As the waters of Forever RIPPLE and WE FIND OURSELVES back on the changed Enterprise, in the control room with the doomed men, as the Pirate Captain readies a bank of destructive heat-beams, and trains them on the control room doors. As the doors glow red from the bombardment, and one of the younger officers in the besieged control country asks the Scotsman, “Where are they…what are they doing…are they coming to help us…?”

And as We CLOSE TIGHT on the metal, turning to slag, we contemplate Kirk and Spock, back there…and we FADE OUT.

ACT THREE:

Kirk has a menial job. Spock has passed himself off as an oriental, he’s washing dishes in a beanery. They are existing in the grimy underside of Chicago life, while seeking the girl who is the focal point for this time-phase.

Spock locates her and Kirk takes a room in the same building. Time is growing short. Beckwith will come through from the future in three days. Kirk meets Edith Koestler, and strangely, wonderfully, they communicate. Kirk, who has all his life been alone on ships in space, who has known casual liaisons with women in port cities and on pleasure planets, finds himself drawn to this girl, who seems to embody a simplicity, and a warmth, that he had only read about secretly in cheap novels.

For three days they grow to know each other. Kirk is pleasured. Spock grows worried. He cautions Kirk against “going native.”

But the time for worrying is past as the day of Beckwith’s appearance arrives. They wait at the appointed time in the pop-out place, and when Beckwith materializes, in the center of a crowd, they try to grab him but he once again manages, through dint of desperation, to escape them. They track him through the city, but he loses himself.

And now, forewarned that they are trying to get him, Beckwith realizes that he cannot be safe, anywhere in time, unless he kills Kirk and Spock.

So the hunted turns hunter. He stalks Spock first, and almost manages to assassinate him, but at the last moment Spock saves himself. And Beckwith vanishes again.

They realize they must do something different to find him before he gets to the girl. Kirk stays with her, while Spock goes searching through the underworld, and finds a man who will hire himself out to locate Beckwith. But when Spock goes to get the man’s report, he finds him dead.

Beckwith has developed cunning. Time is running out.

ACT FOUR: