The Barrier of Loneliness

A man finds himself walking alone on a dirt road, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He finds a diner and walks in to find a jukebox playing loudly, but nobody present; he lowers the volume and continues to call out. Eventually, he heads into the kitchen where he finds a hot pot of coffee on the stove and freshly made pies, but still no other people besides himself. He accidentally knocks over and breaks a clock, at which point the jukebox stops playing.

The man leaves the diner and walks to a nearby town; he sees a parked truck with an apparent female passenger, but "she" turns out to be a mannequin. Like the diner, the rest of the town seems deserted, but the man feels he is being watched and that there is someone around. The phone rings in a telephone booth and he dashes to answer it. There is nobody on the line and he can only raise a recorded message when he tries to call the operator. He grows unsettled as he wanders through the empty town, increasingly anxious to find someone to talk to.

Inside the police station, he uses the radio ("Calling all cars, calling all cars, unknown man walking around police station..."); then he notices a lit cigar in an ashtray. This prods him to check the jail cells in back. In one cell, there is evidence that someone had recently been there shaving. He declares that he wants to "wake up now", and makes his way to the soda shop. As he makes himself a sundae, he considers his situation to be a dream he must be having and marvels at how detailed it is. He idly spins a few racks of paperback books until he notices an entire rack of books titled The Last Man on Earth, Feb. 1959 already spinning. This spooks him and he quickly leaves.

As night falls, lights turn on and the man is drawn to the illuminated movie theater marquee. The advertised film is Battle Hymn and an advertisement outside of a man dressed as he is, directing a fighter jet on the tarmac, causes him to realize that he is in the U.S. Air Force. Running inside and finding nobody in the audience, he begins to wonder what could have happened with the Air Force that resulted in his being in this situation, until the film begins to play. He runs to the projection booth, finding it empty; in a panic, he runs downstairs and crashes into a mirror. When he recovers from this shock, he gives in to terror and races through the streets until he comes upon a "walk" button and desperately pushes it over and over, begging for help. The button is revealed to be a panic button: the man—Sergeant Mike Ferris—is actually in an isolation booth being observed by a group of uniformed servicemen. He has been undergoing tests to determine his fitness as an astronaut and whether he can handle a prolonged trip to the Moon alone; the town was a hallucination caused by sensory deprivation. He had been in the booth for over 484 hours.

The officiating general warns Ferris that while his basic needs will be provided for in space travel, man will not have companionship: "next time [he will] really be alone". As Ferris is carried from the hangar on a stretcher, he looks into the sky and tells the Moon, "don't go away up there" and, "we'll be up there in a little while".

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