I told this to Herb, and I also told him that I had the very copy of “City” that the judges had looked at, way back in 1967, that it was in my files and I’d drive it over to him right then and there along with a copy of the limited edition of this book, containing the same damned script, so he could compare them if he had a mind to do so, but he got cranky with me, he didn’t like being told his book wasn’t as properly vetted and researched as he wanted to believe; and he told me that he would put in a footnote in later editions, and in the paperback, to the effect that “Harlan says he doesn’t drink and Ingalls’ story isn’t so.”

Big fucking deal.

Let’s end the section in this book, the section that once again posits my inability to write, and let’s try to be a good pair of guys with Harlan, and treat him not as quite the mountebank we could if we were meanspirited. But let’s end the section with a bogus anecdote that says, in pretty plain language, “Ellison wasn’t really good enough to win that Writers Guild award with his original version, my pal Gene’s version was much better, and Ellison had to cheat at the last minute even to get the judges fooled.”

So Herb will add a footnote that says, “Harlan says it ain’t so.” Yeah. Great. And the next day, I got the following fax from Herb:

See what he did. He wants me to respect his “concern for accuracy” but he couldn’t even understand what I was saying about that one inch of beer twenty years ago. He heard it as my saying that I drank up till twenty years ago, but stopped, and so Ingalls had to be telling the truth because his anecdote took place earlier than twenty years ago. No, dummy, I never drank, have never ever drunk, not now, not twenty years ago, not sixty-two years ago.

I do not drink, period, no mitigation.

But there it is, thirty years, and still going strong. The Curse of Roddenberry.

The supreme, overwhelming egocentricity of Gene Roddenberry, that could not permit him to admit anyone else in his mad-god universe was capable of grandeur, of expertise, of rectitude. And his hordes of Trekkie believers, and his pig-snout associates who knew whence that river of gold flowed…they protected and buttressed him. For thirty years.