Terror from the Skies

Maureen Hodges heads out for a teachers' banquet at the Silver Wind restaurant, leaving Jimmy Barclay to look after her son Lawrence for the evening. Jimmy has a killer essay to write, so he parks Lawrence in front of the television - where Lawrence gleefully soaks up a late-night monster movie fest, complete with creatures with very long teeth. Lawrence insists the scary movies do not affect him one bit, but he soon comes creeping back, unwilling to sit in a room by himself. Jimmy lets him listen to Odyssey FM instead, figuring a little radio music cannot hurt anybody.

Meanwhile, at the radio station, Edwin Blackgaard and his Harlequin Players are about to attempt something grand: a live radio drama called Terror from the Skies, told entirely through fake news bulletins about space aliens invading Odyssey itself. The station's owner, Mr. Miffland, loves the idea, but he insists that Edwin work the sponsors' commercials into the show - or the show gets cancelled.

The broadcast begins, and it sounds alarmingly real. A bulletin announces that a meteor has landed in Gower's Field. Reporter Dale Jacobs describes a glowing object breaking open and a huge tentacled thing emerging - and then his line goes dead. Lawrence is instantly convinced that aliens are taking over the world. Jimmy keeps telling him it has to be a prank, but the evidence piles up in the worst way: a strange glow really is hanging over Gower's Field, and then the lights and the phone go out. What the boys cannot know is that a road crew working overtime near the field has switched on its floodlights, and one worker's backhoe has just cut through the buried power and telephone lines.

On a battery radio the boys hear Walter Shakespeare and then Eugene Meltsner apparently snatched away by tentacles mid-sentence, followed - absurdly - by a pimple cream commercial that Mr. Miffland has forced into the middle of the invasion. When the bulletins report the aliens marching on the Silver Wind restaurant, Lawrence bolts. His mom is at that banquet, and he means to save her. Jimmy chases after him, noticing that downtown Odyssey is quiet and unbroken, with no aliens or damage anywhere.

At the Silver Wind, the truth is revealed: Whit is there, cheerfully recruiting the teachers to scream on cue as the "victims" of the radio attack. The scientists in the drama discover that plain water destroys the aliens, and the story is racing toward its happy ending when Lawrence bursts through the kitchen door shouting that he will save his mom - live, on the air. Edwin's grand finale collapses into chaos, and he is left sputtering out a hasty summary of the ending nobody got to hear.

Afterward, Maureen scolds the boys for letting their imaginations run away with them, declaring that any intelligent person would know better than to believe such nonsense - just before Harlow Doyle, private eye, dashes in front of her car yelling that the aliens are coming and everyone should grab their water pistols. Maureen reflects that perhaps Mr. Blackgaard should be more careful with his radio dramas in the future.