The persistence of man's curiosity.
Led him into new worlds.
Without conquering his own,
he invaded the sub-world of the microscope.
And the outer world of space.
It is said, turn about is fair play.
But is it?
50-50, Jeff. Looks rough either way.
Uh-huh.
Dexter says it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
We'll miss the squall by a couple of hundred miles. Why should we turn back?
Thanks, honey.
No, thank you, fellas.
On to Tokyo.
Look, if any of you are gonna get in trouble hauling me along...
Go into the teeth of a hurricane if we have to, Amanda,
to get you married.
We may have to do just that.
Oh?
Yeah.
All it has to do is keep on accelerating at this phenomenal rate,
which I don't expect.
Shifts course a bit, which I don't expect, either.
It's not a squall anymore. This is a full-fledged hurricane.
We can't outrun it, and we can't turn back.
Emergency preparations.
Standby. We're going into the hurricane.
I'm gonna try to set her down.
Yes, we're going in.
Emergency procedures in effect.
I said we're going into the hurricane.
The center! The eye!
Emergency stations.
Life raft. Life vests.
There is nothing wrong with your television set.
Do not attempt to adjust the picture.
We are controlling transmission.
For the next hour 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.
Cobe?
Hey, Cobe?
Huh? What is it?
Where are we?
I don't know.
I think we're in the eye of the hurricane.
It's so calm.
It's miraculous, isn't it?
Yeah.
Where's Beeman?
I don't think he made it.
We all blackout?
Yeah.
What's all this fog?
Spooky, isn't it?
Where's the emergency radio, Jeff?
It's in the kit, I guess.
Amanda, are you all right?
I'm wet.
What was that?
The signal mirror. It fell overboard.
Overboard?
Hey, it's solid!
It isn't water at all.
Where are we?
It's some kind of plastic.
What do you make of it, Cobe?
Well, we should be in the middle of a hurricane.
Apparently, in the calm eye of it.
But on water...
I don't understand it.
Jeff?
Can't raise a thing.
Are you receiving?
No.
What's that static?
It's ours.
Some kind of interference.
Maybe it's a whole wall of the storm around us.
It's so weird and strange.
Does anybody feel any movement?
I don't.
Could we be moving along with it? Inside the hurricane?
We could be, but what's that?
Jehoshaphat!
Get down! Cover up! Watch your eyes!
OK, it's gone.
What's gone?
Whatever it was.
It doesn't seem to have any effect though, does it?
No.
Except, I'm dry.
Isn't that funny?
Yeah. So am I.
Me, too.
What was it?
A fog, a mist of some kind.
With a drying action.
What was it, Jeff? Where did it come from?
I can't even guess.
But, I think we ought to investigate.
A plane gone. The ocean gone. A world gone. Where are we?
Hey, this wall feels like the floor. Like it's made out of plastic.
We're inside of something.
Hey, look.
It's coming from where the cloud came from.
What's the matter, Mandy?
Nothing.
Are you cold?
Freezing!
She is. It's cold.
Come on, let's get out of this light.
Dex!
Hey, look! It's icing up!
It's not cold out here, Dex. Just in that light! Get out of it!
It's the light that's making it cold!
Dex!
Get out of there!
He's half-dead!
Do you have to do that?
It's all my fault!
If it hadn't been for me, you'd have turned back.
Come on, Mandy, that's not true.
Yes, it is.
He would have turned back if David was still...
Who's doing this? Who's here?
We're lost! We're never going to get out of here! We're lost!
Now, let's not get hysterical, huh?
I can't help it!
Take it easy, Jeff. I'm frightened myself.
It got cold so fast.
Dex. Dex, can you move your fingers now?
They're st-st-starting to tingle.
And my toes. And my ears hurt!
Another second or 2 in there and you would have just frozen to death.
What made it do it? What made it freeze up so fast?
That first light beam.
Cold light?
That wasn't all. You should have seen that second light beam
come down and slice that raft in two like a knife.
And another light beam, lifted up that part
and put it up into that hole, there.
There's got to be some kind of room in there, or something.
Things don't appear and disappear into nothing.
There's got to be somebody in there to operate it.
I'm sure there's something out there in the distance.
And on the other side of that wall.
Cobe, let's go take a look.
Dex. Dex, are you all right?
Yeah. I think so.
I'll stick around and see if I can raise something on the radio.
Do you want to stay here too, Mandy?
Are you kidding?
Come on.
Well, for one thing, if we're imagining all of this,
we're imagining the same things together.
We just got to be inside something.
I know it sounds incredible.
Jeff! Cobe!
Dexter?
Dexter!
Hey, Dex?
Look!
Feels funny.
Yeah.
But, why would he drop Cobe's jacket?
Where could he have gone? No place?
In there?
What's it all about? Are we prisoners?
How did we get here? If we only understood something!
At least if you're in a plane in a storm, you know where you are.
If it's frightening, you know what you're frightened of.
How long since the crash?
40 minutes ago we inflated the raft on the plane.
How do you know exactly?
I've got a date watch. Same day. Same date.
It was 6 minutes past 4:00. I looked.
Now, it's 14 minutes to 5:00.
What's the last thing you remember, Cobe?
I got the plane under the water.
There were 50 foot high waves.
How about you, Mandy?
I saw the plane split apart, and the water spill on to us
and then Cobe helping me into the raft.
And then we were all hanging on.
Yeah. All except Beeman.
I remember trying to grab him.
Then the water...
The light coming through it.
Then that calm and quiet.
I thought it was me just passing out.
We must have been in the eye of the storm.
There's got to be some logical explanation.
But what about Dex?
If we can only figure out where we are?
Yes, but what about Dex?
I don't know about Dex. Do you?
Hey...
Listen!
You recognize those sounds, Cobe?
No.
I think I do.
Oh!
You both stay here.
OK, come on in.
What is it?
Sounds like an analog or a computer of some kind.
Like none I've ever seen or heard of.
It's part of a system.
You know, it's coding information right now.
What information?
I don't know.
Looks like a...
Like what?
I don't know, I, uh...
I've never seen a telemetry system before. Have you?
No.
But I've got a good idea of what it might look like.
And some part of it might look like this.
What is a telemetry system?
Well, to put it simply it's, uh...
Telemetry is transmitting information from one place to another
over great distances.
You mean we're inside a research project of some kind?
Yeah.
But it doesn't seem logical, does it,
to go all unattended like this?
And in the middle of the pacific ocean?
Hey, look at that.
Greek?
No.
Latin? Hebrew?
No.
Or Assyrian, or Etruscan, or anything.
I've never seen a cuneiform like that.
You've seen a lot, haven't you?
Quite a bit.
In college I majored in ancient languages.
Hey, Jeff, what kind of metal is this?
I don't think it's metal.
It's some kind of plastic.
Like this flooring, and the walls outside there.
Yeah.
Come on, let's keep on exploring.
Looks like some kind of a laboratory.
Yeah, it sure does.
What's that?
A piece of the raft.
Don't touch it! Don't touch anything.
How'd it get in here?
Maybe through the center post, there.
Where the machinery is. And those light beams.
But what for?
I think, maybe, to test it.
To test it for what?
Who's doing the testing? Where is everybody?
The results of the testing
would be sent back to where everybody might be.
Jeff, have you got some kind of a theory about all this?
I'm getting one.
By itself.
Yeah.
It's all programmed.
But for whom?
Now, what is that?
Water, I guess. Seawater.
Cobe, look at the salt residue.
You see that meter?
Yeah.
That canister is being weighed
and the information is being fed
back to the analog room, here.
But why seawater?
Because it was available.
I don't understand. Who'd want to analyze seawater?
Whoever wanted to know it's chemical composition.
But everybody knows its chemical composition.
If they don't, all they have to do is open a book.
Hmm.
No. Jeff means something else.
He means that this is an automatic enterprise.
There's no choice involved.
They didn't know what it was going to analyze, right, Jeff?
Absolutely right.
That piece of raft out there
is being examined in bits and pieces.
It's being subjected to a variety of tests.
And that information is sent here, to this analog room.
And here it's coded and classified,
and sent back to its destination.
What destination? And by whom?
I don't know who.
But once we use this cuneiform alphabet, you never saw before...
Jeff...
How'd we get here?
Cobe.
Cobe, listen.
You know we've got a space project.
It's called surveyor.
An unmanned capsule, an automated device
that will be sent out into space.
And land, say, on Mars, or Venus, or Jupiter.
And once it gets there, it will perform a variety of experiments.
Like testing the soil. The atmosphere.
Plant life, animal life, if there is any.
Testing for chemicals.
Soil conditions. Living conditions.
Free ion belts. Cosmic rays. Radio activity.
A probe?
A probe. This?
Yeah.
But this one isn't ours.
You mean from outer space?
That's exactly what I mean.
You know, they landed this thing on earth
just by chance in the eye of a hurricane.
They scooped us up, and they deposited us.
Where did they deposit us?
Under a microscope.
Outside there, on the other side of this hollow center shaft...
Those light beams, that operate and activate all these tests,
are used to examine and to scrutinize us.
To probe our world.
Now, I think that...
And this may sound ridiculous.
But I think we're inside some gigantic space probe
of an alien civilization.
That plastic flooring that you're standing on right now
is the base of a giant microscope.
Inside...
Inside this whole hunk of space machinery.
It all fits, doesn't it?
And that mist?
A staining process.
The way we'd stain a glass slide and put it under a microscope.
And another thing... About that freezing?
To immobilize what they're inspecting.
They slice a cross section, photograph it,
and send it back by way their advanced telemetry system
so they can study it.
Another world. Another planet somewhere.
We're inside their space probe.
Yeah.
A race of giants, if that's what this is.
Hey...
Is that the life form from outer space?
I don't know. I don't think so.
A form like that doesn't have the manual dexterity
to get very far on the evolutionary scale.
And the one's who built this probe are pretty far advanced.
It's really something.
It's certainly not from our world.
It's unearthly.
Jeff?
You don't suppose that thing got a hold of Dex?
Look.
It's activated the cold light again.
This whole place is automated.
It duplicated itself.
Yeah.
Under that extreme cold, too.
It's fantastic.
I want to get a closer look.
Hey, it's gone.
Must have adapted to it so quickly.
Or it's naturally adapted to cold.
For this, uh, for this ability to divide and multiply.
It's fantastic!
But what's our defense against them?
Certainly not the guns in the survival kit.
What about the radio?
Have we given up hope of trying to contact our world?
What about Dex? What's happened to him?
And what's going to happen to us?
How are we going to get out of here?
How can it see without any eyes?
It can't get closer.
It won't.
If I wasn't sure that this isn't the alien who built this space probe,
I'm sure now.
Why?
Well, just look around. You see how clean everything is.
That's right. Antiseptic clean.
As though it was sterilized before it was sent out into space,
so it wouldn't contaminate wherever it was going.
Like a... Like another civilization.
But what about our friend, here?
A mutant.
A strain of germ that grew, and grew, and grew.
That's a germ?
Yes.
A microbe.
Resistant to whatever sterilization process was used.
Like a, like a fly can be resistant to D.D.T.
Your Mikie might have been picked up some other place.
What do you mean?
That's what I must have seen in the telemetry room. A map.
A rough scale of the solar system.
With lights representing other planets.
Why didn't you tell me about the map before?
I didn't know what it meant before.
Can you make it, Jeff?
I don't know.
It isn't particularly fast.
Yeah, but what if the door doesn't open automatically?
I may face a rather unpleasant situation.
Look, Cobe,
you attract it to that side. I may have a little more leeway.
I'm going with you!
Now, you stay here!
I told you to stay out there!
I told you I may be able to help.
Where's the map?
That's the solar system in there, isn't it?
The planets. The sun.
And the lights on the other planets.
Maybe that means that this probe has already been there.
And might be leaving here to go to Venus,
the next planet closer to the sun.
Yeah. With us on it. That's just great.
Unless we can get off.
We've got to reach them and tell them we can't go along!
We've got to try to reach them!
Yeah, thanks.
But how do I begin?
Maybe they found a way to transcend the speed of light.
Like with the application of a laser principle?
A time warp or space warp?
You understood all along?
As much as I know what those things are.
To compress time,
the past,
the future,
into now.
To change space relationships.
To be in 2 places at one time,
or 2 things,
or 2 people...
To be in one place.
Ah!
"Understood all along"? No.
I'm just beginning to understand
that there are a lot of things I don't understand.
It's like a telegraph.
Yeah.
But in 4 or 5 dimensions.
What?
Well, look.
I can control not only the length of the signal
but the strength of it. Even the shape of it.
Just by how long I hold down the key,
and where I apply the pressure.
Look at that!
Yeah.
Well, what's doing it?
I don't know. I'm not touching it, now.
It's incredible!
We've just communicated with something.
Another intelligent life of some kind.
Somewhere out in space.
Somewhere out there among the millions and millions of stars.
We've only established contact.
We haven't communicated.
No.
And we've got to communicate.
They have to know the position we're in.
And about those microbes out there. And what we're like.
That we're an intelligent life form.
They've got to know that the plankton and microbes
they're finding in seawater aren't dominant in this world.
Anymore than those creatures out there, which may be their microbes
aren't dominant in their world.
Maybe they've seen us already.
You said something about a photometry system.
How are we going to communicate with them?
I don't know.
Maybe, uh... Maybe just, uh...
S.O.S. or help
over and over again. Repeating the pattern.
Jeff! Mandy!
Mandy!
Cobe! Cobe!
I felt as though I was being pulled up like a vacuum.
Cobe, if Dex was pulled up like that...
Hey.
How long has it been doing that?
Not long.
1, 2, 3.
What is it?
1, 2.
Dex, get back in. Get back in.
1, 2.
Mandy, how about you?
One...
That's pretty obvious, isn't it?
Hey!
Hey, take a whiff.
Not bad.
Not a famous French perfume, but not bad.
Look, my blouse isn't wet anymore.
Cobe?
Yeah?
Take a step toward that thing.
What?
Go ahead.
Hey,
that bath must have doused us with some kind of repellent.
Yeah, deliberately, too.
Cobe, we've got some fantastic experimenting to do.
In that telemetry room they've discovered
a way of instant communication.
Those outer space people, life forms,
or whatever you want to call them,
can be a fantastic boon to our science.
Can you imagine when we've learned to communicate with them.
What secrets they can tell us. What scientific mysteries they can solve.
Hear anything?
What is it?
Feel anything?
Yeah.
The whole place is beginning to shake.
Sounds like motors.
Heavy motors.
Atomic motors?
Taking us away? Taking this whole probe away?
What's the next stop?
Venus?
What's the surface temperature of Venus?
800 degrees.
That's 6 times we've gone through the code alphabet.
Why don't they respond?
What else can we do?
We just can't keep on doing this.
What if it doesn't work? How are we going to get out of here?
I don't know, Cobe.
We've got to get out of this thing!
Just show me how.
I'm going to get the shortwave radio from the survival kit.
Maybe it will work this time. It's worth another try.
Good idea.
If only we can raise some response from the mainland.
The hurricane was moving in on Japan the last coordinates we got.
Try it.
Be careful, Cobe.
Stop. Halt. Danger.
Great words, if by some incredible miracle
they understood that you were sending
a 26-letter alphabet,
what would it mean to them? Nothing!
It's an impossible code to break.
It's impossible for our minds.
All I want to do right now is make contact,
just to get them to acknowledge.
What are you doing?
This panel is vibrating. There's a humming sound coming from it.
Hey, you're right.
The humming is getting louder and louder.
If this sound continues getting louder it might break our eardrums.
But then again, if it stops, it might mean they're ready to take off.
I wonder if this is a sound transmitter.
I don't know what a sound transmitter's like.
Look, a signal! What does it mean?
1, 2. 1, 2.
1, 2.
3. 3.
3...
I don't get it. It's senseless.
Just automatic programming.
What's taking Coberly so long?
If I'm any judge, we don't have much time left.
Can you hear me? Is my voice getting through to you?
That did it!
Maybe that's it! Maybe it's the voice!
Hey, try a... Try a mathematical code.
What about Einstein's equation?
It's, uh, "E equals MC squared."
That did it.
Now, why should that do it?
I don't know. Probably just coincidence.
There's no meaning or pattern to this.
No, it can't be coincidence!
They're aware of us.
All right.
So, we made contact with it.
But what good is it?
We've got to communicate.
We've got to make ourselves understood!
Now, try talking to that thing again.
What will I say?
"E equals MC squared," over and over?
Why not?
That equation's a universal law.
It's a constant in the universe.
Just keep talking. Anything!
I'm going to see what's doing with Coberly.
I think you'll be all right here.
I'll, uh, I'll be right back.
Coberly?
Cobe?
Hey, Coberly!
I don't know if I'm whistling in the dark.
I feel silly.
But I'm... I'm talking to you because we're desperate.
If this probe takes off from earth, we'll die!
Because we can't live in outer space.
And... and if this probe lands on Venus,
we'll die there, too, because we can't live in such heat!
There are other dangers here.
What about Dexter?
Where did he go? He just disappeared!
How?
Did that... did that creature do anything to him?
And how can... can it multiply?
You... you must have taken photographs of that creature.
A-and you must be aware of us.
You must be aware of us,
because... because you gave us protection against those creatures.
And you must be aware because,
because you took the trouble to make this whole probe antiseptic.
Y-y-you must be aware that those creatures
can... can multiply and infest our world.
Or another world, if this probe should land somewhere else.
Can you hear me?
Am I getting through?
A-are you all machine, no humanity?
No response?
Don't you understand me?
Cobe? Jeff?
Jeff! Cobe!
Cobe?
Jeff?
Cobe?
Jeff! Cobe!
Where are you?
Help! Jeff!
Where are you? Help!
Help!
I'm glad to see you. We couldn't get back in there.
Hey, now that she's showed, let's go.
What is it?
It's all right, Amanda.
Where are we? I was all alone.
This is the deck edge of the floor of the probe.
Come on, come on.
Lay her down carefully.
Easy does it. Atta girl.
Here, now put these on.
We finally reached a search plane. It's out there in the fog.
You know that light beam showed us the way out here? You, too?
Uh-huh.
We couldn't get back in there,
so I started sending out S.O.S's on the transmitter.
Come on, get that on.
OK. I still can't believe it.
You know if Dexter were here, Cobe, I'd say it never happened.
You're lucky you reached us.
Amen to that.
Though, how you ever figured
your position inside a hurricane,
and out here in all this soup... Miraculous!
Yeah, was I accurate?
Did I figure it?
How do you think we found you flying blind?
Well, I won't say we were lucky getting into that thing,
but we sure were lucky to get out of it.
Now, on to the wedding.
There it goes.
I guess we did communicate, didn't we, Jeff?
We had to.
But I never sent them our position.
How could I?
I didn't even know it.
No. This plane never did receive me?
But how?
I told it.
I told them about those creatures
and how they could destroy our world.
What was that?
Self-destruct.
They destroyed the probe so it wouldn't hurt any people.
Any planet.
Mandy, they must have figured out our alphabet.
They must have broken it down.
The meaning of what we were trying to say.
They'll be back.
Yeah, I think they will.
I wonder what would happen if it was turnabout?
I mean, suppose one of our space probes,
the surveyor,
came up against this kind of a problem in Jupiter or Mars?
I'd like to think we'd be as smart, compassionate,
human.
A few days, a week, a month,
will the Earth be visited,
by a stranger from the universe?
A warm, compassionate stranger.
To tell us of wonders beyond imagination,
of life beyond comprehension,
of secrets from the treasure house of stars?
We now return control of your television set to you.
Until next week, at this same time,
when the control voice will take you to...
The outer limits.