The Outer Limits

Andro:
Better to die than to sit and watch the world die.

The Control Voice:
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We can reduce the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to... The Outer Limits.

The Control Voice:
It is said that if you move a single pebble on the beach, you set up a different pattern, and everything in the world is changed. It can also be said that love can change the future, if it is deep enough, true enough, and selfless enough. It can prevent a war, prohibit a plague, keep the whole world... whole.

Dr. Paul Wayne:
So what difference does it make, whether it's 20 minutes or 20 years, since neither amounts to the faintest echo of the tiniest whisper in the thunder of time.

The Control Voice:
We now return control of your television set to you. Until next week, at the same time, when the control voice will take you to... The Outer Limits.

Rhea Cashman:
Ralph, is fallout anything like rain?

Ralph Cashman:
It's raining?

Rhea Cashman:
No. No it's not raining. But it's doing something - and I'll bet it's radioactive. And there's an uncanny noise, too.

Ralph Cashman:
I wish you'd stop saying 'really Ralph'. It's sounds like you're calling me 'mealy mouth'.

Teenage Luminos:
Don't come in! I'll go away if you will.

Dr. Simon Holm:
You need help? Is it Mr. Cashman? Ralph?

Teenage Luminos:
No. Please go away.

Dr. Simon Holm:
[Waves Mrs. Cashman back] Stay there! I'm a doctor. Are you hurt?

Teenage Luminos:
No... yes, being afraid hurts.

Dr. Simon Holm:
What are you afraid of?

Teenage Luminos:
I came through the shield. I'll be punished if I spoil the experiment. Stay out!

Dr. Simon Holm:
Can't I come in and just talk to you? I'd like to hear about that experiment.

Dr. Simon Holm:
There is no escape for us. Not for us. We need not suffer the same fate as Ralph Cashman. Not so long as we stay in our homes, and never wander more than six blocks in any direction. But we will never go back to the world we've been stolen from. Understand that. Never. It's a lonely feeling, isn't it? But we won't be lonely very long. Soon, the entire Earth's population will be teleported to this place. We will live in labor camps. We will toil, and sweat, and die in controlled areas. Some of us may become infected. Contagion can occur even when we breathe the same air in a confined space. But enough of us will survive to make their project feasible. Out of the whole world of us, enough will survive... if we survive. We are their guinea pigs. But we are human guinea pigs, which gives us some choice in this experiment... human choice. We can choose to make their enslavement of our Earth infeasible. We can choose not to escape infection. We can deliberately become what they are. My wife has already been infected. I'm going to take her hand. Will someone take mine?

Control Voice:
Through all the legends of ancient peoples - Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerican, Semitic - runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies. Called by various names in various times, but historically known as Gilgamesh, the man who has never tasted death, the hero who strides through the centuries.

The Glass Hand:
Stay alive. Above all, stay alive. Destiny is in your whole hand.

Trent:
Where are the future people of the Earth?

The Glass Hand:
In hiding. You are the key to releasing them.

Trent:
Where? Tell me.

The Glass Hand:
I am unable to answer. My mechanism is not whole.

Trent:
I was in a dark place. Someone was calling my name over and over, down a long corridor.

Consuelo:
[amazed] You were dead. The hand, it brought you back.

Trent:
To save all of Man, I have to become a killer.

Consuelo:
What are you going to do?

Trent:
[sigh] Try to beat the Devil.

Battle:
I'm prepared to die.

Trent:
How prepared? Why not give yourself a couple of minutes?

Battle:
We all knew we'd die when we came on this mission. It was worth it.

Trent:
You can stay alive in this time.

Battle:
I don't care about that. Helping my race is more important.

Trent:
Bargain week on patriots.

Battle:
Call it what you like. I'm not afraid to die.

Trent:
Really? Then why are you whispering?

Trent:
You Kyben were always super patriots, especially when you bombed Earth from ten miles out. How does your patriotism sit with burning women and children alive?

Battle:
That's war.

Trent:
So's this.

Battle:
You'll never get out of this building alive. We'll bring more Kyben through the time mirror.

Trent:
That's my problem. Right now you have one of your own. I want to know who's carrying the other three parts of my brain.

Trent:
I'm trapped in a building with the Kyben. There's a woman with me. We can't escape. Tell me, what can I do?

The Glass Hand:
One hundred percent possibility of success is not available. Next success quotient only forty-seven percent probable.

Trent:
Well, tell me, what is it?

The Glass Hand:
Let them kill you.

Trent:
He came from the future. And so do I.

Consuelo:
But... you said he wasn't human, that he was some other kind of being.

Trent:
Another world, AND another time.

Trent:
I was born ten days ago. A full grown man, born ten days ago. I woke on a street of this city. I don't know who I am, or where I've been, or where I'm going. Someone wiped my memories clean. And they tracked me down, and tried to kill me. Why? Who are you? I ran. I managed to escape them the first time. And the hand, my - hand, told me what to do.

Consuelo:
I'm sorry, it's just that I can't stand violence.

Trent:
When it's gone this far, it's more than just violence.

Breech:
I know this: you're the last man on the Earth of the future. You're the last hope of Earth.

Trent:
Explain the gold medallions to me.

Breech:
The time mirror works safely only one way; coming into the past from the future.

Trent:
And when the medallions are pulled off?

Breech:
They're focusing elements for the mirror. It's... it's-it's as if time were a rubber band, and you were on one end stretched out tight. As long as the medallion's present, the band stays tight. But when you rip it off, we snap back up to the future.

Trent:
I'm wearing one. That makes me vulnerable?

Breech:
Yes, you're vulnerable. And we'll get you. We'll have to get you, finally. If you kill me, another will take my place. And if you kill him, another.

The Glass Hand:
You come from the Earth one thousand years in the future. The Kyben came from the stars, and Man had no defense against them. They conquered the planet Earth in a month. But before they could slaughter the millions of humans left, overnight without warning, without explanation, every man, woman and child of Earth vanished. You were the only one left, Mr. Trent. The glass hand, the vanished earthmen have given you, to help you. They called you, "the last hope of humanity." The medallion you stole let you escape into Now, The Present, Today. And now you are among all the men of Earth who are alive today. But the Kyben came into possession of three parts of your hand, the computer that could answer all the questions. You have to get those three lobes to me, the computer brain, and find out what the alien Kyben really want from you, why you were the only man left alive one thousand years in the future, on the planet Earth. You must destroy the time mirror, to keep them from sending more Kyben through to the present, to close that doorway completely.

Trent:
What do you want?

Arch:
You, Mr. Trent. Give yourself up. Give yourself up, and we'll let you live.

Trent:
What is it you want? What?

Arch:
I want the 70 billion earthmen! And you know where they are!

[Trent is talking to Consuelo about the Kyben lying unconscious in front of them]

Trent:
This is going to sound insane, but it's true, it's real, and you must listen to me. This is not a human being. He's from another planet, another solar system. He wants to kill me. He and the others like him. There's more, much more, but, uh, I have to get you to believe me, and there's only one way to do it. Now watch.

[Grabbing the medallion around the Kyben's neck, Trent rips it off, and the alien vanishes]

Consuelo:
Gone! Where?

Trent:
[dropping the medallion on the floor] Doesn't matter where. Just gone. Now do you believe me?

[Trent surreptitiously enters the building through the basement]

Trent:
Is this it?

The Glass Hand:
The Dixon Building. Once the most exclusive office building in the city, it has become the center of a slum. Now it houses cut-rate garment-piece goods offices, passport photographers and the like. One of these offices is a front for the Kyben and their time mirror.

Arch:
[off camera] Welcome, Mr. Trent. I see Breech died a hero, Mr. Trent. He brought you to us. Infinitely easier than going to look for you. Ah, come along, Mr. Trent. We're here, all of us, and we're waiting for you. You don't think you can escape us, do you? One thousand years in the future, we conquered your planet in nineteen days. What chance do you think you have in the present? We've thrown a force bubble around the building. Invisible, impossible to break. You're trapped.

Control Voice:
[Closing Narration] Like the eternal man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh, one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love, without friendship, alone, neither man nor machine, waiting, waiting for the day he will be called to free the humans who gave him mobility, movement, but not life.

[opening lines]

Narrator:
God looked upon His world and called it good, but Man was not content. He looked for ways to make it better, and built machines to do the work. But in vain we build the world, unless the builder also grows.

Thurman Cutler:
Too bad, Sheriff. Adam just cheated the executioner!

Narrator:
His name is Warren Edgar Morley. For the past six months, he has guarded this gate from eight in the morning until six at night, at which time he is replaced by another just like himself. These are the last few moments of his life.

Dr. Bloch:
We have a problem here at NORCO, Professor Peters. As a matter of fact we are slaves to it.

Dr. Bloch:
I have told him that we are slaves to a problem of grotesque proportions.

Prof. Stephanie Linden:
Forgive me Professor Peters. I've gotten into the habit of not answering questions.

Prof. Stuart Peters:
The victim of automation? We're all getting used to letting computers do our answering for us.

Prof. Stephanie Linden:
We have to find a way to break or change the Conservation of Energy Law.

Prof. Stephanie Linden:
[Referring to the law of the conservation of energy] We have to find a way to create it.

Prof. Stuart Peters:
It might be easier to destroy it.

Prof. Stephanie Linden:
We tried. We can't.

Control Voice:
[Opening Narration] There is no limit to the extension of the curious mind. It reaches to the end of the imagination, then beyond into the mysteries of dreams, hoping always to convert even the dreams into reality, for the greater well being of all mankind.

Control Voice:
[Closing Narration] The curious mind cannot be chained. It is a free mind endlessly searching for the greater freedom that must eventually make every living being joyfully complete within himself, and therefore, at peace with himself and his neighbors.

Lt. James P. Willowmore:
[returning from his interrogation] They said... my blindness... spoiled their fun. They said... would I like to have my eyes back and I said [voice breaks] yes yes [regains composure] yes. And... they said... would I be willing to look at lieutenant Krug's body, uh, his corpse. And I wanted to see so bad [begins to cry] I said I would look at anything, and I said yes! [sobs] And I LOOKED!

Major Jong:
Think of it this way, Willomore. Krug would have wanted some member of his race to look upon him in death.

Lt. James P. Willowmore:
He- He had no heart! He had a big hole in his chest! THEY TOOK HIS HEART OUT!

Ebonite Interrogator:
Are you ready to talk, Dix? [Dix tries to speak, but no words come out] Perhaps you could speak if there was someone here you really wanted to speak to.

Dix's Mother:
[Appears in a hallucinatory vision] Arthur. Arthur. You can talk to your mom, can't you, baby?

Pvt. Arthur Dix:
Mom?

Dix's Mother:
[Hugging and affectionate] Oh. Oh. You can talk. Tell me what they want to know. [Dix shakes head] Then whisper it to me then, baby. Whisper all about it. [Dix whispers in her ear]

Ebonite Interrogator:
Private Dix. You may go.

Ebonite Interrogator:
We are not at war here. The grief and loss we caused your planet was an accident. We promised we would do anything to rectify this unforgivable mistake. But we cannot sanction the continuation of such immoral and inhuman experimentation.

Commanding General:
Inhuman? What do you know of humans, sir?

Ebonite Interrogator:
Each of you will be invited to participate in an exploratory interview. I shall conduct it. Private Dix will be the first to accept my invitation.

Col. Luke Stone:
I demand that privilege.

Ebonite Interrogator:
Your demands shall be honored when ours are satisfied. Private Dix! Guard, escort Private Dix to my quarters. [Dix is sitting against a wall and panics]

Col. Luke Stone:
Wait a minute, Dix. Listen, Dix. Go with him. He's not going to hurt you. Listen, they're not going to hurt you. [to approaching guard] Now, don't hurt him. He's going to go with you. [Willimore is standing behind the guard]

[Guard leans over Dix, then turns and savagely blasts Willimore at close range in the face with his control wand]

Lt. James P. Willowmore:
Ah! My eyes! Ah! Ah my eyes! I can't see! Ah! My eyes. [crying]

Col. Luke Stone:
[Looks at Willimore] Jimmy!

Mr. Byron Lomax:
The machines are EVERYWHERE! Oh you'll find them all, you're a zealous people. And you'll make a great show of smashing a few of them, but for every one you destroy hundreds of others will be built. And they will demoralize you, break your spirits, create such rifts and tensions in your society that no one will be able to repair them! Oh, you're a savage, despairing planet; and when we come here to live, you friendless, demoralized flotsam will fall without even a single shot being fired. Senator, enjoy the few years left you. There is no answer. You're all of the same dark persuasion! You demand - *insist* on knowing every private thought and hunger of everyone: your families, your neighbors, everyone - but yourselves.

Mr. Byron Lomax:
People with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from O.B.I.T.

Senator Orville:
[scoffs] Are you *that* perfect, Mr Lomax?

[opening narration]

Control Voice:
In this room, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, security personnel at the defense department Cyprus Hill's Research Center keep constant watch on its scientists through O.B.I.T., a mysterious electronic device whose very existence was carefully kept from the public at large. And so it would have remained but for the facts you are about to witness...

[closing narration]

Control Voice:
Agents of the justice department are rounding up the machines now. But these machines, these inventions of another planet have been cunningly conceived to prey on our most mortal weakness. In the last analysis dear friends, whether O.B.I.T. lives up to its name or not will depend on you.

Barbara Scott:
These past months before they took him away... he...

Senator Orville:
Please go on.

Barbara Scott:
Well, he... he imagined things about me. He accused me of horrible things. He called me a monster. And then he began to speak of seeing... real monsters. And finally, one night he didn't come home and they told me that he had had a physical breakdown and that they had taken him somewhere. I don't know what to believe.

Dr. Clifford Scott:
When I told them what I saw, they got very quiet, and looked at me with great, quiet eyes. Quiet can tell you so much. Until they looked at me that way, I was certain that I had seen what I had seen. Dead certain. Of course, I hadn't. It was just that my life had become a nightmare, so naturally I saw the sort of things that inhabit a nightmare world. I saw a monster. When I told them that, they got very quiet.

Control Voice:
He called them space barnacles for temporary identification. They were not.

Maj. Benedict:
Come on, you can say a few provocative words to your wife.

Janet Doweling:
There are four men on that craft.

Col. MacWilliams:
Four men, Janet, or four bodies?

[first lines]

Control Voice (uncredited voice played by Vic Perrin):
[film footage of people running out in the streets and a missile in the sky] Is this the day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time for wonder, no time to ask why is it happening, why is it finally happening. There is time only for fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray now, or do we merely run now and pray later? Will there *be* a later, or is this the day? [a mushroom cloud explodes before the film projector is shut off]

[last lines]

Control Voice (uncredited voice played by Vic Perrin):
Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely grotesque; it will have been at least a lesson - a lesson, at last, to be learned.

[last lines]

Control Voice:
When this passion called aspiration becomes lust, then aspiration degenerates - becomes vulgar ambition - by which sin, the angels fell.

Richard Bellero, Sr.:
Great men are forgiven their murderous wives!

Control Voice:
The race of man is known for its mutability, we can change our moods, our faces, our lives, to suit what ever situation confronts us. Adapt and survive. Even among the most changeable of living things, man is quick silver, more chameleon like than the chameleon, no matter what the cost to others, or himself.

Carol Maxwell:
What makes you think you can invent the atom bomb? Who do you think you are?

Alan Maxwell:
Nobody, nobody at all. But the universe doesn't care about that.

[first lines]

Control Voice:
In the troubled places of the world, the Devil's hunter finds rare game. For manmade savagery is only the instrument for a secret terror stirring from its dark place of ambush.

Lieutenant Minns:
I understand my IQ is going up, but that's very funny because I don't feel any smarter.

Lieutenant Minns:
No, nobody waiting for me.

Adam Ballard:
None of those other men have any ties either.

Lieutenant Minns:
Link after link. So many things in common. There's gotta be a reason, a purpose, is that it, Mr. Ballard?

Adam Ballard:
No clue, Lieutenant? No inkling what it might be? Something alien in your head. Something guiding you, pointing you, directing you.

Lieutenant Minns:
[softly] No.

Adam Ballard:
What are you reading?

Lieutenant Minns:
Just something I found in the library. Idle curiosity. Morgan's Theoretical Analysis of Comprehensive Finance.

[last lines]

Control Voice:
The inheritors are on their way. In a universe of billions of stars, there are places of love and happiness. On this Earth, in this spot, magic settled for a moment, wonder touched a few lives, and a few odd pieces fell smoothly into the jigsaw of creation.

Lieutenant Minns:
[as he closes the hatch on the children now loaded into the spaceship] Help each other. Learn to help each other.

Lieutenant Minns:
You tried to contain me once. Didn't work.

Adam Ballard:
Our weapons are pitiful against you, aren't they?

Lieutenant Minns:
I didn't mean it that way. [Smiles in an effort to set Ballard at ease]

Adam Ballard:
I did. You smile at me, and I get a chill. You're smiling with a piece of your mind that doesn't belong to you.

Adam Ballard:
What's it for? [Angrily]

Lieutenant Minns:
I don't know.

Adam Ballard:
Does it matter that it may be heinous? [Angrily]

Lieutenant Minns:
Yes it matters! [Angrily] There's nothing I can do about it. [Hopelessly]

Adam Ballard:
You can fight it! [Angrily]

Lieutenant Minns:
Not any more than you can fight me. [Calmly]

Lieutenant Minns:
This project, as you call it Mr. Ballard, won't die.

Captain Fred Thomas:
This is Captain Fred Thomas, commanding interplanetary vehicle M1 colonization probe. To Colonel Hal Danvers, headquarters communication, planet Earth. Subject of report - arrival on the planet Mars. Landing is completely successful.

[last lines]

Narrator:
It is said that if you move a single pebble on the beach, you set up a different pattern, and everything in the world is changed. It can also be said that love can change the future, if it is deep enough, true enough, and selfless enough - it can prevent a war, prohibit a plague, keep the whole world whole.

Harold J. Finley:
You want me to stay a worm, don't you? Unimportant, unproductive, classroom worm! Some women take their husband by the hands and say, "Together we'll climb to the stars." Not you... never you.

Vera Finley:
You wouldn't hurt anyone even if you could. You're not a violent man. You've never hated anyone, never.

Harold J. Finley:
Not to hurt them, no, Vera. But I have this power. It acts whether I want it to or not.

Vera Finley:
No, Harold, you don't have any power. You've always been quiet. You told me yourself you're too mild, you're too weak.

Harold J. Finley:
No more, Vera! I could split this ceiling open if I wanted to! I could crash down these walls. I could splinter this whole block into bricks and rubble.

Vera Finley:
Harold, you're a little man, a nobody. You don't have any power.

Control Voice:
Deep beyond the kindest, gentlest soul may lurk violent thoughts, deadly wishes. Someday Man will learn to cope with the monsters of the mind. Then, and only then, when the human mind is truly in control of itself, can we begin to utilize the great and hidden powers of the universe.

Dr. Thomas 'Kelly' Kellander:
We need a man who will allow us to break him up into electrical particles and transmit him into space at a speed greater than that of light. That's it simply. It's called teleportation. When he gets to where he's going, he'll be reassembled. If he survives the experience, he comes back to Earth - the same way.

Goldsmith:
He gets put back together again?

Dr. Thomas 'Kelly' Kellander:
Yes.

Goldsmith:
The same as he was before?

Dr. Thomas 'Kelly' Kellander:
Well, it's worked with inanimate objects. And it's worked with mice.

Chromo Transmission:
Transmission point Chromo. Subject stable. Sequence commences. Initiate systems.

Dr. Thomas 'Kelly' Kellander:
[to technician] Initiate systems. [to Chromo Controller] Transmission point Earth. Systems initiated. Transmit.

Chromo Transmission:
Transmission accomplished.

[a large monstrosity materializes in the teleportation chamber and appears totally disoriented, smashing into tables and equipment]

Dr. Thomas 'Kelly' Kellander:
Richardson!

Dr. Julia Harrison:
It tried to kill me. It must have killed Dr. Richardson. It broke the force field and started to climb into the infirmary.

Dr. Julia Harrison:
[Reliving a terrifying experience and trying to remain composed as she tells it] It was by the lake throwing something in. And then - and then it began to eat. Kelly, it looked like it was eating. No mouth, but it kept consuming.

Dr. Thomas 'Kelly' Kellander:
The stuff that Richardson found.

Dr. Julia Harrison:
I wondered why Chino called it a 'garbage eater'. They told us they lived through photosynthesis. They lied, Kelly.

Control Voice:
[Opening Narration] Where are we going? Life, the timeless and mysterious gift is still evolving. What wonders or terrors does evolution hold in store for us in the next ten thousand years? - in a million? - in six million? Perhaps the answer lies in this old house in this old and misty valley...

Control Voice:
[Closing Narration] An experiment too soon, too swift, and yet, may we not still hope to discover a method by which within one generation the whole human race could be rendered intelligent, beyond hatred, or revenge, or the desire for power? Is that not, after all, the ultimate goal of evolution?

[last lines]

Control Voice (uncredited voice played by Vic Perrin):
The mold of a man stems from the mind of a child. Educators and emperors have known this from time immemorial. So have tyrants.

Mr. Zeno:
Arrived safely. Ready to penetrate subject 2.