by David Gerrold
I have now spent more years on this planet known as "the guy who created the tribbles" than I spent wondering what I would be when I grew up; if I had known I was going to be "the guy who created the tribbles" for the rest of my life, I might have thought twice about it.
When I wrote it, I just wanted to write one good Star Trek episode, just to prove I could do it. And I was deliberate about two or three things in the script. In particular, I wanted each of the ancillary characters to have something important to do, not just open hailing frequencies or fix the doubletalk generators. One of the things that I had learned in Irwin R. Blacker's screenwriting course was that "every character gets his page."
I loved these characters; not just Kirk and Spock, but McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, and Chekov, too. I wanted each and every one of them to have at least two or three good pages. And I think that's one of the reasons why they all enjoyed the script so much; it was a chance to show a different side of their characters, a chance to have some fun.
For me, of course, the real fun was watching the actors say the lines I had written. I had been watching them for weeks, studying the way they talked; I spent hours on each scene, listening to their voices in my head, trying to match the way they spoke in the dialog I wrote.
And, of course, there was other stuff to learn, too; one day, for instance, producer Gene L. Coon pointed out to me that there were no pockets in the uniforms. "But where do they keep their money?" I asked.
"We don't use money. We use credits."
Okay. . . .
When William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and the others finally brought the dialog to life, I was thrilled; they found things in the script, ways to say the lines, things to do with the action, that made the whole thing even funnier than I had imagined.
The only real disappointment for me came as a result of having written in a single line for myself. The part of Ensign Freeman. And Gene L. Coon had told me I could play the part; but then at the last moment, it didn't happen. I was too young-looking. Too skinny. So Shatner's stand-in got my line of dialog. *sigh*
"The Trouble with Tribbles" was first broadcast on December 29, 1967. I had just graduated from college, and I invited all my former classmates over to my house to watch the episode with me. They watched it as an episode and had a terrific time. I watched it as a terrifying collection of production values that mostly worked, sort of, but not quite the way I had imagined it, and, oh, dear, why did they use that take instead of the other one?
That's the problem with being on the soundstage; later on, when it's all put together, you can't see the show; you can only see the production of it.
But my family and friends enjoyed the episode, and they congratulated me on my first professional credential, and it was otherwise a wonderful night. But I remember, quite clearly, that at one point I said, "It's only a television show. Thirty years from now, who's going to remember it?"
Duh.
The answer was, everybody is going to remember it!
But at the time, who knew? Right?
My first hint that the tribble episode had made any impact at all was when I found out it had been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. It was on the same ballot with "Amok Time" by Theodore Sturgeon; "The Doomsday Machine" by Norman Spinrad; "Mirror, Mirror" by Jerome Bixby; and "City on the Edge of Forever" by Harlan Ellison.
"City on the Edge of Forever" won the Hugo, as well as the Writers' Guild Award. And, yes, I was disappointed. Since then, a number of polls have been taken among Star Trek fans as to what is their favorite episode. In some polls, "City on the Edge of Forever" is voted the best episode of the original series; in other polls, "The Trouble with Tribbles" is voted the most popular. Either way, it's no disgrace to be in a neck-and-neck horserace with a Harlan Ellison script.
During the years that followed, I went on to other television shows; none that inspired me as much as Star Trek, of course, but each was fun in its own way. I developed Land of the Lost for Saturday-morning television; it's a show that continues today in reruns. I did scripts for Logan's Run, Tales from the Darkside, Twilight Zone, The Real Ghostbusters, Superboy, and Babylon 5.
I also wrote a few novels: When HARLIE Was One, The Man Who Folded Himself, Moonstar Odyssey, A Matter for Men, A Day for Damnation, A Rage for Revenge, A Season for Slaughter, The Voyage of the Star Wolf, The Middle of Nowhere, Star Hunt, Under the Eye of God, A Covenant of Justice, Deathbeast, Chess with a Dragon, and a few others. Several of these were also nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards.
In 1994, I wrote a story about my son's adoption, "The Martian Child," and it was my first sale to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. In 1995, "The Martian Child" won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Readership Poll.
So … yes, I have had a career outside of Star Trek; a rather successful one at that. But I was still being introduced as "the guy who created the tribbles." Occasionally, someone asks me if I mind; well, yes and no. Yes, I mind that some of my later (and, I think, better) work gets overshadowed. But no, I don't mind, because the tribbles have opened a lot of doors for me; indeed, the tribbles opened the first and most important door. "The Trouble with Tribbles" was my first professional sale and gave me high-profile credentials in my chosen field of science fiction. The tribbles were my launch pad, so I've always felt a strong attachment to them.
Flash-forward twenty-nine years.
In the summer of 1996, Ira Steven Behr, Ron Moore, and René Echevarria, producers on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, decided they wanted to do a special episode for Star Trek's thirtieth anniversary. They told Executive Producer Rick Berman that they wanted to spend some extra money and use the digital technology perfected in Forrest Gump to insert the actors from Deep Space Nine into an episode of the original Star Trek. Berman agreed; so did the studio. So then they had to decide which episode of the original series to use.
There were several episodes they were considering. The tribble episode was only one of them. One day, they all went out to a local restaurant for an "executive lunch" to discuss the problems and see if they could make a decision. They kept coming back to the tribble episode as a likely candidate; they could have Arne Darvin, the Klingon spy, go back in time intending to kill Kirk, followed by the Deep Space Nine crew, who have to stop him before he does so. But was Charlie Brill, the actor who had originally played Arne Darvin, available? Would he even want to do it?
While they were sitting there talking … who should come into the restaurant but Charlie Brill himself! And that decided that. It was a sign from God, or, at least, the Great Bird of the Galaxy. So that decision was made.
The script was written in secret. In fact, the whole project was shrouded in secrecy while the studio scrambled to make sure that they could get the necessary permissions from the original series actors. I didn't hear about the project until … well, never mind. There were rumors circulating on the Internet, on America Online, and on CompuServe, and I started getting E-mail and phone calls asking me for interviews and my opinion on the new show.
I ducked the first few calls, then called Executive Producer Rick Berman. I hadn't spoken to Rick in several centuries, not since the early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it was as if hardly a day had passed. This is what's true about Star Trek friendships; they're timeless.
We chatted about this and that and the other thing, catching up on stuff, and finally got around to talking about the new Deep Space Nine episode. He told me how the episode had come to happen, how everybody was really looking forward to shooting it, and why so much of the process had to be kept secret for so long. Rick Berman is a true gentleman. He understood not only what the tribbles mean to Star Trek, but also the special place the original episode has in my heart. He said, "Y'know, if we're going to do a tribble episode, you should be a part of it."
So I told him how I'd always dreamed of being an Enterprise crew person. He laughed and thought it was a terrific idea. After making a couple of phone calls to make sure it was doable, he got back to me and told me it was all arranged. I was to report to the costume department the very next day.
I hadn't been on the Paramount lot in a long time, but it was like coming home. Coming through the main gate, you see the sky-wall overlooking the tank and the parking lot, a cluster of offices and soundstages. It is the quintessential movie lot; a factory of imagination. And like all factories, it looks like a chaotic and senseless collection of disorganized and disjointed fragments—unless you understand the process. The more you understand, the more you realize just how efficient a factory this place really is. Every eight days, a new episode of Deep Space Nine comes rolling off the assembly line. You could do four years of classes at USC film school and still not have a sense of just how complex a film production really is, but that's a different discussion. When you have a team that really works, they work wonderfully.
The costume lab is a warehouse full of Star Trek costumes, everything imaginable, and a row of fitting and dressing rooms. The process of being measured and fitted is a lot like going to the tailor for your bar mitzvah suit. It's boring—except when it's embarrassing.
After the fitting, I went over to the soundstage where the current episode was shooting and introduced myself to the first assistant director, B. C. Cameron. (And just between you and me, she is a real treasure. Deep Space Nine is lucky to have such a talented and dedicated person on board.) I also glommed a copy of the script; it was my first opportunity to see what they were really up to.
To be real candid, I was prepared to hate it.
After all, how dare someone else write a tribble episode? The tribbles were mine, weren't they? Just who were these guys to be meddling with my story? Brimming with righteous indignation, I sat down to read "Trials and Tribble-ations."
Without giving anything away … Arne Darvin, now a hundred years later, goes back in time with the intention of killing Kirk and becoming a Klingon hero. The Deep Space Nine team—Sisko, Dax, Bashir, Worf, and Odo—go after him. While "The Trouble with Tribbles" occurs around them, they hunt for Darvin on the space station, in the storage compartments, in the bar, and, in particular, all over the Enterprise, up and down the corridors, in the rec room, in the turbo lifts, on the bridge—everywhere.
About ten pages into the script, I started smiling.
Twenty pages in, I chuckled.
Thirty pages in, I laughed out loud.
Forty pages in, I was guffawing.
Fifty pages into the script, I was rolling on the floor.
And when I finished reading, I was really really annoyed, because it was such a terrific script, I was jealous. How dare these guys write such a good script?!! This was one of the very best Star Trek scripts I had ever read. It was going to be a great episode, probably even a classic in its own right. Probably even a Hugo winner, and wouldn't that be ironic if, thirty years later, a tribble episode finally walked off with a rocket-shaped trophy?
But in a larger sense, the tribbles aren't mine. They are Star Trek's. They are the audience's. The purpose of the original episode was to have fun; to give our heroes a change of pace and a chance to let their hair down and stop being so serious every week. In that regard, the tribbles were a gift—to the show, to the audience.
And once I had gotten past my momentary selfish considerations, I knew I should be very flattered that the gift had gone so far, that it was still giving. To have the original tribble episode brought back as an episode of Deep Space Nine is an acknowledgment of the popularity of the original show. For it to be remembered thirty years later, enough to be affectionately reused, is deeply touching to me. It's a very sweet validation.
To do this episode, not only would they have to insert digitally various Deep Space Nine characters into shots from the original tribble episode, but they would also have to rebuild and re-create large pieces of all of the original Star Trek sets, as well as specific tribble episode sets: corridors, the rec room, part of the bridge, the turbolifts, and the space station bar. They would have to match the lighting, the makeup, the film stock, the costumes, the props, the hairdos, and half a million other details.
The research needed to re-create the original Star Trek was painstaking. And the heroes of the day were Herman Zimmerman, and Mike and Denise Okuda, not to mention the rest of the crew in the art department. They studied blueprints; they studied blow-ups of individual frames of film. They had a new digital master tape made of "The Trouble with Tribbles" so they could study each shot in greater detail. (Then they could see the coffee stain on Mr. Spock's shirt.)
Then they started building, planning, preparing. Phasers and communicators and tricorders were rebuilt. A 3-D checker set and a desktop monitor. Bridge stations. Lights. Wall panels. Signs. Handles for the turbolifts. A curved corridor began taking shape on Stage 11 … and where are we going to find the right kind of orange mesh for the wall next to the ladder? Oops, hey? Look at this stuff over here that the construction workers are using.
Director Jonathan West, who also works as a director of photography for other Deep Space Nine directors, called Gerry Finnerman, the director of photography on the original Star Trek, to find out what kind of lighting he used (arc lights); and what kinds of filters were necessary to re-create "Finnerman lighting"? Remember all those orange and green and purple and blue lights on the walls?
This wasn't a new world that could just be invented; this was a world that had already been invented once and had to be re-created accurately. If any detail was amiss, hundreds of thousands of Star Trek fans would catch it immediately.
Fortunately, the team that was rebuilding the costumes, props, and sets of the original Enterprise were also Star Trek fans. In fact, I don't know anybody in the world who isn't … myself included.
So there I was, on the first day of shooting.
I was officially considered an "atmosphere person." I reported to the studio at eight in the morning. My twelve-year-old son, Sean, came with me to watch, as did Susie Miller, who works with me on a variety of projects. The costumers handed me my uniform; it came with a red shirt. Uh-oh. I immediately turned it around to see if there was a bull's-eye on the back. There wasn't. Whew! But I couldn't help wondering if someone wasn't trying to tell me something. . . .
As I changed into the uniform, Sean frowned and asked, "Where are the pockets?" Remembering what Gene L. Coon had told me almost thirty years earlier, I said, "We don't have pockets on the uniforms."
And Sean immediately asked, "But where do you keep your space money?" That's when I fell down on the floor laughing. The morning was off to a good start.
A little later, Sean asked, "Will we see Kirk and Spock today?" And I had to explain to him that Kirk and Spock would not be there. They didn't do Star Trek anymore. He was not happy about that. It was a bittersweet moment; I knew what he was feeling. To me, Star Trek will always be Kirk and Spock, too.
Once I had the costume on, I had a chance to look at it, and myself, in the mirror. Too young and too skinny were no longer considerations. I was probably the oldest security guard on the ship; that was because I'd never beamed down.
Beyond that, however, I was struck by how accurate the entire outfit was. The original uniforms had been re-created exactly: everything—the boots, the flared pants, velour, the braid on the cuffs, and even the way everything was all tailored—was just like the costumes the original actors had worn thirty years earlier. And I was starting to feel a weird little tickle at the bottom of my spine.
After the costume department, we all headed over to the makeup lab, where sideburns and makeup were applied. Because the original Enterprise sets were lit with arc lamps, a much harsher light than is currently used for television filming, a different kind of makeup was required; the Deep Space Nine makeup team had gone back to the original Star Trek makeup as designed by Fred Philips.
Finally, I was ready for the camera, and I headed over to Stage 11, where the Enterprise had been recreated. There were at least a dozen other atmosphere people there, men and women, all dressed and made up in the original costumes. It was spooky to see all those Enterprise crew people again; they looked so much like the original crew that it was like traveling back in time thirty years. The tingle at the base of my spine became a cold chill.
The set was fully dressed now, lit, and ready for the day's first shot. The walls were brightly lit, the doors worked, and the turbolifts were ready. B.C, the First A.D., placed the atmosphere people where she wanted us: "You go here. You two are walking from here to there. You're talking into a wall panel. Good, let's see a rehearsal; no, that won't do. You, count to two before you come around that corner. You two start from farther back. Good, that's it."
The prop man appeared out of nowhere and attached a balsawood phaser to my equipment belt, and now I was ready for a shot. My son, Sean, was thrilled; the phaser made up for not having any pockets.
And then Sisko and Dax appeared on the set, wearing twenty-third-century Star Trek uniforms; they looked terrific in them. Jonathan West, the director, rehearsed them for a bit; then we ran the first day's shot. It was a complex shot; Sisko and Dax are walking the length of the Enterprise's curved corridor, while crew people hurry past them in both directions. Dax is amazed at how many people there were aboard "these old ships."
So was I. Today, there were twenty extras. On the original Star Trek, we never had more than seven. We had to do quite a few takes of that first shot while everybody learned how to work this new set, but after a while we all fell into the mood of it and the pace of the work picked up.
There were adjustments that needed to be made. After the first shot, for instance, the sound man came around and put foam pads on the bottom of the shoes of all the atmosphere people. Too loud. We sounded like a herd of mugatos. For budget reasons, the set had been built without carpeting.
Later in the day, for an even more-complex shot, also involving a camera tracking with the actors down the corridor, I was waiting behind a corner where a monitor was set up. I had to take my cue to enter by watching to see when the actors reached a certain point in the corridor; then I would come around the corner and cross behind them. Watching the shot proceed on the monitor was eerie; it was the original Star Trek all over again! Everything looked the same. It felt like the first new episode in twenty-eight years. And the cold chill at the bottom of my spine started creeping upward.
Steve Oster, one of the show's producers, came up to me abruptly: "David, in this next scene, Sisko has to hold the handle of the turbolift to tell it where to go. Is it all right if he lets go after he does, or does he have to hold onto it the whole time? Do you remember how the turbolifts worked?"
"Uh …" Thinking fast, I said, "If I remember correctly, it's all right to let go after the lift starts. But you'd better check with Mike Okuda. He's the real expert." It was a nice moment, being treated as if I knew something about Star Trek again.
During another break in the shooting, I had a chance to chat with Jonathan West. Jonathan works as a director of photography on Deep Space Nine, and he's directed three episodes on his own. He was surprised and thrilled to be asked by Rick Berman to direct "Trials and Tribble-ations."
Later, while waiting for another shot to be set up, Ron D. Moore and René Echevarria, (who wrote the teleplay, based on the story by Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler & Robert Hewitt Wolfe—Ed.) came by the set to visit; we had our pictures taken together and I congratulated them on doing such a good job with the script. It was filming even funnier than it read.
One of the video monitors was set up with a tape of the original "Trouble with Tribbles" episode, so the actors and the director could see what was happening in the scene they would be matching. For instance, in the rec room scene where Kirk discovers that his chicken sandwich and coffee arrive with tribbles, Sisko and Dax would be inserted digitally. They would be surreptitiously watching Kirk; so Terry Farrell and Avery Brooks had to watch the scene a few times to see what they would be reacting to.
As we stood around the monitor, one of the A.D.'s was searching backward through the tape for the scene until I asked innocently, "Why are you rewinding? The scene you're looking for takes place in the third act."
For a moment, a couple of folks looked at me surprised, and I felt embarrassed at having spoken up, until somebody realized, "He's right."
And then somebody else said, "Well, if anybody knows this show, it should be David."
By the second day of shooting, the atmosphere people had become a real team. The assistant directors could give a set of instructions and the team would hit their marks every time. They were as professional a group of folks as I'd ever seen on a soundstage, and … well, it was like finally getting a chance to play with the big kids.
Everybody knew we were doing something special here; the cast, the crew, the folks in the front office, the studio executives, everybody connected with Star Trek knew we were re-creating a piece of classic television, and that if it worked, it would make television history. Everybody was jazzed and you could feel the excitement everywhere on the set. The cold chill was halfway up my spine now.
While Paramount Pictures does not have a studio tour the way Universal does, with earthquakes and King Kong and flash floods and trick bridges, they do have guides escorting small groups of tourists around the lot, showing them the workings of a real film studio. During breaks between shots, the atmosphere people would often wait outside the stage, and we often saw these groups wending their way between the soundstages. The tourists would look over and see us in our classic Trek uniforms and their eyes would go wide with surprise.
And it wasn't just the tourists, either; a lot of the people who worked on the Paramount lot, even actors from other shows, reacted with delight to see folks dressed again in the original Star Trek uniforms. It made me start to think … what if Paramount started a new Star Trek show, one that took place in Kirk and Spock's time? Or how about even a new set of shows about Kirk and Spock? (If you used a new, younger cast, you could start off by telling the story of how Kirk first took command of the Enterprise.) I still wonder if that's doable.
On the afternoon of the second day, one of the studio messengers offered me a ride on the back of his electric cart, and we passed a very large group of sight-seers. Half a dozen of them saw me and grinned; they lifted their right hands in the Vulcan salute. I laughed and saluted right back.
Knowing that Mike Okuda had expressed a wish to have one of the original tribbles appear in this new episode, I'd brought one to the set; and as I showed it off to Jonathan and some of the other folks from Deep Space Nine, some of them held it with a sense of awe, as if it gave them a mystical connection to the past.
A little while after that, John Dwyer came by; John was the set decorator for Star Trek and he had worked on the original "Trouble with Tribbles" episode. John is a tall guy, always smiling, always having a good time. He walked up and down the sets now, examining details with a big smile on his face. On the bridge set, he looked at the base of the chair at a work station, something that wouldn't even show up on screen, and grinned. He turned to Mike Okuda: "You even got the chairs right!"
Not only the chairs, even the graphics on the bridge stations and the buttons on the consoles, as well. Jim Van Over, who had done much of that work, proudly pointed out how he'd duplicated all the separate details.
John and I swapped a few stories of our own—about all the folks we still remembered fondly. He had a terrific story about Irving Feinberg, the show's prop man, and how he once brought in a brand-new set of socket wrenches to be Scotty's tools. . . .
And then the high point of the day occurred. Bob Justman arrived.
Now, listen, in all of the histories of Star Trek, you hear a lot about Gene Roddenberry. And more recently, Gene L. Coon is starting to receive some of the credit he so richly deserves for the success of the original series. But it was Bob Justman who made it all work; he was on the soundstage every day, overseeing every detail of the production. He did it for all seventy-eight episodes of the original Star Trek. He did it for the first five years of Star Trek: The Next Generation. There is nobody alive who knows the nuts and bolts of Star Trek like Bob Justman. I've admired him since the day I first met him in the summer of 1967. Bob Justman combines a gentle manner with a no-nonsense approach to production that has set a standard for others to match.
I found him at the end of the curved corridor, watching the setup for a particularly tricky shot. He turned around and saw me and I just grabbed him and gave him a big hug. He saw me in the red security guard's uniform and started laughing. "You finally made it," he said.
I hadn't seen Bob since 1988, and it was like a joyous family reunion with a favorite relative. We stood and babbled at each other for a long time, catching up on old news, clearing up silly old business, and just sharing the joy of both of us being back on the Enterprise. I congratulated him on his new book (Inside Star Trek, written with Herb Solow), he congratulated me on my son's adoption, and I showed off pictures.
And the cold chill that had started at the bottom of my spine suddenly hit the top and my eyes started to fill up with tears of sheer joy. We were back on the Enterprise again and thirty years had disappeared. This was all we'd ever wanted to do: make Star Trek.
Indeed, this was the reason why all these folks were here today. They'd all come aboard this show because they'd all shared the same dream of making more Star Trek; and here we all were, remaking the original Star Trek one more time. Wow!
Bob walked the sets with Mike Okuda and other members of the art department, nodding thoughtfully. Abruptly he stopped, looked up, and said, "Those panels are too dark." And he pointed at the orange mesh next to the ladder. "And that doesn't quite match, either."
Mike Okuda's face fell. "You found the only two things we couldn't match exactly. The company that makes the reflective plastic went out of business ten years ago, and nobody makes the same kind of mesh anymore."
But then Bob said, "You got everything else right. It's perfect. When you take this set down, will you send me one of those wall panels as a souvenir? It would mean a lot." And yes, it meant a lot to Mike and Denise Okuda and the rest of the art department, as well, to receive such high praise from the man who made the original Enterprise work.
Somewhere in there, I mentioned to Bob how carefully they'd even duplicated the "Finnerman lighting," and he said, "Nope, it's 'Justman lighting.' Star Trek was Gerry Finnerman's first job as a D.P., and I had a long talk with him about how I wanted the show lit, and why I wanted to use the colored gels to provide a mood for the sets. Do you know he was so nervous during the first season that he used to throw up after we'd screened the dailies?"
The stories you hear thirty years later …
But then it was time to get back to work. There was one more scene to shoot before the day was over. O'Brien and Bashir have accidentally been caught in the fight in the bar, and now they're in the lineup where Kirk bawls out Scotty, Chekov, and Freeman. (And, yes, while it would have been fun to insert me into that shot with O'Brien and Sisko so I could finally play the part of Freeman, it wasn't technically feasible. Besides, I was wearing a red shirt, remember?)
When the lineup is dismissed, O'Brien and Bashir come down the corridor and around a corner to see that there are tribbles in the Enterprise corridor. First, Jonathan shot the dialog with O'Brien and Bashir; then he set up an over-the-shoulder shot of what O'Brien sees. Because of the angle of the shot, the best place to stand was right behind Jonathan.
Abruptly, he turned around to me and said, "David, what do you think? Aren't there too many tribbles in this shot?"
"Well …" I started thinking out loud. "O'Brien and Bashir just walked out of the lineup. The lineup happens at the beginning of the third act, and we haven't seen tribbles out of control on the Enterprise yet, so this would be the first time we see how fast they're breeding; so, yes, there are too many tribbles in the shot."
Jonathan walked onto the set, and I followed him, and we proceeded to remove half the tribbles. "What do you think, David? Is this about right?" And as I answered him, I suddenly realized everyone was looking at me. For one brief moment, I was directing the director!
"This looks good," I said. And then, not unselfconsciously, I suggested, "You know, this is the shot where you should use me. You should have a crewman, kneeling down on the floor actually playing with one of the tribbles. Let me do that."
"You're right," he said. And that was the way the scene was set up.
When you watch the show—and if you're a serious fan, you've probably taped it—I'm the silver-haired security guard playing with the baby tribble; the same one I'd brought to fulfill Mike Okuda's wish. That tribble is now the only tribble to have appeared in both tribble episodes!
They ain't never gonna get the grin off this face!
And then the shot was in the can and the day was over. It was late and it was time for me to head home. I turned in the phaser for the last time. I took off the costume with real sadness. The adventure was winding down, but not really.
In truth, it was only beginning. Star Trek never ends. It only begins. As I left the lot, I felt young again because I'd had a chance to rediscover the fun and the magic and the dream. The final frontier is not space. The final frontier is the human soul. Space is where we will meet the challenge.
But until we get out there full-time, Star Trek is one of the places where we will imagine the challenge.
No, it's not enough. But it's a great start. Isn't it?
—David Gerrold, 1996
DAVID GERROLD is the guy who wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode for the original Star Trek series. He's also written a whole bunch of other stuff, too.