Project Tic-Toc is a top secret U.S. government effort to build an experimental time machine, known as "The Time Tunnel" due to its appearance as a cylindrical hallway. The base for Project Tic-Toc is a huge, hidden underground complex in Arizona, 800 floors deep and employing over 36,000 people. The directors of the project are Dr. Douglas Phillips (Robert Colbert), Lt. General Heywood Kirk (Whit Bissell), and Dr. Anthony Newman (James Darren). The specialists assisting them are Dr. Raymond Swain (John Zaremba), a foremost expert in electronics, and Dr. Ann MacGregor (Lee Meriwether), an electro-biologist supervising the unit that determines how much force and heat a time traveler is able to withstand.