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Ellison had a legless World War I veteran assist Kirk and Spock in their historical mission. Finally, Ellison developed the character of Captain Kirk as more morally complex than he had been in early episodes, in this case freezing at the crucial moment that demanded action. Roddenberry rejected these elements, apparently believing that drugs, cripples, and moral obtuseness were not good images for noble crews and heroic captains. To be fair, when Ellison penned his treatment there were only two scripts from which to work—“The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before”—and the show was undergoing rapid and dramatic changes in its early stages. Therefore, says Alexander, Roddenberry rewrote it himself after other staff writers failed to bring it up to the show’s standards.

Ellison disputes Alexander’s take on the matter, presenting a complex story that involves a number of writers exerting their influence—least of all Roddenberry. “I rewrote the script, I rewrote it again, I worked on it at home and on a packing crate in Bill Theiss’s wardrobe room in Building ‘E’ and when Gene kept insisting on more and more changes, and when I saw the script being dumbed up, I couldn’t take much more.” The script was redacted by Steve Carabatsos, Gene Coon, and Dorothy C. Fontana, and “fiddled” (says Ellison) by Roddenberry. In the end, Ellison was sufficiently displeased with the final product and requested that his name be substituted with his Writer’s Guild Association registered pseudonym, Cordwainer Bird, “which everyone in the industry knew was Ellison standing behind this crippled thing saying it ain’t my work and sort of giving the Bird to those who had mucked up the words,” Harlan explained in the third person, then confessing “but Gene called me and made it clear he’d blackball me in the industry if I tried to humiliate him like that; and I went for the okeydoke. I let my name stay on it.” To this day Ellison’s name stands on this most famous of Star Trek episodes, which originally aired on NBC on April 6, 1967.

I have now read “The City on the Edge of Forever” in all of its editions. Although I must admit that Harlan’s original script is richer, more complex, and more morally compelling than what aired on television, childhood memories create powerful preferences. To a thirteen-year-old boy, William Shatner cuts a heroic jib while Joan Collins fulfills youthful fantasies. Regardless, the story is not just another science fiction tale. Three decades later that episode came to represent to me a deeper theme of historical change. Since historians cannot go back in time to alter a jot or tittle here and there and observe the subsequently changed outcome, such historical fantasizing must be left to those who dwell in fiction. While science has yet to devise a way to travel backward in time, science fiction has no trouble at all (usually by encountering an “anomaly” in the space-time continuum), and the theme of removing an individual from the historical picture to trigger a different result has become one of the mainstays of the genre.

The discussion of fictional stories in this context may be defended as contributing to our scientific understanding of the nature of causality in history and biography. There is a role for thought experiments in all sciences—to broaden our perspective and deepen our understanding of a subject through the consideration of novel possibilities (see chapter 10). The Austrian physicist and philosopher of science Ernst Mach considered thought experiments a form of empiricism because they derive from past experiences creatively rearranged. He notes that physicists’ thought experiments such as rolling balls down frictionless planes serve a useful purpose in establishing principles that can be tested experimentally in other ways. Einstein is the best-known example of a scientist many of whose most significant ideas were worked out in thought long before they were tested experimentally. He called these his “gedanken experiments.” But he was only doing what so many scientists do, and not just physicists.