What happens
Ken Pirston, a company investigator, arrives in Padang, Sumatra, to look into the murder of Jim Martin, and he links the killing to a rival oil venture on the island. He meets a pilot known only as the man called X, who flies him toward an oil test site near Akim. The test well belongs to American driller Brad Kelly, and local tensions over oil rights and talk of the Darul Makeda run through the episode. The Man Called X is a Friday night NBC radio series starring Herbert Marshall, and this instalment aired on July 13, 1951. The episode breaks off here, with explosions, strange shadow-puppet warnings and suspicions among the oil men still unresolved.
Sumatra, Indonesia, in a newly independent republic; Padang and the remote oil fields near Akim in the northern jungle, shortly after the country's independence.
Characters: Ken Pirston, Herbert Marshall as the man called X, Brad Kelly, Pagan Zellschmitt, Sunga Tabara, Frederica Thurston, Megara, Ngarah
Listen for: The shadow-puppet prophecies that foretold the nitro explosion and the arrival of the devil god, and the meeting in the oil tent where Ken and the man called X learn who is working against the test well.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.