DIMENSION X - Knock (Fredric Brown)

DIMENSION X
Knock
May 6, 1950

Knock is a short story by Fredric Brown published in the Science Fiction magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in their December 1948 issue. It was adapted into a radio play for Dimension X by Ernest Kinoy whose writing career included screenplays, stage plays, Television, film, and of course, radio.
The show begins and ends with a knock at the door, and between those two knocks we see humanity's best and worst qualities in action. Mr. Kinoy does an excellent job of developing the characters, and building suspense. In a few snippets of dialog I understand the characters' personalities and motivations, and unlike the original short story which gave some hints of the twist ending, Kinoy leaves us guessing until the last line.

HISTORICAL GLOSSARY

When George the Zan asserts that Walter is killing the zoo animals, Walter responds, "George, you're off your trolley." A trolley is an electric street car, also called a cable car, and sometimes the metal arm that connected them to electric cables would unfasten, leaving the trolley car to go off track. Like Zan's train of thought, or logical conclusions, were not going in the right direction.

When pressed for a reason for the female duck's death, Walter says, "Maybe she died of the Dutch elm blight." This could be a whisper of an allegory. Dutch Elm Disease is an invasive fungal disease that was imported to the US on logs from Europe. And it decimated forests in the 1950s. Is this remark more than a witty response demonstrating Walter's existentialist/absurdist view on life? Perhaps the aliens are being subtly compared to dutch elm disease: invasive and devastatingly fatal.

Walter's answer to the Zan about why he won't tell them how he is killing the animals is, "Oh, call it a romantic attachment to lost causes. My grandfather was a Confederate officer." This is not a political statement. From the perspective one would find in a history book it was pretty obvious the south didn't have a chance against the highly industrialized north for many reasons. So Walter's comment is not a political innuendo, but rather is an imaginative way of saying that going against impossible odds runs in Walter's family.

When Walter explains to Grace how he tricked the Zan he says, "And then I introduced Donald." She asks, "Who's that?" Even though there was no Disneyland when this radio play was written, Walt Disney was producing cartoons. Donald Duck was first introduced in 1934, six years after Mickey.

In the final scene Grace tells Walter, "I wouldn't marry you if you were the last man on earth!" This was a common idiom of the era expressing a complete lack of any attraction. There is nothing the man could do to become attractive: not becoming wealthy, working out and getting a six-pack, doting on her, charming her, nothing. So at the conclusion of this story there is humor in the fact that the idiom is both literal and figurative.