Her name is Nan Adams. She's twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California from Manhattan...Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania. Perhaps, to be filed away under "accidents you walk away from." But from this moment on, Nan Adams' companion on a trip to California will be terror. Her route: fear. Her destination: quite unknown.

Ecosystem Unit

A rocket piloted by two astronauts heads out on a mission to Mars. One of them, Marcusson, is a positive thinker who believes that people are alike all over, even on the Red Planet. The other astronaut, Conrad, has a more cynical view of human interplanetary nature. The impact of landing on Mars is so severe that Marcusson is critically injured. Knowing that he is dying, Marcusson pleads with Conrad to open the door of their ship so he can at least see that for which he has given his life. Conrad refuses, still fearful of what may await outside, and Marcusson dies.

Now alone, Conrad hears a rhythmic sound reverberating upon the ship's hull. Expecting some unnameable evil, his apprehension turns to joy when he opens the hatch and sees Martians that indeed appear to be human, have mind-reading abilities and give the impression of being most amicable, especially the beautiful Teenya, who welcomes and reassures him. The hospitable locals lead their honored guest to his residence—an interior living space furnished precisely in the same manner as one on Earth would have been.

Conrad relaxes, but soon discovers that his room is windowless and the doors cannot be opened. One of the walls slides upward, and Conrad realizes that he has become a caged exhibit in a Martian alien zoo. Conrad picks up a sign that says "Earth Creature in his native habitat" and throws it on the floor. In the episode's closing lines, Conrad grips the bars and yells to the heavens "Marcusson! Marcusson, you were right! You were right. People are alike.... people are alike everywhere!"

Colonel Archie Taylor, a gruff aristocrat, has difficulty enjoying his men's club because of the constant chatter of fellow member Jamie Tennyson. Just as irritating is the content, which usually concludes with a transparent attempt to curry investors.

In an effort to shut Tennyson up, Taylor proposes a wager: he bets $500,000 that Tennyson cannot remain silent for one year. If Tennyson accepts the wager, he will be enclosed in the club's game room, in which a small glass-walled apartment has been erected. There, he will be monitored by microphones so that he cannot speak without detection. Any requests he makes will be made in writing, and any member may come to visit him, through the glass. Tennyson is offended but agrees, telling fellow club member George Alfred that he deeply loves his wife and needs the money to pay the debts incurred by her exorbitant spending. He requests that Taylor put a check on deposit in his name. This measure is refused by all in the club as the Colonel has a strong standing of honor and credit within the club. "My courage against your credit" is then accepted by both.

Though he had assumed Tennyson would be successful for only a few weeks, after nine months Tennyson remains silent. Taylor gets nervous and offers Tennyson first $1,000, then $5,000 to call off the bet. He begins suggesting that Tennyson's wife is planning to leave him for another man rather than wait out his year of silence. Though Tennyson has sent several notes requesting that she visit, his wife has never responded, giving weight to Taylor's insinuations. Tennyson seems gripped by despair at the thought of losing his wife, but nonetheless refuses to call off the bet.

The last evening of the year, Alfred tells Taylor his behavior over the past few months, particularly using Tennyson's wife as a threat, has severely damaged the club members' esteem for him. Tennyson emerges to the congratulations of his fellow club members, before he approaches Taylor and silently puts his hand out for the money. The embarrassed Taylor admits that he had lost his fortune a decade ago. He praises Tennyson's resolve and character and then announces his decision to resign from the club.

The distraught Tennyson scribbles furiously on a sheet of paper, perplexing the other men who wonder why he doesn't speak aloud. Taylor reads the note aloud: "I knew that I would not be able to keep my part of the bargain, so one year ago I had the nerves to my vocal cords severed!" Tennyson with tears in his eyes, displays the scar on his throat from the operation, which he has concealed for the past 12 months under scarves and turtlenecks.

Henpecked, far sighted bank teller and avid bookworm Henry Bemis (Meredith) works at his window in a bank, while reading David Copperfield, which causes him to shortchange an annoyed customer. Bemis's angry boss (Taylor), and later his nagging wife (deWit), both complain to him that he wastes far too much time reading "doggerel". As a cruel joke, his wife asks him to read poetry from one of his books to her; he eagerly obliges, only to find that she has inked over the text on every page, obscuring the words. Seconds later, she destroys the book by ripping the pages from it, much to Henry's dismay.

The next day, as usual, Henry takes his lunch break in the bank's vault, where his reading will not be disturbed. Moments after he sees a newspaper headline, which reads "H-Bomb Capable of Total Destruction", an enormous explosion outside the bank violently shakes the vault, knocking Bemis unconscious. After regaining consciousness and recovering the thick glasses required for him to see, Bemis emerges from the vault to find the bank demolished and everyone in it dead. Leaving the bank, he sees that the entire city has been destroyed, and realizes that a nuclear war has devastated Earth, but that his being in the vault has saved him.

Seconds, minutes, hours. They crawl by on hands and knees for Mr. Henry Bemis, who looks for a spark in the ashes of a dead world. A telephone connected to nothingness. A neighborhood bar, a movie, a baseball diamond, a hardware store, the mailbox of what was once his house and is now a rubble. They lie at his feet as battered monuments to what was, but is no more. Mr. Henry Bemis on an eight-hour tour of a graveyard.

Finding himself totally alone in a shattered world with canned food to last him a lifetime (but no one to share it with) and no means of leaving to look for other survivors, Bemis succumbs to despair. As he prepares to commit suicide using a revolver he has found, Bemis sees the ruins of the public library in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact and legible; all the books he could ever hope for are his for the reading, and (as he gazes upon a huge fallen face of a clock) realizes that he has all the time in the world to read them without interruption.

His despair gone, Bemis contentedly sorts the books he looks forward to reading for years to come, with no obligations to get in the way. Just as he bends down to pick up the first book, he stumbles, and his glasses fall off and shatter. In shock, he picks up the broken remains of the glasses he is virtually blind without, and says, "That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was—was all the time I needed…! It's not fair! It's not fair!" and bursts into tears, surrounded by books he now can never read.

"Mouth" McGarry, the manager of a broken-down baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs on its last legs, allows a robot named Casey to play on his team. Casey has the ability to throw super-fast balls that cannot be hit.

Eventually, after Casey is beaned by a ball and given a physical examination, the National League finds out and rules that Casey must be taken off the team because he is not human. Casey's inventor, Dr. Stillman, gives him an artificial heart to have him classified as human.

But with a heart, Casey now has human emotions. He refuses to throw his fast balls anymore, saying that he feels empathy with the batter and does not want to ruin the batter's career by striking him out. With the team sure to fold soon, Dr. Stillman gives McGarry Casey's blueprints as a souvenir. Glancing at them, McGarry suddenly has a brilliant idea, as he runs off after Dr. Stillman to tell him his idea. Rumors later surface intimating that McGarry has used the blueprints to build a world-champion team of Casey robots.