Chuckles and Skip, whose wife is in labor at the hospital, are tending at the Oasis Bar in Terminal City this evening, their current customers being: Freddy, the local barfly and floozy, who wants some excitement in her men; grizzled newspaper reporter Harry Barnes, who is lamenting the sorry state of his career which has gone nowhere; Helen and Earl, the former a proverbial good girl who in her loneliness is planning on running off with the latter, a slightly older and more experienced car salesman, for the weekend, those plans about which Helen had lied to her mother with who she still lives; and the quiet young man at the end of the bar. What none of the others yet knows is that that quiet man is Gunther Wyckoff, who was sentenced to life at a mental hospital for the criminally insane three years ago for his compulsion to kill, he who has just escaped and has returned to Terminal City on a mission. When it is made public that dangerous Wyckoff has not only escaped but has already killed one person in Terminal City in his return, he feels he has no other option but to hold everyone in the bar hostage and barricade them all inside. While a standoff of sorts also occurs outside in the situation among the police, specifically between Captain Henry Keiver, who is leading the operation to apprehend Wyckoff and save the hostages, and police psychologist Dr. John Faron, whose testimony three years ago led to Wyckoff being sent to the hospital rather than to the proverbial electric chair, the hostages try to negotiate with Wyckoff to let them go, each whose approach is tainted by his or her own personal situation. They all are working under a deadline as Wyckoff has threatened to start killing the hostages if he doesn't get what he wants.
—Huggo