by 02(lit)
"Very well," Kirk said. He looked at the main viewing screen, which was now showing the image of the target planet. It was utterly barren, though occasional faint geometrical patterns showed where there might once have been cities-before the creatures had come with their burden of agony and wiped them out. "It will be a pleasure to get rid of that monster. Arms Control, are those missiles primed?"
"Yes, sir," said a loudspeaker. "Two fully-armed planet-wreckers, programed and ready to go."
"Very well. Fire one."
A streak of light shot away from the Enterprise. For many long minutes nothing seemed to happen. Then the planet on the screen burst into a white blare of atomic fire. The screen backed hastily down the intensity spectrum.
At the same moment, Spock screamed. Two security men promptly grabbed him; Bones had been alert for just such an outcome.
"Stop! Stop!" Spock screamed. "My world-my life-"
"Fire two," Kirk said grimly. The planet was already breaking up, but he was taking no chances. Another colossal fusion explosion spread over the screen. When it had died away, there was nothing left to be seen but an enormous, expanding cloud of gas.
"So we have created a new Orion nebula," Kirk said. He turned to Spock. The first officer was standing quietly in the grip of the security man, while Bones hovered nearby with a hypo.
"Mr. Spock?"
Spock's eyes were glazed, and for a moment he seemed to have no mind at all. His face was blank, his mouth working. Then, gradually, life and sanity seemed to flow back into him.
"I am... recovering," he said formally. "The pain was... incredible... like nothing I had experienced before. For an instant I was that creature. I felt its death. But now... nothing."
"Now," McCoy said firmly, "we take you below and extract that thing from you. I will tolerate no further arguments on that score."
"No further arguments are necessary," Spock said. "Its purpose is served."
"Any word from Deneva, Lieutenant?"
"Rapidly getting back to normal, Captain," Uhura re-ported. "Menen says that the remaining creatures just wander about helplessly and seem to have almost no vi-tality left. To kill one, you need scarcely do more than stick it with a pin."
"Very good," Kirk said. "Mr. Spock, this may sound grandiose, but it's the truth. I think you have singlehandedly just saved the galaxy."
"No, sir, I think not."
"What could have stopped them if we hadn't?"
"Their own nature, Captain."
"Explain."
"A truly successful parasite," Spock said, "is commen-sal, living in amity with its host, or even giving it positive advantages-as, for instance, the protozoans who live in the digestive system of your termites and digest for them the wood that they eat. A parasite that regularly and in-evitably kills its hosts cannot survive long, in the evolu-tionary sense, unless it multiplies with tremendous rapidi-ty-much more rapidly than these creatures did. It is not pro-survival."
"In the evolutionary sense, maybe," Kirk said. "But evolution takes a long, long time. In the interim, you have at least saved millions of people from pain, madness and death."
"Believe me, Captain," Spock said, "I find that quite sufficient."
THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER*
(Harlan Ellison)
* The script for this story differed drastically in some respects from Mr. Ellison's original version, which he was kind enough to send to me. In writing this adaptation I tried to preserve what I thought were the best elements of both scripts; but it was tricky to manage and it is more than possible that I have wound up owing apologies all around. It was a poetic and brilliant piece to begin with; if it is a botch now, the fault is entirely mine.-JB
Two drops of cordrazine can save a man's life. Ten drops of that unpredictable drug will sometimes kill. When a defective hypospray went off in McCoy's hand, a hundred times that amount was pumped into his body in a split second.
With a frenzied, incoherent cry, the ship's surgeon fled the bridge. Within minutes the entire ship was alerted. The library tapes on cordrazine said that at such dosages, paranoia was a frequent outcome-but McCoy knew the ship too well. By the time a search was organized, he had reached the transporter room and beamed himself down to the planet the Enterprise was orbiting.
The transporter had been monitoring what appeared to be a curious time disturbance on the surface of the unknown world. The settings had not been changed; what-ever was down there, McCoy was now in the heart of it. Kirk would have liked to have had more information about it first, but there was no chance of that now. They had to go after McCoy. Kirk picked Spock, Scott, Uhura, Davis and a Security guard, and, of course, himself.
They materialized in the midst of extensive ancient ruins. Much of it was almost dust, but there were enough scattered sections of broken wall and piled stone to pro-vide hiding places for McCoy.
This planet was cold. A burnt-out sun hung dolorously in the sky, producing a permanent, silvery twilight. It was a dead world, an ash. The ruins extended past the hori-zon-a city of tremendous size-but there could have been no life in it for ten thousand centuries. It takes a long time for a sun to burn out.
In the midst of the desolation, one object was polished like new, drawing Kirk's eyes instantly. It was a large, oc-tagonal mirror-or was it a mirror? Its framed, cloudy surface was nebulous, shifting. Whatever it was, it gleamed, untarnished, agelessly new. A cube, also untar-nished but half-buried in dust and rubble, sat beside it. Spock aimed his tricorder at it.
"Whatever that is," Kirk said crisply, "make it the hub of our search pattern. Fan out."
The group separated quickly-all but Spock, who was drawing closer to the shining object, instead. He said, "Unbelievable!"
"Mr. Spock?"
"Sir, this one, single object is the source of all the time displacement we detected out in space. I do not understand where it gets the power, or how it applies it. It can-not be a machine, not in any sense that we understand the term, but..."
Kirk eyed the object. "Then what is it?
At once, the dead air was stirred by a heavy hum; and then a resonant, vibrantly throbbing voice spoke from the object itself.
"A... question," the voice said. "A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space, and before your race was born, I have awaited a question."
"What are you?" Kirk said.
"I... am the Guardian of Forever."
"Are you a machine," Kirk said, "or a being?"
"I am both, and neither. I am my own beginning, my own ending."
Spock said, "I see no reason for answers to be couched in riddles."
"I answer all questions as simply as I can."
"What is your function, then?"
"I am a time portal. Through me the great race which once lived here went to another age."
"Past or future?" Spock said.
"The past," the voice said, like a sigh. "Always and only the past. And to their past, which you cannot share. I can only offer you yours. Behold-the birth of the plan-et you both share."
In the mirror, there was suddenly the image of a solar system forming out of a changing, cooling fireball... and somehow Kirk knew that it was not an image at all, but a distant view of a fact. A moment later, they were looking at a primeval, shoreless sea; and then, suddenly, a jungle of tree ferns.
"Mr. Spock," Kirk said thoughtfully, "if that is a door-way back through time, could we somehow take Bones back a day in tune, then relive that accident? Stop that hypo spitting into him?"
"We would have to catch him first," Spock said. "Be-sides, Captain, look at the speed at which centuries are passing. To step through precisely on the day we wish would appear to be impossible."
"Guardian, can you change the speed at which yester-day passes?"
"I was made to offer the past in this manner," the Guardian said. "I cannot change."
Egypt waxed, waned, passed. Atlantis sank. Skin-clothed barbarians suddenly became Hellenes. Spock was getting
it all into the tricorder.
"It's strangely compelling, isn't it?" Kirk said. "To step through there, lose oneself in another world-"
He was interrupted by a shout and a scrambling sound. He spun. McCoy, who evidently had been quite nearby, was headed straight for the time vortex at a dead run. Nobody but Kirk and Spock were anywhere near him.
Spock dropped the tricorder and intercepted, but McCoy, his eyes frighteningly wild, twisted away from him. That left no one but Kirk, who made a flying dive; but McCoy did a little dance step of broken field maneuvering and was free. Kirk landed painfully and rolled over.
"Bones!" he shouted. "No, no!"
But he was in time only to see McCoy disappear into the cloudy octagonal frame, his body popping out of sight as though it had been swallowed. Then the vortex was as blank as it had been when they first saw it.
"Where is he?" Kirk demanded.
"He has passed into what was," said the voice of the Guardian.
"Captain," said Uhura, a little breathlessly. She had arrived on the run. "I've lost contact with the ship. I was talking to them, and it suddenly went dead. No static; just... nothing."
"The communicator is all right?"
"Yes, sir. It just seems like there's nothing up there."
The Guardian said, "Your vessel, your beginning, all that you knew is gone."
Kirk felt a fearful sinking of his heart, remembering that episode when he and Spock and an archaic man named John Christopher had fought not to be noticed by the world of the 1970s. He said grayly, "McCoy has somehow changed history."
Scott had joined the party. He said, "This time we're stranded, Captain?"
Kirk did not answer, but Spock nodded. "With no past -no future."
"Captain," Uhura said. "I'm... I'm frightened."
Kirk looked slowly up into the black and star-littered sky of the nameless planet, empty now of the Enterprise, without even a sun to give it warmth and joy.
"Earth's not even out there," he said. "Not the one we knew. We are totally alone-without even a history."
"We shall have to remake it," Spock said.
"How, Mr. Spock?"
"We will have to go back in tune ourselves-attempt to set right whatever it was that the doctor changed. I was recording images at the time he left. By synchroniz-ing just out of phase with that, I believe I can approximate when to jump. Perhaps within a month before he arrived. Or a week if we are lucky."
"Guardian!" Kirk said. "If we are successful..."
"Then you will be returned. It will be as though none of you had gone."
"Just finding McCoy back there," Scott said, "would be a miracle."
Spock said, "There is no alternative."
"Scotty, when you think you've waited long enough- whatever 'long enough' might mean now-then..." Kirk shrugged. "Each of you will have to try it. Even if you fail, you'll be alive in some past world, somewhere."
"Stand ready, Captain," Spock said. "I think the time is coming around again."
They were standing in a seamy, down-at-the-heels city street, with murky glass storefronts and an occasional square four-wheeled vehicle. Over one store was a large sign proclaiming:
CCC CAMPS SIGN UP HERE
and beside it, another store with a sign that said FREE SOUP and a smaller sign with an arrow, reading FORM A LINE. Queues of shabby men in caps and shapeless coats were moving, very slowly, into both stores.
Spock said, bemused, "Is this the heritage my mother's people brag about?"
"This," Kirk said with disgust, "is what it took us five hundred years to crawl up from. Never mind that now- somebody's going to spot us pretty quickly, and our clothes aren't exactly period costumes. Let's do something about that first."
He drew Spock down the alley in which they had first popped into this world. "There's a line of clothes back there."
"I'm afraid I will draw attention either way, Captain."
"Well, Mr. Spock," Kirk said, "if we can't disguise you, we'll have to find a way to explain you. Here, put these on." He pulled down from a line two shirts, two pairs of pants, an old jacket and a wool stocking-cap.
"You might see if you can locate me a ring for my nose," Spock said. "But Captain, aside from the fact that this is theft, I do not believe we ought to change clothes out in the open. As I remember your history, old Earth was rather stuffy about such matters."
"That's right. Okay, let's march." Kirk rolled the cloth-ing into a bundle and tucked it under his arm.
They made it back to the open street without incident. Kirk began to feel better. "You know," he said, "I rather like this century. Simpler, easier to manage. Why, I might even find I actually have a considerable talent for... wump!"
He had run squarely into the arms of a large, bulkily obvious Security-guard type. The blue-uniformed man looked them up and down, and then at the clothing bun-dle Kirk was shifting back and forth. At last he said pleasantly, "Well?"
"Uh, yes," Kirk said. "You are a police officer. I seem to remember..."
It seemed to be the wrong tack. Kirk let the sentence trail off and tried a friendly smile. The policeman smiled back, but he did not move. Behind Kirk, Spock said, "You were saying something about a considerable talent, sir?"
This was also a mistake, since it attracted the officer's attention to Spock, and especially to his pointed ears. Kirk said hurriedly, "My friend is, uh, Chinese, of course. The ears, ah, are actually easily explained. You see..."
The policeman remained absolutely silent. Kirk was stumped.
"Perhaps the unfortunate accident I had in childhood..." Spock prompted.
"In the fields, yes," Kirk said quickly. "Caught his head in a mechanical, uh, rice-picker. Fortunately... an American missionary living nearby, who happened to have been a skilled plastic surgeon in civilian life..."
"Sure an' t'God that's enough, now," the policeman said. "Drop the bundle, hands up against that wall. Phwat a story."
"Yes, sir," Kirk said. As he was about to turn, he stopped and stared at the policeman's shoulder. "Uh, careless of your wife to let you go out that way."
"What?" the policeman said, raising his nightstick.
"Quite untidy, sir," Spock said, picking up the cue. "If you will allow me..."
He pinched the policeman's shoulder gently, and, equal-ly gently, the policeman sagged to the pavement.
"And now, Captain..." he said.
"Yes," Kirk said. "As I recall, the appropriate expres-sion is-flog it!"
Police whistles-an eerie, unfamiliar sound-were shrilling behind them as they ducked into an open cellar door. The cellar was dismal: a coal bin, an old furnace, mountains of litter, a few mildewed trunks, all looking like monsters in the dimness. They changed clothes quick-ly. Kirk wore the jacket; Spock pulled the stocking cap down over his elegant, dangerous ears.
Spock got out his tricorder. Nothing came out of it but an unpleasant electronic squeal, like an echo of the fading police whistles.
The two men looked at each other over the coal pile. At last Kirk said, "Obviously this is not a game. Time we faced the unpleasant facts. Status, Mr. Spock?"
"First," Spock said precisely, "I believe we have about a week before Dr. McCoy arrives. But as far as being certain of that..."
"And arrives where? New York, Boise, Honolulu, Outer Mongolia?"
"Obviously, I do not know. There is a theory..." Spock hesitated. Then he shrugged and plowed on, "The theory is that time can be regarded as fluid, like a river, with currents, backwash, eddies. Like the solar-system analogies of atomic structure, it is more misleading than enlightening, but there may be a certain truth to it all the same."
"Mr. Spock, if I didn't know you better, I'd suspect you were trying to educate me."
"No, sir. I mean only to suggest that the same time current which swept McCoy to a certain place or event has taken us to the same place or event... Unless that is the case, I believe we have no hope."
"Odds?"
"Captain, in tim
e there are no odds; you are pitting an infinite series of instants against an utterly improbable event. And yet..." Spock held up the tricorder. "Locked in here is the exact place, the exact moment, even exact images of what McCoy did back here. If I could hook this into the ship's computer for just a few moments..."
"Any chance that you could build a makeshift com-puter?"
"In this zinc-plated, vacuum-tube culture?" Spock said. "None at all. I have no tools, no parts, no supplies... I do not even know the line voltage."