The Trouble With Tribbles Part 6

By the time Smith is through, he has contracted to sell almost .ve hundred fuzzies to various storekeepers at the trading post, for prices ranging from ten to twenty-.ve credits apiece.

Back on the Enterprise, Kirk and Spock discuss what they have seen.13 Kirk had decided that Smith is harmless-just a clever rascal and a shrewd businessman. Spock, however, expresses his misgivings...

Meanwhile, they have to stay on watch for a possible at-tempt to get at the grain in the warehouse. (For some reason the warehouse looks strangely like the outside of a movie soundstage.)14 Kirk orders the guard doubled.15 Jones and his a.s.sistant inspect the grain and report that it is still safe. The a.s.sistant is a twitchy young man who makes frequent trips to check on the grain.

Meanwhile, Smith has delivered his .ve hundred fuzzies and they have become an instant craze. The original .ve hundred have sold out amazingly fast. The shopkeepers clamor for more. Somehow, Smith is able to meet their demands, although at a slight rise in price.16 Within a day, it seems as if everybody has a fuzzy. Those who don't have one yet, have them on order. Smith, of course, continues to sell them wholesale. He also barters for food, fuel, water, etc: using fuzzies instead of cash.17 Fuzzies appear everywhere. Even Janice Rand18 brings one onto the Enterprise. Other crew members start showing up with fuzzies on their shoulders, or in their pockets.19 Everybody admits that they are cute, but Mr. Scott complains that they keep crawling into his machines, and Kirk has to issue an order to keep fuzzies off the bridge.

However, almost immediately it becomes apparent that the fuzzies are fantastically proli.c. Janice Rand's fuzzy drops a litter of ten golden pups, each the size of a thumb. Soon, other fuzzy owners report that their fuzzies too have had litters.

McCoy dissects one and reports that the little beasts are as.e.xual, reproducing at will. "Whenever one of the little creatures is fed enough...POW! He has pups. I mean, she has pups-er, it has pups."

Because the creatures are such simple organisms, a newborn fuzzy is as mature as a full-grown fuzzy. The only difference is size.

Kirk confronts Smith just as Smith is preparing to leave. "You knew about the fuzzies breeding so fast, didn't you?"

Smith nods. "Of course. That's my job. I'm a fuzzy salesman. It's a harmless enough business, Captain. It hurts no one. Besides, that's how I carry my stock. I keep a few for breeding, and when I get to a planet, I can manufacture as many as I need."

Kirk shakes his head. The fuzzies may be a pleasant enough animal, but Smith certainly isn't. His att.i.tude towards business leaves much to be desired. Shortly thereafter, Smith leaves the trading post.

When Kirk and Spock return to the Enterprise, they discover that Janice Rand's fuzzy has just dropped its second litter. Worse, the fuzzies of the .rst litter have had their .rst litters. Janice Rand is now the proud owner of 121 fuzzies. She goes to the galley to get some food for them...quite a bit.20 For the nest few days, the story is the same all over. Every-body who has a fuzzy reports that the fuzzies are breeding as fast as they are being fed. There are fuzzies everywhere; you can't give them away. They are overrunning the Enterprise.

Little b.a.l.l.s of .uff sit patiently on desks, chairs, tables, in Kirk's coffee cup, on the .oor, in corners, under beds, on bookshelves, in the galley...

The cook21 complains that fuzzies have gotten into his .our stores and completely eaten them. Kirk inspects and sees that the fuzzies have gone through a large bin of white .our, and in its place have left only more fuzzies.

Kirk and Spock stare down into the .our bin at the seething ma.s.s of fuzzies22...and they are both thinking the same thing: the grain!

He and Spock race to the granary. They break the seal on the door and open it. The worst has de.nitely happened. There is no grain-just a solid, seething ma.s.s of fuzzies. (Perhaps they are mewling hungrily.) The fuzzies do not have to be shown. The interior of the warehouse can be suggested by having a number of fuzzies roll out when the door is opened.

Aghast, they stare into the warehouse. Apparently, somehow the fuzzies have gotten into the grain. Perhaps it was through an air vent, or perhaps someone accidentally dropped one, or perhaps it is sabotage...

In any case, as was previously noted, a fuzzy reproduces as fast as it is fed. McCoy's experiments have shown that under optimum conditions, a fuzzy can reproduce every twelve hours.23 The young are born mature and they are ready to reproduce within a few hours too. The faster you feed them, the faster they reproduce.

(Under normal conditions, on their home planet, fuzzies probably do not have optimum growth conditions. They probably have a great many natural enemies and food is probably more scarce. But people tend to overfeed their pets, and so...) Fuzzies have an extremely fast metabolic rate. Their growth is inhibited only by the amount of food available. It is not important how old a fuzzy is, but how much it has been fed. These fuzzies have been able to eat to their hearts' content. There must be several hundred thousand of them in the warehouse.

"One million, seven hundred and seventy one thousand, .ve hundred and sixty one," comments Spock.

Kirk looks at him.

"That's a.s.suming an average litter of ten every twelve hours, of course."25 "Oh."

Kirk makes an immediate decision. "First, close that door! Second, capture Cyrano Smith!"

It now becomes apparent to Kirk that the fuzzies were Smith's plot to destroy the grain.

The Enterprise takes after Smith's s.h.i.+p. With their bigger, more powerful engines they quickly catch up and overtake the s.h.i.+p. They beam Smith aboard and take his tiny s.h.i.+p in tow. Smith protests his innocence. He knew the fuzzies were fast breeders, but he knew nothing about the grain.

Kirk ignores his protestations of innocence. This is a matter for the Interstellar Commerce Commission26-tampering with interstellar s.h.i.+pments.

However, when they return to the trading post, there is another surprise for them. All the 1,771,561 fuzzies that have eaten the grain are dead. Indeed, many of the older ones (in the bottom of the pile) were already dead, but undiscovered.

McCoy performs a dissection on some of the dead fuzzies and discovers that they have been poisoned; yet the grain has tested out as being harmless. McCoy tests the grain again-that is, what is left of it.

This time he discovers a virus imbedded in the grain. Ordinarily, this virus tests out harmless, but it has the peculiar property that when it is taken into a living creature's body, it undergoes a change. It becomes an inert material. It is not a poison, but just as carbon monoxide can suffocate a person, the inert chemical in the bloodstream can cause a creature to die because it is not getting enough nourishment. No matter how much it eats, it will starve to death once the reaction is started.

The process is a delayed action one. A suf.cient level of the virus is necessary in the bloodstream to generate a threshold level of inert material. Once that threshold is achieved, death follows. Inadvertently, by destroying the grain, the fuzzies have saved the people of Barth.27 Further tests by McCoy show that if this grain had been used for seed, the virus would have been present in all of the crops raised.28 Apparently someone had tampered with the grain long before Smith arrived at the trading post planet.

Strangely, it is Smith who .ngers the villain.29 Damon Jones' a.s.sistant is revealed to be an employee of the Barth Corporation. He is taken into custody. Jones will arrange for a new s.h.i.+pment of grain.

But what about Smith and the fuzzies? There is still a plague of the little .uff b.a.l.l.s on the trading post.

Kirk decides on a punishment to .t the crime. Smith will have to stay on the trading post until he can get rid of every last fuzzy. In short, he has to be the dogcatcher!

Smith protests, but Kirk asks him if he would rather be charged with violating Interstellar Customs by transporting animals from one planet to another.30 Smith decides to stay and catch fuzzies.

Back on the Enterprise, now strangely free of fuzzies, Spock congratulates Kirk on a remarkably logical solution to the whole problem. Kirk accepts the praise modestly. "It did seem to have a feeling of justice about it..."

Suddenly he stops. Janice Rand is holding two gold b.a.l.l.s of .uff. "What are those?" he gasps, aghast.

"Earrings," she says and puts them on. They all have a good laugh, except Spock. He only looks bemused.

In the .rst version, the one that didn't get turned in, I had also written an afterthought. I include that here to show an alternate direction the episode might have gone.

AFTERTHOUGHT.

In this story I have pictured Smith as a colorful rogue who is well aware of what he is doing by spreading fuzzies throughout the galaxy. He knows that without natural enemies, fuzzies could eat a planet bare.

However, there is another way that Smith could be pictured. He could be a doddering old man who is unaware of the consequences of having too many fuzzies. He could come aboard the Enterprise or the trading post like a little old lady who lives with sixty-three cats-there can be no such thing as too many fuzzies for him.

When other people show an interest in the fuzzies, he gives them away. Love (and fuzzies) should be shared. Smith wants to spread love and fuzzies to every planet in the galaxy, unaware of the ecological damage he is doing in the process.

At .rst, Kirk thinks of the old man as just a harmless eccentric. After he discovers the fuzzies in the warehouse, he decides that maybe he is more than that. Maybe he is a cunning saboteur.

When Smith is brought back and shown the results of what he has caused, he is shocked. Never before has he stayed in one place long enough to see what happened when the fuzzies began multiplying rapidly.

For the .rst time, he realizes what he has done-there can be such a thing as too much love. He decides he must undo the damage. Fortunately, he knows just the way...the fuzzies have a natural enemy: a creature that is all mouth and teeth. It is extremely voracious and breeds just as fast as fuzzies- Kirk stops him before he puts that plan into action. The old man vows to help exterminate the fuzzies and undo the damage he has caused.

The .rst approach as detailed in the preceding twelve pages can be played as a comic adventure with overtones of farce. The second interpretation can be played for whimsy shading into pathos as the old man breaks down and cries when he realizes what he has done. You can't help but feel sorry for the poor old man who loves people and fuzzies so much that he cannot conceive of too many or too much being a bad thing. (What a perfect role for Boris Karloff...)31 Either approach could be fun, or perhaps a combination of the two...the old man is a bit of a rogue, and a bit of an eccentric.

Of the .ve premises that I submitted to STAR TREK, the one that they thought showed the most promise was also the one that was going to be the hardest to turn into a usable TV script.

Why?

Very simple. It had no story.

It was a premise built around a gag-the gag is this: everybody runs around in circles, making a lot of noise and chasing a lot of red herrings, without noticing that the real danger is already underfoot and breeding rapidly. The proli.c abilities of the fuzzies should seem to be only a minor subplot, a running gag, and secondary to what seemed to be the major con.ict.

Only problem was, the story didn't have a major con.ict. At best, it had a couple funny scenes. At worst, it was a transparent setup for an obvious punch line-opening a door and being inundated by fuzzies.

Of the .ve stories, "The Fuzzies" was both the best and the worst that they could have chosen.

The worst because I didn't know how to do it. I had absolutely no idea of how to put the tiling together to make it work on screen.

The best because it forced me to be a better writer than any of the other premises would have. The challenges in "The Fuzzies" were greater than the challenges in any of the other stories-but not quite big enough to look insurmountable.

Any of the other four stories would have required a simple straightforward telling of an action adventure plot-not that writing such a script is necessarily an easy task, but de.nitely easier than writing a script which provides the illusion of action and adventure while disguising the fact that it is really a s.h.a.ggy-creature story.

Why Gene c.o.o.n chose "The Fuzzies" over the other four-well, actually, the other two ("The Cosmic Chess Game" was unusable and they were already doing "The Doomsday Machine")-is a question that someday I would like to have answered.

I mean, it would be nice to know.

Oh-if you're thinking that all of this happened overnight, let me put some dates in here to help you sort things out.

Those outlines were turned in to my agent in February, and he turned them in to STAR TREK almost immediately.

Gene c.o.o.n's of.ce didn't reply until June.

They only had twelve or thirteen scripts by then that they thought were usable. I don't know, maybe they were getting a little desperate.*

*I was trying to think cheap.

1After Gene c.o.o.n decided he was interested in "The Fuzzies," he went through the premise and made notes in the margin, pointing out the things I would have to change to make the story appropriate for STAR TREK, as well as NBC. These are included as footnotes.

76.

2This was the .rst no-no. Gene's penciled notation was: "Big business angle out. One planet against another." Translated, this meant, "On American television, big business is never the villain. Make the conflict between two different planets instead."

3This character was originally conceived as being fairly sympathetic. Later, he became Nilz Baris, a pretentious, self-important bureaucrat.

4I repeat, it makes more sense to me to leave it in storage on a s.p.a.ce station. If it's only waiting for transs.h.i.+pment, why expose it to possible planetary contamination? Furthermore, it seems like a waste of energy to beam it down and then beam it back up again-somewhere in that transaction, you'll be .ghting the effects of the planet's gravity field and that will take power, a lot of it.

5I hated every line of this. I still do.

6"Guards posted." Gene was pointing out that Kirk and Spock would not be doing this task themselves. In my very .rst version, I had written: "At the request of Jones, Kirk agrees to post a guard over the warehouse. (The warehouse is like all of the trading post's living modules. It is a bubble of plastic, coated with foam. From the outside it is a blank sphere, but on the inside it can be subdivided to make apartments, or left empty to be a warehouse. This particular warehouse is three quarters .lled with grain.)" But I had forgotten to include this when I rewrote it. Naturally Gene picked up on this immediately.

7"Security would do this." He was right, of course.

8The name Jones had already been used for someone else.

9This was rather high-handed of Kirk, I thought. And a bit presumptuous too. Had it been allowed to stand, it would have been bad plotting.

10This was an a.s.sumption on my part. STAR TREK hadn't touched on the question of money at all.

11In particular, I was thinking of the ones that were being sold as key chains. How much could a few hundred of those cost? I was trying to think cheap again. The fuzzies had to be (a) believable, (b) easily made, and (c) a minimum of a special effects problem.

12Gene c.o.o.n didn't like this idea. Fuzzies were supposed to be cute. It wasn't exactly aesthetic to hint that people were skinning them for their fur-besides, in this particular future, women were beyond adorning themselves with the fur of animals.

13If they discuss it, then we don't even have to show it. The discussion alone is enough to establish the fact.

14It is impossible to think much cheaper than this.

15See! I had thought to post a guard.

16On rereading this, I am amazed at how impossible it would have been to portray on .lm-at least, as it is written here, it would have been. That we were able to keep so much of the flavor of this in the final shooting script, although we had changed so many of the details, is a tribute to something or somebody. I think.

17"Where does he get all the fuzzies from a one-man s.h.i.+p?" Gene had written, then crossed it out. Apparently he had thought it over and decided the answer was obvious.

18"No." Gene meant that the lovely Grace Lee Whitney who had played Janice Rand would not be back for the show's second season. When I asked him why, he said, "She transferred to another s.h.i.+p."

19"No pockets." Well, how was I to know? I hadn't been watching the show regularly.

20All right, Janice, but you'll be sor-ree...

21I know, I know. There's no cook on the Enterprise, just machines. We'll talk about this later. Maybe.

22If we had .lmed this shot, the visual memory of it would have been enough so that we would not have had to show the interior of the warehouse, also seething. Some things are far more effective if they are left to the viewer's imagination.

23Originally, I had written: "-under optimum conditions, a fuzzy can drop a litter every eighteen hours. The young will mature and begin reproducing within another twenty-four hours." But I wanted to speed it up, and I .gured if the audience would believe an eighteen-hour gestation period, they'd believe a twelve-hour one. By the way, did you know that opossums have gestation periods of only eleven days?

25Of course. If you're going to tell a joke, tell it all.

26"Federation". There's no such thing as an Interstellar Commerce Commission.