Pedott, a peddler, has the curious ability to give people exactly what they need before they need it. The old man enters a cafe where he first gives a woman a vial of cleaner. Then, he gives a down-on-his-luck ex-baseball player bus tickets to Scranton, Pennsylvania. The ball player receives a job offer in the city the tickets are for; and the ball player needs his jacket cleaned, for which the woman just happens to have the cleaner.

Renard, a small time thug, asks Pedott to give him what he needs, and the peddler gives him a pair of scissors which save Renard’s life when his scarf gets caught in an elevator‘s doors. Renard shows up at Pedott’s apartment, asking for another thing he “needs,” and the peddler comes up with a leaky pen that predicts a winning racehorse.

Renard continues menacing Pedott for more. Pedott gives him a pair of new shoes. When a car suddenly heads directly toward Renard, he tries to run, but the new soles are so slippery, he cannot escape on the wet pavement. He is struck and killed by the passing car. The shoes, Pedott explains to Renard’s corpse, were whatPedott needed, because he foresaw that Renard would eventually kill him. At the end of the episode the peddler gives a couple a comb, which they use to groom themselves just before they are photographed as witnesses for a newspaper story covering the “hit and run” accident that killed Fred Renard.

Three astronauts flying the X-20 DynaSoar into space for the first time disappear from radar on a test flight, then reappear. Serling’s voiceover is spoken showing the ship represented in a hangar by a canvas-covered form.

However, all is not as it seems upon their return to Earth. After they land, Gart is sent to the hospital with a broken leg. During the evening the other two, Forbes and Harrington, go to a bar. There, Harrington suddenly gets a strange feeling as if he no longer belongs in the world. He immediately goes to a phone booth to call his parents, but they tell him they have no son. Then Harrington mysteriously disappears, and no one but Forbes remembers his existence. Forbes tells his story to Gart, who says he does not know any person named Harrington. Then Forbes looks in the mirror, only to find there is no reflection and runs out of the room. By the time Gart gets up to run after him, Forbes has mysteriously disappeared too, and nobody remembers him. Then Gart himself mysteriously disappears, and the ship does too – wiping them off the face of the Earth.

Although there are no special effects showing the spacecraft in flight, the disappearances are emphasized by props. The headline on the newspaper first says “Three Men…” then “Two Men…” and finally “Lone Man…” There is one fewer bed in the hospital room when one man disappears. At the end, the hospital room is shown empty, as is the hangar where the ship was originally housed.

The episode ends in standard fashion with a voice-over from Serling, while panning out on a view of the now empty hanger but provides only a vague reference of the men and the ship who where taken ‘somewhere’ by ‘something’.

A somewhat nervous passenger by the name of Carl Lanser appears aboard a British ship in 1942. As the story opens, it becomes clear that Lanser has no idea of how he got aboard or who he really is. He is standing on deck as a man is calling him for dinner. He enters the cabin and joins the crew and passengers. Hearing the captain comment on German U-boats, Lanser seems annoyed and explains to him in great detail how one would not be aware of its presence. They ask Lanser what his profession is and how long he has been in England. Lanser explains that he has not been there long and was born in Frankfurt, Germany. Lanser then appears confused, explains that he is ill and goes to his cabin.

While still on deck, he speaks to a female crew member but grows increasingly stressed and rants about doom waiting for them. He explains that he knows who he is but cannot seem to grasp the specifics. The captain then asks to see Lanser again. After speaking to him, he is suspicious because Lanser claims he was born in Germany but cannot provide details of his life and does not have his passport on hand to verify his identity. The captain sends a steward to Lanser’s cabin and, while unpacking Lanser’s possessions, he finds the cap of a German naval officer. While inspecting it in private, Lanser discovers the cap bears his own name on the inside. Lanser leaves and goes to the ship bar.

Lanser is becoming increasingly panicked through listening to fellow passengers discuss various topics related to the War, he has been experiencing a sense ofdéjà vu, and it is becoming seemingly obvious that he is, unbeknownst to the others, a German submarine officer. Lanser is now certain that the ship will be attacked. The engines halt at 12:05 and despite the crew’s reassurances Lanser panics, believing they will be killed at 1:15. Unsuccessfully trying to convince the crew that they will soon be under attack, Lanser must suffer the agony of watching the passengers be killed. At precisely the hour that Lanser predicts, the freighter is sunk by a German U-boat commanded by a Captain Lieutenant Lanser.

Later, Lanser is in his cabin on the U-boat, recording that night’s kill. When his second-in-command asks Lanser if they might be judged according to the way they attacked the defenseless ship, Lanser replies only that the British will surely judge them. The first mate questions Lanser on whether God might also be judging them, condemning them to relive the final moments of the doomed ship. With this thought left open for debate, we learn that the First Mate’s fears are realized: The attacking U-Boat and crew are condemned to sink the freighter over and over, with Lanser being an unwitting passenger among those killed without mercy on the ghost ship. The episode thus recounts Carl Lanser’s private hell. Sure enough, Lanser reappears on the deck of the ship – and the nightmare begins again…

Edward Hall (Conte), a man with a severe heart condition, believes that if he falls asleep, he’ll die. On the other hand, keeping himself awake will put too much of a strain on his heart. He believes this due to his constantly overactive imagination. He believes that his imagination is severely out of control, to the point where he’d be able to see and feel something that was not there. Due to this, his heart condition is especially dangerous. He seeks out the aid of psychiatrist Rathmann and explains that he has been dreaming in chapters, as if in a movie serial. In his dreams, Maya, a carnival dancer, lures him onto a roller coaster in a funhouse in an attempt to scare him to death. Realizing that Rathmann cannot help him, Hall starts to go, but stops when he realizes that Rathmann’s receptionist looks exactly like Maya. Terrified, he runs back into Rathmann’s office and jumps out of the window.

In reality, the doctor calls his receptionist into his office, where Hall lies on the couch, his eyes closed. Rathmann tells the receptionist that Hall had come in, lain down, immediately fell asleep, and then a few moments later let out a scream and died. “Well, I suppose there are worse ways to go”, the doctor says philosophically. “At least he died peacefully…” Rod Serling’s narration then reveals that in a split-second, a person can dream up a thirty-minute dream.

Bank teller and avid bookworm Henry Bemis works at his window in a bank, while reading David Copperfield, which causes him to shortchange an annoyed customer. Bemis’s angry boss, and later his nagging wife, 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 drawn lines over the text on every page.

The next day, Henry takes his lunch break in the bank’s vault, where his reading will not be disturbed. Moments after seeing the newspaper’s 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 he needs to see with, 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 also been destroyed, and realizes that a nuclear war has devastated the Earth, but that his being in the vault has saved him.

Finding himself totally alone in a shattered world with food to last him a lifetime, but no one to share it with, Bemis succumbs to despair. As Henry is about to commit suicide using a revolver he found, Bemis sees the ruins of the public library in the distance. Investigating, he finds that the books are still intact and readable; all the books he could ever hope for are his for the reading, and 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. 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 all the time I needed…! That’s not fair!“, and bursts into tears, surrounded by books he will never read.

In 2046, an inmate, named Corry is sentenced to solitary confinement on a distant asteroid for 50 years. In the fourth year he is visited by a spacecraft that regularly brings him supplies and news from the Earth four times a year. Captain Allenby has been trying to make Corry’s stay humanely tolerable by bringing him things to take his mind off the loneliness. On this trip on the 15th day of the 6th month of the fourth year, however, Allenby tells Corry not to open a certain crate that has just been delivered until after the transport crew leaves. Upon opening the special container, Corry discovers that Allenby has left him with a feminine robot, named Alicia, to keep him company. At first, Corry detests it, rejecting Alicia as a mere machine; synthetic skin and wires inside. However, when Corry sees that Alicia is in fact capable of crying, he begins to fall in love with it.

When the ship returns, Captain Allenby brings news that Corry has been pardoned after a review of past murder cases, but they only have 20 minutes to leave. Corry, it seems, can return home to Earth immediately. Corry is delighted, until he learns that there is only room for 15 pounds of luggage, far too little for his Gynoidcompanion, as there are seven other passengers on the ship from other asteroids. He frantically tries to find some way to take Alicia with him, arguing that it is not a robot, but a woman, and insisting that Allenby simply does not know it as he does. At that point, just as the rest of the transport crew is surprised at the sight of Alicia, Allenby suddenly draws his gun and shoots the robot in the face. The robot breaks down, malfunctioning, its face a mass of wire and broken circuitry which repeats the word Corry, and Corry’s illusion is presumably broken. He then takes Corry back to the ship, assuring him he will only be leaving behind loneliness. “I must remember that”, Corry says tonelessly. “I must remember to keep that in mind”.

A mean-spirited, abusive hypochondriac sells his soul to the Devil (appearing as a rotund rogue who calls himself “Cadwallader” here, as he likes the way the name rolls off his tongue) in exchange for immortality, adding enough conditions to keep him out of Satan’s clutches forever. He is puzzled when the Evil One doesn’t put up much of a fight, only stipulating an escape clause which allows the man to die if he so wishes, but doesn’t worry too much about it.

He uses his newfound invulnerability to collect insurance money and cheap thrills by hurling himself into life-threatening accidents. Soon growing bored with this game, he confesses to the murder of his wife (who actually accidentally fell off the roof of their apartment building trying to stop him from jumping), hoping to experience the electric chair. His lawyer is too good, however, and he is sentenced to life in prison without any chance of parole. In the last scene, the Devil shows up and reminds the man of the escape clause. Realizing he will face eternity in prison if he doesn’t use it, the man nods and suffers a fatal heart attack. The guard discovers his lifeless body and sighs, “Poor devil…”

While driving cross-country, middle-aged executive Martin Sloan (Gig Young) stops to have his car serviced at a gas station within walking distance of his hometown, Homewood. After walking into town, he sees that it apparently has not changed since he was a boy, including the drugstore with a soda fountain that still sells sodas for a dime, and whose proprietor (that Sloan remembers as having died) is, unbeknownst to him, still alive.

Sloan walks to the park where he is startled to see himself as a boy, and following him home, meets his parents as they were in his childhood. Trying to convince his disbelieving parents that he is their son, he shows them his identification, but succeeds only in alarming the couple, who tell him to leave.

Confused, he wanders back to the park and finds his childhood self on a carousel, and tries to tell him to enjoy his childhood while it lasts. His advances scare young Martin, who falls off the merry-go-round and injures his leg. After young Martin is carried away, Sloan is confronted by his father who, having seen the documents and money with future dates on them in Sloan’s wallet, now believes his story. The man advises his son that everyone has their time, and that instead of looking behind him, he should look ahead, because the happiness he is seeking may be in the places he hasn’t looked yet.

Finding himself in present-day Homewood again, Sloan makes his way back to the gas station, now walking with a limp. He picks up his car and drives away, content to live his life as it is.

Aging film star Barbara Jean Trenton secludes herself in her private screening room, where she reminisces about her past by watching her old films. In an attempt to bring her out into the real world, her agent Danny Weiss arranges a part for her in a new movie and brings a former leading man—now also older, many years retired from acting and managing a chain of grocery stores—to visit her. This horrifies Barbara Jean and only drives her further into seclusion. Then one day, Barbara Jean’s maid finds the screening room empty—and is horrified by what she sees on the screen. Danny comes over and sees on the screen the living room of the house, filled with movie stars and Barbara Jean as they appeared in the old films. She throws her scarf toward the camera and departs just before the film ends. In the living room, Danny finds Barbara Jean’s scarf. “To wishes, Barbie”, he says wistfully, “to the ones that come true…”

Washed-up gunslinger Al Denton is given another chance by a mysterious salesman named Henry J. Fate, who offers him a potion guaranteed to make him the fastest gun in the West for ten seconds. Facing a young gunfighter named Pete Grant, who rode into town looking for a duel, Denton downs his vial of the potion only to find his opponent holding an identical bottle. Each man shoots the other in the hand, causing injuries that will never allow either to use a gun again. Denton later tells his young opponent that they have both been blessed because they will never again be able to fire a gun in anger. Henry J. Fate quietly rides out of town.