The City on the Edge of Forever

by Harlan Ellison

  And we COME BACK INTO FOCUS finding ourselves in the control central with LeBeque being dragged back away from the damping controls by Spock and several other crewmen.

  He reels back and the HIGH PIERCING WHINE of machinery stressing to implosion level subsides as Spock damps the units. The extraterrestrial spins on LeBeque, and coldly informs him,

  “You’ve been walking around this control country like a man under water for the past two hours. If you’re feeling unwell, Mr. LeBeque, relieve yourself, and leave the bridge.”

  “T—two hours…?” LeBeque murmurs, shaking his head as though to clear it. He excuses himself from the bridge and WE GO WITH HIM as he passes down cross-corridors in the ship, pausing to fight with himself, emotions playing across his face that tell us the man despises himself for what he has allowed himself to become. Then, making a decision, he heads for Beckwith’s cubicle, and as we come to them in 2-SHOT we hear LeBeque say, “I’ve had it. Whatever Kirk wants to do with me, I’ll deserve it; but I’m turning you in, Beckwith.”

  He turns to go, and has taken only two steps into the corridor when Beckwith, wild with panic, emerges from behind him and we ZOOM IN on Beckwith as he raises a massive block of green jade and swings it heavily, again and again at LeBeque, out of the frame. Another ZOOM IN on a trio of crewmembers, two men and a woman, as they round the junction of corridors and see the murder and then we HARD CUT TO:

  CORRIDOR OF ENTERPRISE framing a LONG SHOT IN PERSPECTIVE as Beckwith races toward the transporter chamber. There is a guard on the door, but Beckwith rushes INTO FRAME at such a breakneck pace that he is on the guard, and smashes him to the deck before the other can raise his weapon to challenge. Beckwith plunges through the hatch into the chamber, and the hatch sighs shut behind him, even as a throng of Enterprise crewmen—led by CAPTAIN JAMES KIRK, Spock, YEOMAN JANICE RAND and DR. McCOY—fill the frame and dash away from us, down the corridor toward the chamber.

  McCoy drops, to aid the guard who lies twisted at an odd angle, possibly dead. Kirk and Spock find the hatch sealed from the other side. Yeoman Rand breaks out a phaser and begins to puddle the sealtite as they HEAR the SOUND of the SHIP’S TRANSPORTER. As they burst through the hatch, into the transporter room, they find the transporter still glowing, the TRANSPORTER CHIEF half-conscious, struggling to sit up and pointing at the still-active machine. “B-Beckwith…” he mumbles.

  “He’s loose on that planet down there,” Kirk says tightly. “Let’s go get him…”

  CAMERA HOLDS on Kirk as the crew rush everywhichway to get a patrol ready to transport down after the killer. CAMERA HOLDS as Kirk turns to stare at the still-glowing transporter and on that eerie humming as we FADE OUT.

  ACT ONE:

  FADE IN the surface of the dead world. CLOSE ON booted tracks as CAMERA ANGLE WIDENS to show us the terrain. A featureless ball of silver-gray mists and dust-like powder that covers the ground. As though some cosmic god had flicked an ash and it had grown into a world. As CAMERA PULLS BACK we see the tell-tale shimmering and coalescing that mean crewmen from the Enterprise are materializing from the transporter. As Kirk, Spock, Yeoman Rand and FIVE ENLISTED CREWMEN appear, we HEAR the VOICE of KIRK OVER:

  KIRK’S VOICE OVER

  Ship’s Log: star-date 3134.8. This cinder, this empty death of a planet. This desolate mote in the emptiest reaches between galaxies. Its loneliness has the men of my patrol on edge. I know what they feel. This is the source of the peculiar radiation that had our clocks running backward. And now, Beckwith is down here—somewhere. Oh, we’ll find him, we have to. But there is something more important that has them frightened. A dead world such as this should be frigid, it should have no atmosphere.

  (beat)

  But we aren’t cold—and we can breathe.

  While we HEAR VOICE OVER we see Spock indicating the tracks to Kirk, and the Captain deploying his men in a search-pattern as they move forward. VOICE OVER CONTINUES as we LAP DISSOLVE TWICE THRU scenes of the patrol moving across the wilderness, being directed by one or another of the patrol members who stay with the tracks. When we first saw them materialize, they were wearing insulation suits and breatherpaks (transparent plastic envelopes over their heads) but now that Kirk has informed us there is air, the plastic envelopes have been thrown back like hoods.

  They carry phasers, and one of the crewmen has a small radiation console strapped to his chest. The DISSOLVES are different only in ANGLE and CLOSEUP for the scenery is seemingly changeless.

  As we DISSOLVE THRU TO the last of these tracking shots, the crewman with the console advises Kirk that the strange radiation that affected the ship’s clocks is becoming stronger, coming from the direction in which the tracks lead, over the horizon.

  They strike out toward the source of radiation and in the far distance see a series of great mountain peaks, rising up like shards of glass from an ocean of silver. They get a distant impression of a great city on the furthest of those peaks, a series of spires that tower into the cadaverous gray sky without warmth or welcome.

  They follow the tracks that head straight for the mountains, and the radiation grows more potent. Soon they find themselves on a mountain top near the city. As they top a rise—and the tracks vanish on the harder surface—they are astonished to see a group of men…but such men as the explorers from Earth have never known:

  Old they are. Old as the chill and dying sun that casts only shadows on this empty planet. Old as thought, old as time, old as the cinder on which they live. Nine feet tall, and shapeless beneath the long white robes that reach to the mist-laden ground. Even taller if one allows their mitered headpieces. Taller still by the lengths of their snow-beards, the only part of them other than their lined and weary faces that shows from their clothing.

  Kirk and Spock register astonishment at finding these ancient creatures, but the old men finally speak, after long beats in which their motionlessness makes us suspect they may be of stone. And this is what they say:

  We are the Guardians of Forever. We have been here since before your sun burned hot in space, before your race came into being. We have been here when this area of space was so filled with young suns that it was always high noon from their light.

  “But why do you stay here when this world is cold and empty?” Mr. Spock demands.

  Only on this planet do the myriad pulse-flows of time and space merge. Only here do the flux lines of Forever meet. Only here on this empty corpse of a world is there a gateway to the past, where the time vortex created by the Ancients can work. Only here. And we were set to watch the time vortex, so many hundreds of centuries ago that even we do not have clear memories of it.

  The Guardians explain that they are almost immortal, that they have been guarding “the time vortex” for so many eons, that Kirk and his party are the first visitors they have had since two hundred thousand years before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

  Spock inquires if they have seen another Earthman, and the Guardians say no. Yet as we INTERCUT to a rocky niche nearby, we see the hunted Beckwith, listening to every word being said. He looks around him, trying to find a way to escape, but it is a cul-de-sac. The only way out is past Kirk and the Enterprise patrol—and the Guardians. The look of desperation grows on his face, but it is mixed with a viciousness that tells us Beckwith is far from finished.

  Kirk expresses astonishment at the concept of a “time vortex,” that he had always thought it was the fable of lab technicians when they had had too much pure grain to drink. The Guardians nod their heads in the direction of a shimmering pillar of light, set between the gray-silver rocks. The time vortex. Built on lines of creation that mortal Man will not discover for a hundred hundred times the span of years he has been in existence. Created out of pure matter, and harnessed to this world where the passage of time and space meet just so. The pillar of light rises up and disappears. Into that fire of forever lies the passage to the past.

  Kirk asks the Guardians if they would consider it an imposition to tell hi
m more about the time vortex. They smile a little wearily, and say they would be pleasured to do so. “We want to know,” Kirk says gently, and they answer: We have nothing to do but desire to show you. Uncounted millennia they have stood here, silent, and to exercise their craft is their delight.

  They explain how the time vortex works, and then they offer to show Kirk the past. He asks if they can show him the past of any world, and they say yes.

  Kirk asks to see the past of Old Earth.

  They tell him to watch the pillar of light. At first there is no change, but in a moment the light itself begins to roil and thicken—like quicksilver mixing with smoke—and then a scene takes form in the light. It is a view of dense primordial jungle, blazing under a young sun. Then there is a crashing through the jungle, and the Earthmen reel back in astonishment as the behemoth bulk of a giant wooly mammoth bursts out of the foliage.

  They show him the time of the Mastodons; the time of the Clipper Ships; the time of the Depression, 1930. And the men of Earth marvel.

  As we HOLD PAST BECKWITH in F.G. to the Earthmen watching the pillar of light, we HEAR Kirk ask if it is possible to go back in time, back to, say, Old Earth. The Guardians indicate it is possible.

  But it is not wise. Man and non-Man must live in their present or their future. But never in their past, save to learn lessons from it. Time can be dangerous. If passage back is effected, the voyager may add a new factor to the past, and thus alter everything from that point to the present, all through the universe. Time is elastic. It has a tendency to revert to its original shape when the changes are minor. But when the change is life or death…when the sum of intelligence has been altered then the change can be permanent…and cataclysmic. So we do not go back. For one hundred thousand years no one has gone back.

  The time vortex has been left set at the year 1930, Old Earth. As Kirk and Spock talk with the Guardians, the ancient men tell them that time moves at its normal pace all through the universe, but not here, not within the sphere of influence of the machine, for it is akin to standing on the king’s cross, a zone of no-time. And that explains why there is atmosphere and warmth on this dead world. If they can control time, how much simpler it is to control their environment. It also explains the radiations received by the Enterprise, the radiations that caused their chronometers to go berserk. Spock then says to Kirk, “You see how old they are, centuries older than any human or alien we have ever encountered? Yet they say that time moves barely at all here. Can you imagine how old they must be to have aged so much.”

  The thought is staggering to Kirk, but he has barely a moment to think about it, for at that moment Beckwith leaps from his hiding place and makes a long run toward the time vortex. Kirk and Spock plunge forward to stop Beckwith. He slams Spock across the jaw and keeps going, a broken-field dash that Kirk suddenly realizes is toward the pillar of light. Kirk takes a flying dive toward Beckwith, and manages to throw him off-balance. But Beckwith does a little dance-step of maneuvering and hurls himself forward and in a whooooshing of space rushing to fill the vacuum where he has been, Beckwith vanishes into the pillar of light, even as Kirk grabs up a phaser and fires a blast of coruscating energy at the pillar of light—now once again empty.

  Beckwith has gone back. Back to the past.

  Kirk dashes back to Spock. The extraterrestrial gets lumpily to his feet. He is all right. The Guardians of Forever are in a panic. They say the fact of adding Beckwith to the past has changed everything. Kirk says everything looks the same. Yes, here on this world, everything is the same, they explain, but from here outward, everything is different. It is another universe out there.

  “How? How is it changed?” Kirk demands.

  They do not know. Only that the fabric of time has been warped, the river that is the time-flow has been diverted, and everything in the present has been altered. At that moment the Guardians’ city, high on one of the crags far behind them, begins to shimmer and send out waves of light. The Guardians say they are being summoned by others, that the great ancient machines that govern the pillar of light are registering traumas in time, and they must return to their city.

  And they vanish.

  Kirk realizes he and Spock and the men must get back up to the Enterprise as quickly as possible, to see what has changed there. He sends the men up first, in transporter shifts that leave only himself and Spock for the final shift.

  For a moment they contemplate what alterations in time Beckwith’s jump-back could have caused, but as Spock points out, “Speculation at this point is senseless.”

  Not so senseless, however, when they transport up to the ship, materialize in the chamber and find that the room they left as a USS exploratory vessel has altered drastically. As they stare about the room, the neatly-uniformed men are gone, and in their place Kirk and Spock find themselves staring at a motley horde of evil-looking renegades. A crew of deadly cutthroats with phasers leveled at them. The renegades are a strange and anachronistic blending of modern science and mismatched garb. The six crewmembers already sent up, five Enterprise men and Yeoman Rand, are prisoners. And as one of the pirates steps forward to speak, Kirk finds himself about to be gunned down mercilessly.

  “Welcome to the Condor!” The pirate CAPTAIN smirks, as we HOLD on Kirk’s expression of disbelief and we FADE OUT!

  ACT TWO:

  Kirk and Spock realize what has happened: some strange turn in time has altered their ship into a buccaneer vessel. They leap out of the transporter chamber and Kirk grapples with the Pirate Captain. It is the signal for the captive Enterprise men to overcome their captors. There is a bloody pitched battle in the transporter room and finally the Enterprise men manage to empty the chamber. But now there are not 530 men of the Enterprise on the other side of that triple-strength door. There are 530 killer vandals and their women, who are even at this moment readying weapons to blast through into the chamber. Kirk and Spock know they must go back to the nameless planet and follow Beckwith into the pillar of light. They must bring him back from the past, to straighten out time.

  They enter the transporter chamber, and leaving their six remaining living fellow crewmen to hold the ship, they begin to dissolve. Yeoman Rand, her uniform ripped from the battle, exposing a handsome expanse of leg, urges them tightly, “Hurry back, Captain. Or we might not be here when you ret—”

  But they are gone.

  The Guardians have returned. Kirk and Spock say they will go back. They ask the Guardians to send them to the same time Beckwith arrived in. The Guardians say there is a problem. Because of the internal stresses put upon the time-flow by the passage of Beckwith, they cannot be sent back to the exact, same, precise moment. Either earlier or later. Kirk says earlier, and they will wait for Beckwith and grab him when he comes through.

  The Guardians warn Kirk and Spock of two things: first, Beckwith’s go-back has caused only a temporary temporal alteration. If they can bring him back, everything will go back the way it was, like a river following its natural course.

  But in each time-period there is a focal point, the Guardians warn them. Something or someone that is indispensable to the normal flow of time. Something that may be completely innocent or unimportant otherwise, but acts as a catalyst, and if tampered with, will change time permanently.

  They say that Beckwith will try to reach this focal point, and in some way alter it, so that time stays forever altered. Kirk wants to know how Beckwith knows what the focal point is. The Guardians assure him Beckwith doesn’t know, but that because of the stresses and fluxes of the time-flow, Beckwith will be inexorably drawn to this focal point, and will alter it, even without knowing he is doing so.

  “Then how can we stop him?” Kirk asks.

  The Guardians have been speaking in generalities, in parables (though for purposes of this outline they have stated their points concisely), and now they try to tell Kirk what he needs to know, but once again their ethereal natures turn the clues into riddles:

  You must stop him by b
ringing him out of the past. He will seek that which must die, and give it life. Stop him.

  Kirk is confused. “I don’t understand. Can’t you tell me more?”

  Blue it will be. Blue as the sky of Old Earth and clear as truth. And the sun will burn on it, and there is the key.

  Even Spock, analytical and logical, does not understand. But though they ask again and again, the Guardians can tell them nothing more. So they turn to the pillar of light, still tuned to Old Earth, 1930. They walk toward it, and the flames leap up about them as they step through.

  They go into the pillar of light, a week earlier than Beckwith, and when they appear in the past, they find themselves in New York of 1930, on Old Earth.

  It is, literally, the city on the edge of Forever…

  Linked to a tall-spire city on a frozen mountain peak across the stars and hundreds of years in the future, another city on the opposite edge of Forever, by the tenuous thread of life called Kirk and Spock and Beckwith.

  But now that they are here, in the past, they must learn to make their way, at least until Beckwith comes through the time machine. Yet imagine the circumstances—they are men out of time, out of joint with the world around them. They have no skills that can be put to use in this “regressive” age. Their clothes are peculiar. They have no place to live, no money (and don’t even understand the medium of exchange or have a way of earning money) and most obvious of all—