The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison Read Free Book Online

things going. He was doing a book and he had this short story he had to get in, or whatever…”
    Johnny doesn’t seem to remember what the working situation for freelance writers was like in the ’60s. How it went, was this: the new season began in September; every show got an order for 28 to 32 segments from the networks; but they got those purchase orders earlier, in May or June. And then they would start showing the pilot episode to every writer in town. They had “cattle calls” in which you’d be sitting with twenty or thirty other scenarists, in a screening room at the studio. And after you’d seen the pilot episode they’d shot the year before, everyone would trample his gramma to get to the producer or story editor, to pitch an idea.
    And it all happened during a couple of weeks in the spring. What you would have to live on for the rest of the year was predicated on how fast, and how many, gigs you could smash’n’grab during the cattle-call fortnight. (And in them thar days, kids, the pay was a lot less. For a half hour script, it was something like fifteen hundred bucks, and for an hour-long segment, like Trek , it was maybe three grand.) So if you wanted to live above the poverty line in expensive L.A., you glommed onto three or four assignments all at the same time.
    No excuse, just the way it was.
    And I had a couple of assignments on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well as completing the last of a feature film assignment (coincidentally, also at Paramount). Gene came on the scene after I was committed to those jobs, but he wanted me on Trek so much, and I was so enamored of the idea of working on the first really big-time sf space adventure show…I accepted the contract.
    So it is true. I was slow. I was riding three horses at the same time. But early on, I fell in love with my story of Kirk and Spock trying to set time right, of Kirk’s great, tragic love affair, of the immutability of time and the human spirit. I threw myself into writing “City” as I had done with no other story save “Demon with a Glass Hand.” And I wrote treatment after treatment to keep up with Roddenberry’s ever-changing “script direction” and “input”—most of which came as a result of either Desilu or NBC suggesting this nitwit idea or that bonehead concept, I wrote and wrote and wrote. More than the Writers Guild regs permitted, more than I was ever paid for, more than was required. What sort of imbecile demands?
    Well, Gene called me up one day and said, “The Enterprise has to be in danger. Big danger.”
    I replied that the focus of the show was not on the Enterprise , which existed in a timeless place frozen in the chrono-stream till Kirk and Spock could either set time in the past back the way it was supposed to be…or change the future, in which the ship might not even exist.
    “No, no,” Gene said, getting troubled that I was arguing with him, as if I knew what I was doing, “we have to have a great threat to the ship in every episode. The network is asking for it.”
    “But it’s beside the point, Gene! It only wastes time and takes the viewer’s focus off the love story, which is what this is all about.”
    “You’ll have to do it!”
    So I did it. To Gene’s order, I created a sub-plot about the Enterprise being thrown into an alternate future where they had become, gulp!, space pirates. It was an unnecessary, foolish, redundant distraction…but Gene thought it would placate the suits over at NBC. (Eventually, of course, it was dropped. But it helped contribute to the myth that I had written this unshootable, incredibly expensive teleplay. Horse puckey.)
    And there was, of course, the opening, in which I had one of the ship’s complement getting a weak-willed officer to do something crooked, by tempting him with Jewels of Sound, a kind of futuristic hallucinogenic narcotic. Oh no, I was told, we can’t possibly have anyone on the Enterprise doing anything as scummy as that. Our people