Where the fuck were you for thirty years while Roddenberry and his running-dogs dissed me and smeared my rep?

But, then, I shouldn’t be rude to you. After all, didn’t you pay good money to buy my book? So let me just get on with it, and reprint my article from TV Guide. And when I return, New Horrors! New Horrors!

Last fall, Entertainment Weekly did one of these special Star Trek issues and they ranked all 79 episodes of the original series. Number one, all-time best, most popular episode was “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Undisputedly the best episode of Star Trek.

I wrote that episode. The words didn’t spring unbidden from Spock and Kirk’s mouths, they were written. By me. The tragic love story in which the principal protagonists of the Enterprise went back in time to New York City during the Great Depression of 1930, and Kirk watched as the woman he loved—Sister Edith Keeler—was killed…I spent most of 1966 writing and rewriting and re-rewriting.

I watched it once, only once—when it originally aired over NBC on April 6, 1967—and have been unable to bring myself to look at it again since that evening. One would think the anger and the punch in the heart would abate after more than thirty years. But Star Trek has become as anally retentive a cult as the most obsessive True Believer could wish, and the urban myths that have been cobbled up about “City,” and my script, march on tirelessly. They are horse puckey, but on they trudge.

In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is a line that has become famous. It is this: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

That is to say, why bother with the truth when horse puckey allows the True Believers to enjoy their obsession in a state of blissful ignorance?

I cannot tell you the truth. You would not want it, or believe it, or honor me in any way for having told it to you. Crybabies whine for the truth.

What you want is myth and half-truth. Okay, I can do that. But what follows is only that part of the truth that will not curdle your milk. The snail on the rose remains hidden.

Roddenberry and I sat in a booth at Oblath’s. The restaurant was nearly empty, only a few gaffers and extras sipping coffee or dumping down a late breakfast. It was sometime between ten in the morning and noon. I was working on a meat loaf sandwich, and Gene had a drink in front of him. He looked at me and said, “They’re conspiring to cancel the show.”

Gene had called me at home and asked me to come down for “a private talk.” He didn’t want to meet at the Star Trek offices in the “E” building of Desilu Studios, which adjoined Paramount. He asked me to meet him at Oblath’s, the now-vanished luncheon joint that stood just across the narrow street from the Marathon gate of Paramount. It was always crammed with people from the studios, but not till coffee break or lunchtime. Now, we were alone, and Gene was telling me that dark and inimical forces inside NBC were plotting the demise of this new space adventure series to which I’d been devoted since Gene had invited me to be a writer for the series in late 1965.