What happens
Bill Everett, a reporter, is sent to a bar to meet a disheveled man named Yang and Dao, who claims to be the last living Martian and says he has just arrived on Earth in the body of a man named Howard Wilcox. Over drinks, Yang and Dao describes a dying Mars, a silent city, and a button pressed in a stadium. Everett goes home with him to meet Wilcox's wife, Elaine, and the story grows stranger as the evening goes on. This is X Minus One, an old-time radio series, broadcast on August 7, 1956, with a cast that includes Mandel Kramer and Elliott Reed.
New York City, in a newspaper city room, a neighborhood bar, and a Greenwich Village apartment, with the story of Mars told in flashback.
Characters: Bill Everett, Yang and Dao, Howard Wilcox, Elaine Wilcox, Vincent, Cargan, Bonnie, Barney
Listen for: Listen for Yang and Dao's account of the Martian plague and the stadium in Zandar, and for the moment Elaine Wilcox learns the truth about her husband.
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.