"Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers.
A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page, but who is conspired
against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and
the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter
a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll
have a world all to himself... without anyone."
Plot - First Part
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.
Interlude Narration
"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."
Plot - Second Part
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.
Closing Narration
"The best laid plans of mice and men... and Henry Bemis...
the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time.
Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a
piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded
to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis... in the Twilight Zone."
