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

hadn’t just taken a dive off the turnip truck. OhBoy, if Time really could be called back!
     
    I heard his Harley coming down the mountain road toward my house long before he shot halfway past the driveway, decided to course-correct doing 35 on a steep slope, and laid his bike down in the tarmac with a hideous wounded-beast screech.
    The scar from his wheelie remains to this day in my driveway, though the 1994 Northridge earthquake splintered it some.
    He came limping up to the door, I opened it, and in came The Great Actor, to peruse my humble offering.
    Shatner sat on the sofa in the living room, and read the script front to back, top to bottom, page after page. I went off around the house to tend to other matters—everything having gone to hell while I’d obsessed over the dawn-to-dusk writing of “City”—and every once in a while I’d cruise past and offer him a cuppa coffee or ask if everything was cool. He was abstracted, but he indicated everything was peachykeen. It took him some time to read it. He read it close, bro, very close.
    Then, when he had finished it, he sat there for a few minutes, staring out through the sliding doors of the living room toward the watershed land behind my house. Contemplative. Then he picked up “City” and started reading it all over again.
    This went on for a couple of hours.
    And after he completed the second pass, I saw him slowly turning the pages, studying the script for something…I knew not what.
    Talk about being a Mt. Everest capacity jerk, that was me, that was I, that was the both of the not-a-kid.
    He was line-counting. The Great Actor was weighing the freight of lines spoken by his publicity nemesis on Star Trek , the enigmatic Mr. Spock, the excellent Leonard Nimoy, against how many Kirk shots there were. And let me not suggest that the ego of Bill Shatner influenced his opinion, but when he toted up the numbers in his head, and found that Lenny had, what, maybe half a dozen more lines…I was on my way to an anger and a heartpunch that has lasted for thirty-five years.
    He told me how great the script was, how he couldn’t wait to play it, how he was going to tell Gene it was the best script they’d ever had for the show…and I battened on the banana oil flattery like a bad dresser buying a cheap suit. (I’m sixty-one years old. Shatner calls me “a surly young man.”)
    Shatner, of course, still limping from his flameout, went straight to Roddenberry and said he’d seen the script and it was swell, just perfectly swell, but he had a few problems with it .
    (A small digression. MY STAR TREK MEMORIES “written by” William Shatner—which is to accuracy as Le Sacre du Printemps “danced by” Harlan Ellison at the Bolshoi is to reality—had an initial printing of 250,000 copies. And though I don’t follow Shatner’s business dealings with even minuscule attention, I do know that in December of 1993 HarperCollins went back to press for another 25,000 copies.
    (That means that yet another quarter of a million gullible readers read the following fanciful interpretation of Shatner’s one and only visit to my home, as I’ve just described it to you. This is from page 219 of STAR TREK MEMORIES:
    (“Finally, when it got to the point where Justman and Roddenberry felt they were going to have to give up on the script, Gene sent me up to Harlan’s house, hoping that I might be able to reason with him, and I have to admit, I failed miserably. At the time I was rather friendly with Harlan, and I’m sure that Gene felt like maybe he’d listen to me if I went up there and told him why his script wasn’t usable. And I can remember driving up to Harlan’s house on my motorcycle, getting inside the house and being yelled at throughout my visit. Harlan was very irate and within a rather short period of time he’d thrown me off his property, insane with anger at Justman, Roddenberry and Coon. I was just the messenger, but he was out to kill me,