• 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.

Read, and compare. The evidence is before you.

I don’t have the space or the inclination to run all the letters from Roddenberry to me. Nor the space to place before you all of the times Roddenberry in print declared how much over-budget my show had gone…and each time it was thousands of dollars more than the last time, like the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy holding aloft a sheet of paper and declaring, “I hold in my hand the names of 136 card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” and the next time, “The names of 258…” and the next time, “The names of 502….” But here’s a sample.

Now, originally, I crowed like a madman at this ultimate admission by Roddenberry that, in fact, if I went over budget on “City” it was by a mere, piddling six thousand dollars! In the limited edition of this book, last year, I even went so far as to urge the reader to check out Roddenberry’s own math in his letter to me. I said, “It don’t parse, it don’t add up, it’s just simply incorrect!”

But on closer examination—and with a determination to be as truthful as the evidence at hand compels—it is clear that Roddenberry’s budget letter presents a thorny ethical problem for me. As I pointed out, the Great Bird’s figures don’t add up. So I should caper and gibber and make hay out of this confession straight from his beak. But ethically, I’d be as bad as Roddenberry or the mooks who cobble up mythology about “City” and me. Because it’s obvious, I think, that it was essentially a typographical error.

If you add another 6 to that 6000, you get $66,000. $191,000 + 66,000 = $257,000…which is what Roddenberry says the show finally cost. So I didn’t go over budget a stammeringly piddly six grand, but rather sixty-six grand. (And Solow & Justman’s INSIDE STAT TREK roughly confirms that budget.) But the investigative journalist Joel Angel, whose book about Roddenberry I’ve cited previously, sent me a fax after reading the limited edition of this book, and he made reference to his investigations of archives dealing with Star Trek, and he advised me as follows: