As for my being “exhausted” after doing a mere 45 minutes…sheeeet, just ask anyone who’s been to one of my 3-hour lectures!

And what end does this redundant exposure serve? If nothing else, it should show you, gentle reader, just how much malarkey you’ve accepted as True Word. Van Hise gets bits and snippets of half-remembered anecdotes, and publishes them without ever offering the finished copy to his sources for fact-checking. Then those mini-legends get circulated and distorted by fans who gossip and never get the specifics right (not to mention the inadvertent or purposeful warping of data on these idiot computer bulletin boards that run all night long disseminating half-baked bullshit no more valid than the National Enquirer edition of 12 November 1991 that blared the headline: STAR TREK CREATOR’S SECRET—HE DIED HATING CAPT. KIRK.) Then Edward Gross picks up the story and gets more specific, but he wasn’t there, either, so he makes the mistake of leaving Roddenberry out of the scene. And then a Shatner-puppet filches the story, attempts to rework the wording sufficiently so no one can shout, “Plagiarism!” (they needn’t have worried, neither Van Hise nor Gross has the money to sue) and sets down the anecdote with several major errors now concretized, drawing an utterly bogus conclusion that Paramount was working behind Gene Roddenberry’s back, thus reinforcing Gene’s long-since disproved claims that studio and network were out to scuttle him, a song he sang from the git-go. And it makes Roddenberry look like El Supremo, fighting off the hordes of duplicity, when in fact he was the single largest blockage in the Star Trek flow.

But here is what I ask you to consider, and I realize now that I grow weary writing this self-vindication, as weary as you must have grown reading it: I ask you to perform two acts of simple logic. No arcane thinking, no convoluted creation of conspiracies, no long leaps between facts. Just two acts of cold, logical thinking. And they are these:

• First, ask yourself if the depiction of the author of “City” as a writer who couldn’t handle the materials of his own story, as a mad jackanapes without professionalism, as a talent to be admired but not hired…rings true for a writer who was subsequently asked to write Star Trek I, Star Trek II, Star Trek IV and Star Trek V? And asked to write those larger, more expensive, more easily fucked-up productions by the same people who had been telling everyone Ellison was a bum!

If I was so goddam notoriously impossible to work with, if I had such a criminal disregard for budget, if I was a cannon on the loose…why the hell did they come back to me again and again and again?

• And second, just read the damned script. Read all the treatments, read the attempt I made to satisfy those subsequent demands for revision, read the actual words I wrote! Then rent the damned video, if you must, and compare. You may still go with what aired, but at least you’ll see that I wrote no Scotty selling drugs, I wrote no great crowd scenes, I wrote no space armadas! I wrote a simple and poignant love story, and I tried to say something about mortality and the importance of courage when there is no hope and the nature of friendship and the basic crapshoot that is history.