Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations by Michael Jan Friedman

Author:Michael Jan Friedman [Friedman, Michael Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Trek, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 0671881035
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1999-11-05T07:00:00+00:00

McCoy knew who Edith Keeler was. He knew only too well.

With a healthy disregard for red tape, he told me how the Enterprise encountered a pattern of time displacement waves and traced it to the Guardian. He also told me how he, the ship’s doctor, accidentally injected himself with a hypospray full of cordrazine. Caught up in a paranoid delusion, he beamed himself down to the Guardian’s planet.

Kirk and a security team followed—and found the Guardian. It was Spock, Kirk’s first officer, who determined that the thing was a million years old. It was Spock too who recognized the Guardian for what it was—a means of accessing other periods in time.

In the meantime, the cordrazine-crazed McCoy leaped through the Guardian into Earth’s past-more specifically, Earth in the 1930s, where he saved the life of one Edith Keeler.

Unfortunately, that single act twisted history as we know it, obliterating the events that led to the creation of the Federation and the existence of a Starship Enterprise. Kirk and his landing party found themselves stranded in a pocket of timelessness, with no past and no future.

In an attempt to set things right, Kirk and Spock went after McCoy. Kirk eventually restored the timeline by preventing the doctor from rescuing Keeler—but only after the captain had fallen in love with the woman.

Spitting out Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, the Guardian assured them that their place in time was secure again. But it wasn’t finished. It had a proposition. “Many such journeys are possible,” it informed Kirk. “Let me be your gateway.”

The captain wisely declined the offer, according to McCoy’s account. But the fact that it was made at all raised some questions in my mind.

Armed with something specific to petition for, I went to the Federation Council. To my delight, they granted my request for an interview with the Guardian.

Gazing into the Guardian’s maw, I watch the fiery launch of the Apollo XI spacecraft that was the first to deposit human life on Earth’s moon.

A second later, in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia, the armies of Khan Noonien Singh exchange bursts of gunfire with the forces of another genetic superman. By the harsh light of bonfires, riots tear apart a Sanctuary District in San Francisco. Vulcans emerging from an interstellar craft draw a motley crowd of post-World War III humans.

It all passes before my eyes. Year after year, decade after decade, century after century.

Interestingly, the Guardian isn’t consistently showing me the events I expect to see—the events you and I have come to think of as turning points in man’s development. But I don’t think it’s displaying random occurrences either. It’s just that its perspective is an alien one.

In any case, I haven’t come here simply to put the Guardian through its paces. Hard as it is for me to believe, I have even bigger fish to fry. “Thank you,” I tell the time portal, “but I’d like to ask another question.”

The Guardian mists over again and the musty smell returns. A moment later, the historical images cease.

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