Everything below about Harlan Ellison's teleplay is a matter of record. The opinions are mine.
You have just read a novel that assumes something the aired episode does not. In the version most people know, James Kirk holds Leonard McCoy back on a sidewalk on Twenty-second Street and lets the woman he loves walk in front of a truck. It is the most famous three seconds in the history of the show, and it is the reason the episode is still argued about nearly sixty years later.
That is not the version Harlan Ellison wrote.
In his original teleplay, Kirk fails. He cannot do it. He stands there with the whole of the future in front of him and he cannot make himself let her die, and it is Spock who acts to prevent the rescue, because Spock is the only one in that road capable of holding logic above the thing he is watching happen to his friend. Ellison's Kirk would have let her live. He would have traded the universe for one woman in a gray coat, and in an earlier draft he is prepared to trade his crew for her as well.
Roddenberry would not have it, and neither would the production staff, whose verdict on the draft was that it was not Star Trek. Roddenberry's position was that Kirk could do it. Ellison's was that a man that passionate could not. The script went through Steven Carabatsos, Gene Coon and D. C. Fontana before it shot. The aired version handed the choice back to Kirk and let him make it correctly, and won the 1968 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, and Ellison spent the rest of his life saying what had been taken out of it. He published his own version, unaltered, with an essay attached, and he was still angry about it thirty years on.
I am not qualified to settle that fight and I am not going to try. But I have always thought that Ellison was right about the man. The Kirk of that episode has spent two years telling us, weekly, that he does not accept no-win scenarios, that he will not leave people behind, that he rewrites the test rather than take the loss. Then he stands still on a curb for three seconds and does the arithmetic. It is magnificent and it has never once been believable to me.
This book assumes the other thing happened.
It assumes his arm went out. It assumes Spock and McCoy were three seconds too slow, that the truck missed her, that the two men on the sidewalk went thin and vanished into a corrected world where Christopher Pike had never left the center seat, and that a thirty-four-year-old starship captain was left kneeling in a road in 1930 with a living woman in his arms and no way home.
And then it asks the question the episode never had time for, which is not whether he was right.
It is what it costs to be wrong for forty years, on purpose, alone, in Brooklyn, with nobody to tell.
DAVID MOSS