In his excellent nonfiction assessment of horror and science fiction, DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King reported that rumor had Harlan Ellison going to Paramount with the idea of the Enterprise breaking through the end of the universe and confronting God himself. And that wasn’t big enough, either.

Removing tongue from cheek, the author explained the real story to King, but before discussing that, it’s important to note what writer James Van Hise wrote in his fanzine, Enterprise Incidents.

“The story Harlan came up with,” Van Hise wrote in number eight of his magazine, “was never written down, but was presented verbally…the story did not begin with any of the Enterprise crew, but started on Earth where strange phenomena were inexplicably occurring. In India, a building where a family is having dinner, just vanishes into dust. In the United States, one of the Great Lakes suddenly vanishes, wreaking havoc. In a public square, a woman suddenly screams and falls to the pavement where she transforms into some sort of reptilian creature. The truth is suppressed, but the Federation realizes that someone or something is tampering with time and changing things on Earth in the far distant past. What is actually happening involves an alien race on the other end of the galaxy. Eons ago, Earth and this planet both developed races of humans and intelligent humanoid reptiles. On Earth, the humans destroyed the reptile men and flourished. In the time of the Enterprise when this race learns what happened on Earth in the remote past, they decide to change things in the past so that they will have a kindred planet. For whatever reason, the Federation decides that only the Enterprise and her crew are qualified for this mission, so a mysterious cloaked figure goes about kidnapping the old central crew. This figure is finally revealed to be Kirk. After they are reunited, they prepare for the mission into the past to save Earth. And that would have been just the first half hour of the film!”

Ellison gave Stephen King a little more information on his story meeting with Paramount.

“It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when man first emerged,” he said. “I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek feature, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.”