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

wouldn’t act that way.
    That was the first time I ever heard that miserable excuse for hackneyed formula writing. Our hero wouldn’t act that way. Our lead won’t allow her character to act that way. Our people wouldn’t act that way.
    No, indeed not. What they can do is act the same damned predictable way each and every week, in each and every new situation. Never mind that human beings are irrational and unpredictable and an amalgam of good and bad and smart and dumb, never mind that the most universal reason that most of us do any thing, even if it gets us in trouble or messes us up, is that It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Never mind that making these characters unchanging gave them about as much depth as a saucer of oatmeal. Never mind that common sense tells us that if you jam a mixed crew of approximately 450 people into an interstellar tunafish tin, for extended periods, that maybe, possibly, whaddaya think someone might get just a touch cranky with someone else? You mean to tell me, I said to whomever would listen, including Gene and John and Herb Solow (then head of the studio), and Bobby Justman, who was, at the time, associate producer—all of whom tell wonderful stories about how I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and how each of them, according to them, saved this script—that all 450 of these spacefaring men and women are saints, without flaw or natural human instincts or crankiness or rotten spots in their nature? No, I was told, Gene believes in the ultimate perfectibility of the human race. (Yeah, but all them third world aliens, who were nothing more than surrogates for ghetto minorities, they could be miserable rotten sonsabitches. Talk about your White Man’s Burden.)
    Yet, with all of that in there, Gene okayed the treatment finally, and I set about the long chore of writing the script.
    So you know who it was that really sandbagged me?
    It was Shatner.
    I wasn’t a kid. I should have heard the sound of creeping actors in the night.
     
    Shatner had been sucking up. No, let me correct that, heaven forbid any of the True Believers get the impression that Bill wasn’t absolutely and strictly the kindest, least self-serving entity in the universe. Bill had been solicitous of my friendship. I won’t talk about that afternoon at the Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills. All I’ll say is that Bill was a sharp listener, and he knew that I had won the Writers Guild award, plus all these science fiction Hugos and Nebulas, and I was coming off a feature film that (until the wretched thing, in fact, opened) gossip was predicting would make a fabulous film…and he made me his little pal, his little chum. Leonard Nimoy wasn’t like that. He was simply a good guy, and never hustled me, and we have remained friends for a quarter of a century.
    But Shatner had me conned. Butter wouldn’t melt…well, you know the rest. And I was going for the okeydoke again, silly me.
    Bill had made it clear that the moment I finished that great script everyone on the show said I was writing, he wanted to see it, wanted to hold it in his hands still warm and pulsing from the typewriter.
    I finished the script on Saturday the 28th of May, the day after my thirty-second birthday. I wrote FADE OUT and THE END and sat back and smiled and felt great compassion for Captain James T. Kirk, who would have sacrificed the entire universe, all of time and space, for the woman he loved. And I was filled with pride at having created the character of Trooper, a legless veteran of World War I, whose bravery meant nothing in the infinite flow of merciless time. Boy, I loved that damned script!
    And like the Mt. Everest of schmucks, instead of going and playing a game of miniature golf or swimming the Hellespont, I made one of the great idiot mistakes of my life. I took an actor’s disingenuous camaraderie as true friendship, and I called Shatner at his home.
    “I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Bill said.
    I wasn’t a kid. I