombs to sites within the Soviet Union. In a few hours, World War III will have begun. Have the Reds attacked? (Smiles) Not at all. I merely wanted to dramatize what happens when the human body responds to bacterial invasion. Red blood cells lead the counterattack, as if guided by molecular radar. And radar is a very important factual idea in today's plausible, yet fictional, story.

ACT I

(Title:

THE MYSTERIOUS
DOCTOR SOCRATES

Camera pans past laboratory glassware to a Bunsen burner, on which sits a bubbling flask of dark liquid. A lab-coated young scientist, Bob, takes the flask off the burner and pours the contents into a coffee cup, then takes a drink. He writes a few lines on a pad of paper, then looks up as Dr. Lewis, a distinguished-looking, elderly scientist played by Whit Bissell, enters.)

DR. LEWIS: Bob, you've been working too hard. Why don't you take a break? Go home and get some rest.
BOB: I can't, Doc, not until I finish my work on these mice. All this work, and they still don't respond to radar. Take a look. (He gives Dr. Lewis a cylindrical, hatbox-like container. Dr. Lewis looks into the container, and we see an overhead view of a couple of mice walking around on a rotating turntable.)
DR. LEWIS: Have patience, Bob. Science is just a matter of time. We know that mice can use radar, because their close cousins, the bats, already do. We just have to produce the chemical that allows them to do this, and radar mice will be ours.
BOB: But according to my calculations, I do have the chemical! It's right here, in this beaker! And yet, the mice do nothing. Science can't explain this!
DR. LEWIS: Patience, boy. Science can find an answer for everything. (A knock on the door.) Why, whom could that be?

(Dr. Socrates, a tall man in top hat and tails played by William Schallert, enters and doffs his hat.)

DR. SOCRATES: Greetings, fellows! I am Dr. Socrates. I am pleased to make your acquaintance. (Bows deeply.) I've come a long way to see you-why, it must have been over twelve billion miles!
DR. LEWIS: So you're from out of town, are you? From whereabouts exactly?
DR. SOCRATES: Oh, you wouldn't have heard of it. Nobody on your small planet would have, in fact, even using your largest telescopes.
DR. LEWIS: From out of state, then?
BOB: What brings you here?
DR. SOCRATES: Well, I can solve your radar-mouse problem. First of all, I'll have to attend to this blackboard. (Walks up to a blackboard covered with trigonometric formulae, and changes one exponent from "2" to "3.")
BOB: Don't touch that!
DR. LEWIS: (goggling at blackboard) Of course! It...It all suddenly makes sense!
DR. SOCRATES: That's half of the problem. The other half is...interference.
BOB: You mean, somebody's interfering with our mice?
DR. SOCRATES: Yes, using radar. Radar of a technology unknown to your science. In fact, I thought it was unknown on this planet in this century...until now.
DR. LEWIS: Then we'd better find out who it is!
DR. SOCRATES: I have important business to attend to. Good evening, gentlemen. (Puts on his top hat and leaves.)
BOB: That Doc Socrates certainly was an odd duck. I'll bet he's not from around here.
DR. LEWIS: A truly odd duck indeed.

(Commercial.)

ACT II

(We see the stock footage of spinning mice again. Superimpose title and repeat opening theme. Dissolve to:

Two spacesuited figures sit at opposite ends of a sort of rotating teeter-totter, supposedly a centrifuge. They face, oddly, in the direction of motion.)

MERCER: At a top-secret laboratory far below the Nevada desert, our nation's top scientists plan for a history-making expedition-a flight to the planet Jupiter, which could be the first step toward a landing on the Moon. In preparation, prospective space pioneers attempt to endure the crushing gravities they might possibly encounter on such a mission.

(A man and a woman, wearing lab coats, stand behind a row of oscilloscopes and transformers, apparently watching the offscreen centrifuge through an opaque wall.)

MAN: That Ted can make it up to ten Gs isn't so surprising. But Barbara?
WOMAN: In space, there will be no weaker sex.
MAN: Give me good old Earth anytime, baby!

(Closeup of a meter, labeled TANDY, dropping from 7 millivolts to zero.)

WOMAN: Well, the centrifuge has stopped spinning. Let's see if they're all right.

(Two spacesuits walk into the scene, one walking normally, the other staggering. The healthy spacesuit takes off its helmet; inside is a young woman, none the worse for wear. The other takes off his helmet, grimaces, spins around, and falls to the floor, comatose. He is a young DeForest Kelley.)

WOMAN: Is he all right?
MAN: He seems to be in crushing pain!

(Music. Commercial.)

ACT III

MERCER: After the young spaceman's collapse, doctors worked to attempt to discover what mysterious ailment had crippled him. Was it connected to the baffling failure of the mouse-radar experiment?

(DeForest Kelley sits in a hospital bed, speaking to a doctor.)

KELLEY: I simply don't understand it! I've been on that centrifuge a dozen times before, and I could always take ten Gs, even twenty, with no trouble!

(Enter Dr. Socrates.)

DR. SOCRATES: Don't mind me; I'm Dr. Socrates. I'm here to investigate your problem.
KELLEY: I'm a scientist, not a laboratory specimen.
DR. SOCRATES: Now, now, I simply suspect that it's related to another thing I've been worrying about. I don't want to cause any trouble.
DOCTOR: Care for a smoke, Dr. Socrates? And how about our space explorer?
KELLEY: Thanks, Doc.
DR. SOCRATES: Don't mind if I do. (Each takes a cigarette from the doctor, and they all light up.)
DOCTOR: They're Archdukes, the only cigarettes I recommend. They're flame-broiled, so they're soothing to the throat and lungs. (to DeForest Kelley) Have you felt weak before, say, over the past week?
KELLEY: (inhaling smoke deeply) Now that you mention it, I did have a moment of...strange nausea just a few days ago.
DOCTOR: Where were you at the time?
KELLEY: (perplexed) Where was I?...Someplace very high...I was on the observation deck...at the top of the Empire State Building.
DR. SOCRATES: Of course! Thank you, both of you! You've helped me find it! Not in my six thousand years of life has something like this happened!
DOCTOR: Well, sir, I'm glad we were of service.

(A windowless wall. Dr. Socrates shows a boxlike apparatus to an army colonel.)

DR. SOCRATES: Well, here we are at the top of the Empire State Building. This, Colonel, is a radar interference detector. A sort of modern version of nature's humble bat.
COLONEL: I've never seen anything like that before.
DR. SOCRATES: That's because you humans haven't invented it yet!
COLONEL: Are you from New York?
DR. SOCRATES: Let's just say I'm from...another "city." Another place, another time.
COLONEL: Oh...Jersey! Does your detector say anything?

(Close-up of what looks curiously like a cloudy, circular window into an aquarium. A fish-shaped blip swims past on the screen.)

DR. SOCRATES: Yes, it does! That light on the screen indicates that a large concentration of radium exists in a certain coffeehouse in Greenwich Village.
COLONEL: It's agents of an enemy nation, then!
DR. SOCRATES: Precisely! And now we'll catch them red-handed, to coin a phrase.

(A nearly identical, windowless wall. The Colonel puts handcuffs on several goateed, beret-wearing, stripe-shirted beatniks. Dr. Socrates looks on.)

BEATNIK: What's the big idea, daddy-O?
COLONEL: The national security of the USA is the big idea! This coffeehouse contained over twelve pounds of Communist radium! In case you didn't know, that's against the law.
ANOTHER BEATNIK: The law is for squares!
DR. SOCRATES: Oh, no, it isn't! The law was made by good men, heroic men. And I have them here with me!

(In walk recognizable facsimiles of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Julius Caesar, Isaac Newton, and Sherlock Holmes.)

BEATNIK: (stunned) Dig those crazy hepcats!
DR. SOCRATES: Meet my good friends, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Julius Caesar, Galileo, and Sherlock Holmes! (Each bows in turn.) And now that my job is done, I can return to whence I came.

(Swelling music. Title: THE END.)

EPILOGUE

(Coolidge Mercer sits at his desk, reading Scientific American. Several other issues of Scientific American lie in a neat row on the desk.)

MERCER: Who was Doctor Socrates? Was he from Earth, or from somewhere else? The world may never know...Our story, of course, was fiction. It has not happened...yet. Could it have happened? I have here Dr. Absalom Symmes of the Florida School of Mines, an expert on the planet Jupiter. Professor Symmes, in the course of his investigations, has seen Jupiter with his own eyes. Twice! Welcome, Professor Symmes.
SYMMES: (into the camera) I'm glad to be here, Mr. Mercer.
MERCER: Professor Symmes, is there life on Jupiter?
SYMMES: (into the camera) I have here (produces chart) a picture of the planet Jupiter, as conceived of by scientists. Now, as you can see, these banded structures and this large spot change and move over the course of the year. We think that these green and blue-green features are clear evidence of plant life on Jupiter. We cannot, however, be sure about animal life, but the bands do resemble canals.
MERCER: Could man survive on Jupiter?
SYMMES: Yes, with the aid of a breathing mask to provide oxygen, and, of course, heavy boots to keep him from floating away in the weightlessness of space. Jupiter, as you may know, has over three moons, which would make it an ideal spot for that romantic getaway! And its high gravity would make it easy to land.
MERCER: (smiling broadly) Thank you, Professor Symmes. (To camera) Join us next week for another exciting adventure in the world of fiction...and science. (Music. End credits.)

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