Yet, with all of that in there, Gene okayed the treatment finally, and I set about the long chore of writing the script.

So you know who it was that really sandbagged me?

It was Shatner.

I wasn’t a kid. I should have heard the sound of creeping actors in the night.

Shatner had been sucking up. No, let me correct that, heaven forbid any of the True Believers get the impression that Bill wasn’t absolutely and strictly the kindest, least self-serving entity in the universe. Bill had been solicitous of my friendship. I won’t talk about that afternoon at the Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills. All I’ll say is that Bill was a sharp listener, and he knew that I had won the Writers Guild award, plus all these science fiction Hugos and Nebulas, and I was coming off a feature film that (until the wretched thing, in fact, opened) gossip was predicting would make a fabulous film…and he made me his little pal, his little chum. Leonard Nimoy wasn’t like that. He was simply a good guy, and never hustled me, and we have remained friends for a quarter of a century.

But Shatner had me conned. Butter wouldn’t melt…well, you know the rest. And I was going for the okeydoke again, silly me.

Bill had made it clear that the moment I finished that great script everyone on the show said I was writing, he wanted to see it, wanted to hold it in his hands still warm and pulsing from the typewriter.

I finished the script on Saturday the 28th of May, the day after my thirty-second birthday. I wrote FADE OUT and THE END and sat back and smiled and felt great compassion for Captain James T. Kirk, who would have sacrificed the entire universe, all of time and space, for the woman he loved. And I was filled with pride at having created the character of Trooper, a legless veteran of World War I, whose bravery meant nothing in the infinite flow of merciless time. Boy, I loved that damned script!

And like the Mt. Everest of schmucks, instead of going and playing a game of miniature golf or swimming the Hellespont, I made one of the great idiot mistakes of my life. I took an actor’s disingenuous camaraderie as true friendship, and I called Shatner at his home.

“I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Bill said.

I wasn’t a kid. I 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.