For a moment they contemplate what alterations in time Beckwith’s jump-back could have caused, but as Spock points out, “Speculation at this point is senseless.”

Not so senseless, however, when they translate up to the ship, materialize in the translation chamber and find that the control room they left as a USS exploratory vessel has altered drastically. As they stare about the room, the neatly-uniformed men are gone, and in their place Kirk and Spock find themselves staring at a motley horde of evil-looking, evil-smelling space pirates. A crew of deadly cutthroats with phasers leveled at them. The pirates are a strange and anachronistic blending of modern science and traditional Jolly Roger garb. The eleven men already sent up, eleven Enterprise-garbed men, are prisoners. And as one of the pirates steps forward to speak, a terrifying latter-day descendant of Edward Teach, Blackbeard, Kirk finds himself about to be gunned down mercilessly.

“Welcome to the Condor,” the pirate Captain smirks, as we HOLD on Kirk’s expression of disbelief, and we FADE OUT!

ACT TWO:

Kirk and Spock realize what has happened: some strange turn in time has altered their ship into a buccaneer vessel. They leap out of the translation chamber and Kirk grapples with the Pirate Captain. It is the signal for the captive Enterprise men to overcome their captors. There is a bloody pitched battle in pilot country and finally the Enterprise men manage to empty the control room. But now there are not 530 men of the Enterprise on the other side of that triple-strength door. There are 530 killer vandals and their women, who are even at this moment readying weapons to blast through into the control room. Kirk and Spock know they must go back to the nameless planet and follow Beckwith into the pillar of light. They must bring him back from the past, to straighten out time.

They enter the translation chamber, and leaving their twelve remaining living fellow crewmen to hold the ship, they begin to dissolve. The Scotch Engineering officer, watching them, urges, “Hurry back, Cap’n, or we might not be ’ere when y’ret—”

But they are gone.

The Guardians have returned. Kirk and Spock say they will go back. They ask the Guardians to send them to the same time Beckwith arrived in. The Guardians say there is a problem. Because of the internal stresses put upon the time-flow by the passage of Beckwith, they cannot send the two spacemen back to the precise time. Either earlier or later. Kirk says earlier, and they will wait for Beckwith, and grab him when he comes through.

The Guardians warn Kirk and Spock of two things: first, Beckwith’s go-back has caused only a temporary temporal alteration. If they can bring him back, everything will go back the way it was, like a river following its natural course.