Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [132]
Together they leap through the portal and arrive in New York City circa the 1930s and take refuge in the basement of a mission run by the angelic Edith Keeler (Joan Collins through soft-filter lenses, whose character Ellison patterned after “Sister” Aimee Semple McPherson, the first evangelist to employ the power of radio in the 1930s to reach the masses). Spock constructs a crude computer out of vacuum tubes in order to replay his recording of the guardian’s passage of time (which he was producing with his tricorder when McCoy jumped) to see if they can determine what McCoy did to alter the future. In the process, Spock gets a brief glimpse of the immediate future in a newspaper headline of that year that read “Social Worker Killed,” beneath which appears a picture of Edith Keeler. The image fades as a power surge burns out the tubes. Kirk arrives, after a plot-thickening encounter with Keeler in which the two appear to be falling in love.
“I may have found our focal point in time,” Spock explains to him. “Captain, you may find this a bit distressing.” A replay of the now-repaired computer, however, reveals a different newspaper caption six years into the future: “F.D.R. Confers with Slum Area ‘Angel.’” Above the headline is a photo of Edith Keeler. “We know her future. Within six years from now she’ll become very important, nationally famous,” Kirk enthuses. Spock gives him the alternative. “Or, Captain, Edith Keeler will die, this year. I saw her obituary. Some sort of a traffic accident.” Kirk is understandably confused. “You must be mistaken. They both can’t be true.”
Spock explains the paradox that such time-travel thought experiments present. “Captain, Edith Keeler is the focal point in time we’ve been looking for, the point in time that both we and Dr. McCoy have been drawn to.” The now-enlightened Kirk says to no one in particular, “She has two possible futures, and depending on whether she lives or dies all of history will be changed. And McCoy . . .” Spock finishes the sentence:”. . . is the random element.” Kirk queries: “In his condition, does he kill her?” Spock answers with a double paradoxical problem: “Or, perhaps he prevents her from being killed. We don’t know which. Captain, suppose we discover that in order to set things straight again, Edith Keeler must die?”
Meanwhile, McCoy makes his appearance in New York, near Keeler’s mission, hungover from his drug overdose. As he enters the mission to recover, he narrowly misses seeing Kirk and Spock as they descend to the basement where Spock has repaired his crude computer, to glance into the future one last time. “This is how history went after McCoy changed it,” Spock explains to Kirk. “Here, in the late 1930s, a growing pacifist movement whose influence delays the United States entry into the Second World War. While peace negotiations dragged on, Germany had time to complete its heavy-water experiments.”
In this altered version of history, Germany is the first to develop the atomic bomb. Mounted on V-2 rockets, these bombs allow Germany to defeat the Allies and win the war, altering conditions so that centuries hence the Enterprise and her crew never existed. Since it was Edith Keeler who founded the peace movement, somehow McCoy came back and prevented her from dying in a street accident. (Of course, if he did she would have erased McCoy from the future, preventing him from returning to the past to save her life, in which case she would have been killed, allowing McCoy to live and save her life, and so on.) She lives, along with the cascading alternate contingencies of Nazi victory. Much to Kirk’s dismay, for history to be righted there is only one future Edith Keeler can have. Spock reinforces the overriding necessity: