- Narrator: [Closing Narration] Mr. Goldsmith, survivor, an eye witness to man's imperfection, an observer of the very human trait of greed, and a chronicler of the last chapter - the one reading 'suicide.' Not a prediction of what is to be, just a projection of what could be. This has been the Twilight Zone.
- Goldsmith: When we talked about the ways that men could die, we forgot the chief method of execution. We forgot faithlessness, Major French. Maybe you're not to blame. Maybe if it weren't you, it would have been someone else. Maybe this has to be the destiny of man. I wonder if that's true. I wonder. I guess I'll never know. I guess I'll never know.
- Major French: Mr. Goldsmith. The following is unofficial. Now, we'd like you to make your transition here as easy as possible. Now, under certain circumstances we might even allow you to remain in nominal control. Assuming that you don't give us any trouble. Now, that's unofficial. The following is official.
- [slaps him to the ground]
- Major French: Now let me fill you in on the situation here, Mr. Goldsmith. Between Buffalo, New York and Atlanta, Georgia, there are probably around five hundred people alive. You know why. Well, because there's no authority, there's no discipline. Now we're here to give you a little of both. And if you give us any trouble, any trouble at all, I'm gonna hang you. From that balcony right over there.
- Narrator: [Opening Narration] What you're looking at is a legacy that man left to himself. A decade previous, he pushed his buttons and, a nightmarish moment later, woke up to find that he had set the clock back a thousand years. His engines, his medicines, his science were buried in a mass tomb, covered over by the biggest gravedigger of them all: a Bomb. And this is the Earth ten years later, a fragment of what was once a whole, a remnant of what was once a race. The year is 1974, and this is the Twilight Zone.
- Major French: Where is this old man that keeps you on a diet? When does he come out?
- Goldsmith: He never comes out. He stays in the cave.
- Major French: Well, I'm not surprised, Mr Goldsmith. I'm not surprised at all. You see, off Lake Erie we've got a pack of wierdies up there that bay at the moon once a week. And then around what used to be Chicago, man, we've got a real swinging cult goin' there. They've built themselves a statue made out of fissionable lead. This is their "diety". What do we have here? We have an invisible old man in a cave.
- Goldsmith: I don't think you understand, Major. We don't recognize your authority here. We've had transients pass through on occasion, but they didn't stay. Like you, they represented themselves as "authorities," but we discovered they carried their headquarters with them. They represented no one but themselves.
- Major French: Now, I don't think any of you are going to die of radioactivity. I think if you're going to kick off, you're going to kick off either from malnutrition, or from being conned to death.
- Goldsmith: If that's true, Major, at least it'll be a painless death.
- Major French: Friends, Romans, Farm Animals! We are now going up to the cave and check your favorite recluse. We're gonna bring him out in the sunshine and get a good look at him. And then we're gonna decide if he's worthwhile keeping alive.