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 New York life, while seeking the focal point for this time-phase.

Then, by chance (or as Spock later murmurs, “There are no coincidences in Time.”) the alien locates the “focal point.” On his way home one night from the hash-house where he washes dishes, he passes a street corner revival. He hears the lyrical sound of a woman’s voice, as clear and as vibrant “as truth.” He stops, pauses to listen as SISTER EDITH KEELER speaks to a crowd of disgruntled derelicts, poor men—as all men in these days of pennilessness are poor—about the brotherhood of man. About the need to trust, the need to love…not in the manner of the fanatic, to love merely because it keeps the belly from growling; but to love because it is the only salvation for mankind, the only way to find the path to the stars.

Spock listens to the beautiful girl say things that the space travelers of his own age have learned. Thoughts that are thousands of years ahead of their time. And then he realizes: she is wearing a blue cape, a cape as blue as the sky of Old Earth. A cape that is fastened across her throat by a huge golden brooch in the shape of a sunburst. And her name is Keeler…

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.

Spock rushes back to tell Kirk. They follow the girl after her revival meeting, and see the tenement in which she lives. 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 Keeler, 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.