ANNOUNCER:
You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the
Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War
of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.

PIERSON (played by Orson Welles):
As I set down these notes on paper, I'm obsessed by the thought that
I may be the last living man on earth. I have been hiding in this
empty house near Grovers Mill -- a small island of daylight cut off
by the black smoke from the rest of the world. All that happened
before the arrival of these monstrous creatures in the world now
seems part of another life. . . a life that has no continuity with
the present, furtive existence of the lonely derelict who pencils
these words on the back of some astronomical notes bearing the
signature of Richard Pierson. I look down at my blackened hands, my
torn shoes, my tattered clothes, and I try to connect them with a
professor who lives at Princeton, and who on the night of October
30, glimpsed through his telescope an orange splash of light on a
distant planet. My wife, my colleagues, my students, my books, my
observatory, my. . . my world. . . where are they? Did they ever
exist? Am I Richard Pierson? What day is it? Do days exist without
calendars? Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind
the clocks?