In a sparsely populated town set ten years after a nuclear war, the townspeople have discovered a supply of canned food but are waiting for Mr. Goldsmith to return from the cave to get the message from "the old man" to tell them whether it is contaminated with radiation. Some of them want to take their chances and eat the food, but they refrain from doing so after seeing the disastrous harvest yielded when they did so with their choice of land rather than taking the old man's advice about which areas were contaminated. When Mr. Goldsmith, the town's leader, returns, he informs them that the old man has declared the food contaminated and that it should be destroyed. When a group of soldiers enter the town, they try to dispel the townspeople's strange beliefs about the man in the cave. It is