I had written “Demon with a Glass Hand” as a cross-country chase. The Outer Limits had the stingiest budget ABC could come up with. Bobby Justman took me one lunchtime to a magnificent building in downtown L.A. called the Bradbury Building. He asked if there was any way I could rewrite the script to be shot there, permitting the production company a way of producing the show within the budget.

Were I the intractable, primadonna pinhead Roddenberry and these other clowns have tried to paint me, I doubt seriously that I would have had the acumen to rethink “Demon” on the spot, and say to Justman, “A chase can be linear…horizontally…or vertically! If I postulate a force bubble around the building, invisible but impenetrable, then when the protagonist is lured to the building, and trapped inside, the chase becomes vertical!” And we shot it, and it won a Writers Guild award, and no one claimed they’d rewritten me, to save my ass.

Same Justman. Same situation.

If I had written it too expensive, if I had written it over budget, why were all these wise heads, all these sage intellects incapable of doing what Justman had done: treat me like a professional, stop running around like hysterical loonies throwing their hands in the air screaming “it’s too expensive!” and just tell me where it needed to be brought back into budget.

I did it with the use of McCoy (Dorothy Fontana’s suggestion) when it was considered by Roddenberry to be imprudent that there could be a corrupt officer on board the Enterprise. Oh, yeah, it was D.C. who suggested McCoy replace Beckwith. Not Coon. Not Roddenberry. Not Justman. Not Solow. It was the woman whose Afterword on page 257 of this book told me thirty-year-old secrets that astonished me. (But it was not she who altered the interesting, sensible way in which McCoy is infected—see one of the revisions that follows the script—and had him make an asshole of himself by injecting himself with his own hypodermic. Caramba!)

I wrote to order. If I’d written it too expensive, just sit down with me and explain why. There were set and cast and budget considerations of which I (as well as most other writers) was unaware. One would have had to be on staff to know such things.