SPOCK

This place is dead, empty. Why do you stay?

As the Guardian speaks, movement within the fog, light, mist, the substance of “him,” changes, glows, dims, sparkles, changes color…whatever EFFECT has been opted for.

GUARDIAN

Because I am the last of my kind.

KIRK

The last?

GUARDIAN

The city is empty. Built to last even after I am gone.

KIRK

We followed some sort of radiation to this planet…it damaged our vessel—

GUARDIAN

You wandered into the time-flow. This world is the center of the Universe.

KIRK

The center? I don’t—?

24 CLOSER SHOT—ON GUARDIAN

as his form shimmers and pulses.

GUARDIAN

Only on this world do the million pulse-flows of time and space merge. Only here do the flux lines of Forever meet.

(beat)

Only here can exist the gateway to the past, where the Time Vortex of the Ancients can work.

(beat)

My race was set to watch the Time Vortex, so many hundred of centuries ago that even I do not have clear memories of it.

KIRK

The gateway to the past? A timemachine?

GUARDIAN

Not a machine. A creation, a vortex.

Kirk is about to ask what he means but Spock logical—cuts in.

25 ON SPOCK

SPOCK

Have you seen another man, dressed as we are?

GUARDIAN

What I see has already been, or is yet to be. No. No other like you.

CUT TO:

26 ROCKY NICHE—CLOSE PAST McCOY

past him, hidden in a shadowy crevice, listening to Kirk and Spock talking to the Guardian. There is a flagrant madness in McCoy’s face. The feverish color of the poison coursing through his veins can be seen in his cheeks. He sweats. His eyes are bright and wild.

He is a man totally out of his senses. He looks around himself, for a way out, but we see he is in a cul-de-sac. The only way out is past the Enterprise patrol. KIRK’S VOICE CARRIES.

KIRK

There are legends in space. About you. About this place.

GUARDIAN

You are the first visitors I have had in twice two hundred thousand years.

27 ANGLE PAST KIRK IN F.G.

to the Guardian, the mist rising, the light changing. Kirk approaches another step. We can see something in him we have never seen before: wonder, absolute all-consuming wonder. He has found a key to the secrets of the universe that compel him. He is being filled to the top with amazement, and he leans forward almost like a child.

KIRK

I always thought stories about time machines were the drunk-stuff of lab technicians when they’d had too much pure grain to drink.

GUARDIAN

The Vortex of Time is real. Look!

Kirk looks and his eyes open wide; delight and amazement and confusion and belief there.

28 THE TIME VORTEX—ESTABLISHING