The City on the Edge of Forever (16 page)

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 bringing 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—

Spock is an obvious extraterrestrial.

This is brought forcibly home to them as they materialize on a crowded New York street. In the midst of a bread-line demonstration. On a soap-box, a man is inciting the crowd to riot, charging that all the foreigners are clogging the soup kitchens, stealing jobs good Americans should have, sending the country further and further into the Depression. Kirk and Spock are momentarily disoriented, having come from a bleak landscape a million light-years away, and hundreds of years in the future, and they find themselves looking about with confusion. Their movement draws the attention of the haranguer, and when he sees Spock, his eyes open wider.

“There’s one of ’em! There’s one of the foreigners trying to take the bread out of our mouths! Let’s show him how we feel about things!”

The crowd turns in blind fury, propelled by empty bellies, and begins attacking Spock. Kirk leaps to his aid, and in a moment there is a street corner imbroglio that both realize they cannot win. In a moment that is clear of attackers, Kirk levels the phaser he has brought through with him and trains it on a lamppost. It vanishes at a blast of light, and the crowd falls back in terror.

Kirk and Spock take this moment as a means of escape. They bolt, with the crowd regrouping behind them.

They take off, down the street, around the corner, into an alley, over a fence, into a backyard and down another street, till they come to ground in a basement of an apartment building.

They know they must find the focal point the Guardians spoke about. But to do that, they must be able to move freely in the city. Kirk cautions Spock to stay there, back in the end of that dirty basement, till he can find them lodgings, and clothes of the period. Spock agrees and Kirk goes off, leaving the alien with the phaser.

But this is the year of the Depression. Work is scarce, money is almost impossible, even clothes are a problem. And Kirk, so much worse off than men familiar with the times, with ties to the period, with knowledge of how to do it and where and how much it costs, finds himself at a loss. He manages to steal some clothes off a clothesline and returns to the apartment house.

He and Spock change, and they are about to leave, when the custodian of the building discovers them. He assumes they are bindlestiffs, just bums, sleeping in the basement, and though they think he is going to make a fight with them, he seems to be a good man; he asks them if they need work, and they say yes. He tells them they can sleep down in the basement till they find something better. “At least it’s warm near the furnace.”

In exchange they will carry out the cinders and shovel the coal to keep the furnace stoked, and promise not to steal from any of the tenants.

They thank him, and he says it’s only for a short time till something happens for them.

A short time…

As the waters of Forever RIPPLE and WE FIND OURSELVES back on the changed
Enterprise
, in the chamber with the doomed men, as the Pirate Captain readies a bank of destructive heatbeams, and trains them on the control room doors. As the doors glow red from the bombardment, and one of the younger officers in the besieged transporter chamber asks Yeoman Rand, “Where are they…what are they doing…are they coming to help us?”

And as we CLOSE TIGHT on the metal, turning to slag, we contemplate Kirk and Spock, back there…and we FADE OUT.

ACT THREE:

Kirk has a menial job. Spock has passed himself off as an Oriental, he’s washing dishes in a beanery. They are existing in the grimy underside of New York life, while seeking the focal point for this time-phase.

Then, by chance (or as Spock later murmurs, “There are no coincidences in Time.”) the alien locates the “focal point.” On his way home one night from the hash-house where he washes dishes, he passes a street corner revival. He hears the lyrical sound of a woman’s voice, as clear and as vibrant “as truth.” He stops, pauses to listen as SISTER EDITH KEELER speaks to a crowd of disgruntled derelicts, poor men—as all men in these days of pennilessness are poor—about the brotherhood of man. About the need to trust, the need to love…not in the manner of the fanatic, to love merely because it keeps the belly from growling; but to love because it is the only salvation for mankind, the only way to find the path to the stars.