The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison

Author:Harlan Ellison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: E-Reads
Published: 1994-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

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.

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