The Guardians have been speaking in generalities, in parables (though for purposes of this outline they have stated their points concisely), and now they try to tell Kirk what he needs to know, but once again their ethereal natures turn the clues into riddles:

You must stop him by bringing him out of the past. He will seek that which must die, and give it life. Stop him.

Kirk is confused. “I don’t understand. Can’t you tell me more?”

Blue it will be. Blue as the sky of Old Earth and clear as truth. And the sun will burn on it, and there is the key.

Even Spock, analytical and logical, does not understand. But though they ask again and again, the Guardians can tell them nothing more. So they turn to the pillar of light, still tuned to Old Earth, 1930. They walk toward it, and the flames leap up about them as they step through.

They go into the pillar of light, a week earlier than Beckwith, and when they appear in the past, they find themselves in New York of 1930, on Old Earth.

It is, literally, the city on the edge of Forever…

Linked to a tall-spire city on a frozen mountain peak across the stars and hundreds of years in the future, another city on the opposite edge of Forever, by the tenuous thread of life called Kirk and Spock and Beckwith.

But now that they are here, in the past, they must learn to make their way, at least until Beckwith comes through the time machine. Yet imagine the circumstances—they are men out of time, out of joint with the world around them. They have no skills that can be put to use in this “regressive” age. Their clothes are peculiar. They have no place to live, no money (and don’t even understand the medium of exchange or have a way of earning money) and most obvious of all—

Spock is an obvious extraterrestrial.

This is brought forcibly home to them as they materialize on a crowded New York street. In the midst of a bread-line demonstration. On a soap-box, a man is inciting the crowd to riot, charging that all the foreigners are clogging the soup kitchens, stealing jobs good Americans should have, sending the country further and further into the Depression. Kirk and Spock are momentarily disoriented, having come from a bleak landscape a million light-years away, and hundreds of years in the future, and they find themselves looking about with confusion. Their movement draws the attention of the haranguer, and when he sees Spock, his eyes open wider.

“There’s one of ’em! There’s one of the foreigners trying to take the bread out of our mouths! Let’s show him how we feel about things!”