#rod serling

A man finds himself alone walking towards a diner. Inside he finds a jukebox playing loudly and coffee hot on the stove. He hollers to the people in the kitchen, asking if they realize how loud it is, but he receives no response. He turns the music down and attempts to ask the cooks about the town up the road but no one answers him. He inquires for some breakfast, but no chef or waitress is to be found. He hops over the bar and shouts out the backdoor, but no one is to be found. He discovers breakfast food on the stove in the kitchen and a broken clock on the floor. As he helps himself to a cup of coffee, he shouts, hoping to get someone's attention. Finding no one, he leaves. He is not able to remember who he is or how he got there.

After leaving the diner, he walks to the nearby town which also seems to be deserted. He shouts into the bakery, then notices what he believes to be a woman watching him in a car from across the street. He tells her that he is unable to remember who he is and has not seen anyone since he woke up that morning (or rather started walking down the road). Upon approaching the car, he realizes that the "woman" is actually a mannequin who falls out.

He hears a payphone ring and rushes to answer it, but there is no one on the other end or an operator. After inserting coins, the man only gets a recorded operating system. He checks the telephone directory, curious where all of the town's inhabitants and storekeepers are. When trying to leave the booth, he is unable to exit because he attempted to open it the wrong way.

The man grows more and more unsettled as he wanders through the empty town, looking for someone—anyone—to talk to, all the while having the strange feeling that he is being watched. Attempting to find someone, he goes into the police station. He talks into the police radio, joking that a strange man is walking through town, until he sees a smoking cigar in the ash tray. There are no prisoners being detained in any of the jail cells, but he finds a few things in one cell: the faucet is still running, a towel, a razor, shaving cream and a shaving brush. After finding these things, h tells himself that he needs to wake up. As the cell door almost creaks closed, the man rushes out of the prison and into the town square, asking where everyone is.

As he walks down the street, he hears the church bells ring just before entering a drug store. After seeing no one come out of the church, he ducks inside the drug store and asks the invisible patrons if they would like a sundae. He talks to his reflection, apologizing that he cannot remember his name, and tells a tale about Ebenezer Scrooge, then wonders why he can't wake up from the nightmare he is stuck in. He then comes to several racks of books and spins them all around. He looks one of the racks and picks up a book called "The Last Man on Earth". After spinning the rack around and seeing the same book, he is spooked and leaves the store.

That night, he plays a game of tic-tac-toe with himself when several evening street lights switch on. After realizing all of the lights have turned on, he approaches the movie theater and realizes that the man in the poster (a member of the Air Force) is wearing a similar jumpsuit as he is. He comes to the conclusion that he must also be in the Air Force. He excitedly rushes in to tell the moviegoers his revelation, but there is no one to hear the news. The man begins to think that perhaps he is having this dream because of a bomb or another accident. Just then, the film begins to play with a plane being seen flying on the projector screen. He dashes upstairs hoping to find someone in the booth running the pictures, but instead there no one is seen.

Even more spooked by this, the man heads downstairs only to smack into a reflection of himself in the mirror. He then runs outside and trips over a curb, then a bicycle. After tripping over the latter, he believes the picture of an eye on the optometrists office is watching him and screams. He quickly gets up and runs down the street again, only to finally collapse next to a street crossing and presses the button labeled WALK. It is revealed that the walk button is actually a panic button. A group of men is watching the proceedings of this experiment in a nearby room, and after the man panics, they break him up. The broken clock he saw earlier in the café actually the clock, which he has repeatedly pounded, that was counting his time in the simulator.

The man is really a training astronaut named Mike Ferris, confined to an isolation room located within an aircraft hangar for 484 hours and 36 minutes, testing to see if he can stay sane cooped up in a small spacecraft for the duration of a trip to the Moon. The town was a complete hallucination, an escape valve for his sensory-deprived mind.

As Ferris is carried out of the hangar on a stretcher, he asks the doctor what went wrong. The doctor tells him that they are able to fix any problem but the need for companionship. Ferris sees the Moon above him, and says wistfully, "Hey! Don't go away up there! Next time it won't be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it'll be for real. So don't go away. We'll be up there in a little while."

𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹 𓁹

Closing narration: