Old Time Radio Mystery, Suspense, & Horror · Dakoda Black

1094 - Now You See Them, Now You Don't (CBS)

February 16, 2026·40 min·3 clips

Shock casualties in a military hospital vanish before your eyes with a sound like a champagne cork popping.

The nerves get primed early. E.G. Marshall brings the listener into a colder kind of war story, the sort where a discovery arrives before anyone is ready to handle it. Professor Harry Scrimm is serving hard labor in a reactivated Alcatraz in the year 2171, and his future is bleak from the start. The setup reaches back to World War II and the nuclear bomb, then pushes toward another war with a consequence even stranger than the weapon itself. The generals want order. Scrimm's story refuses to give it to them. It slips out of military logic and into scenes that feel staged, frantic, and hard to pin down. Caesar appears in disguise, or maybe Van Hur appears as Caesar, then as Ben Hur, and the whole thing turns into a knot of mistaken identity and theatrical pleading. Vesta enters. So does Sergeant Leela Tibbet, whose sacred ritual gets pulled into the chase. Then the story jumps again, into a parliamentary fight over the Suez Canal, where cost, empire, and authority become another performance nobody can hold steady. The episode enjoys the absurdity, but the joke has teeth. People in command keep reaching for weapons they do not understand. Scrimm sees more than Harp does. By the end, General U.B. Harp is stuck waiting while America searches for something that can defend poetry, beauty, and the better things in life. Scrimm laughs because the bomb's secret has slipped past force, rank, and practical command. The ending is sadder than it sounds. Someone who was not there goes away to a time that never was, and even Marshall seems to envy the idea a little.

As heard by us

A future-war satire with a bleak, oddly graceful ending.

The episode leans into future-war satire with a bleak comic edge, following Professor Harry Scrimm through 20 years hard labor in reactivated Alcatraz as he recounts how a fantastic bombshell in 2171 changed the western world and how General Harp's patriotic slogan starts to…

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Why you'd press play

When a future war turns into a disappearing act.

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