Getting Really Real

Malcolm and Joey in the transporter room

My favorite of Gerry Conway’s Star Trek comic strip stories was his last one, “Getting Real.” It was unique in that it was told from the point of view of two junior high school kids who, in 1983, were beamed up to the starship Enterprise. I found myself getting carried away by all the ideas and questions that popped into my head as I was reading, inspired by all the things not answered in the tale.

The story started when the two kids, Joey and Malcolm, walked outside of an arcade after their Defender game crashed. They heard a buzzing sound, and when they popped ’round the corner, they saw what they took to be William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan about to get ready to promote the latest Star Trek movie. Joey asked for an autograph from Nimoy, who was made up to look like Mr. Spock. When asked how the boys knew who they were, Joey pointed to a poster on the wall behind them, which advertised Star Trek airing Saturdays on Channel 32. As Shatner and Nimoy pondered the poster, Malcolm started to put two and two together, and figured out the three men weren’t actors. Instead they were actually Admiral Kirk, Captain Spock, and Commander Scott. “Those are real pointed ears!” he realized. Malcolm dragged Joey away, and they ran down the street, right into a cop. The kids explained that Mr. Spock was following them. The cop retorted, “Yeah, and I bet Captain Kirk is with him.” As Spock neck-pinched the cop, he said, “Actually, Admiral Kirk.”

As the story unfolded, the kids beamed up to the USS Enterprise and had a little adventure. They learned that the ship had been sent to 1983 on a time travel mission to change history. A space-borne microbe had inadvertently been picked up by the space shuttle, and when it returned to Cape Canaveral the microbe spread a deadly virus which killed half the population of Florida. The Enterprise had been sent back to prevent the plague by destroying that space shuttle. Being patriotic kids, they didn’t take kindly to the mission plan, and being familiar with Captain Kirk from Star Trek, they felt Kirk would have found a way to solve the problem without hurting anyone. A debate about TV heroism ensued, and then the kids took it upon themselves to save the shuttle. In the end, they convinced Kirk not to destroy the shuttle, and the kids were returned to the arcade.

The unreliable narrator might perhaps be more unreliable than usual, as the story was told from the point of view of the kids. But still, I wondered about the mission, the parallel universe time travel, the microbes, the plague, and the setting.

Where was that arcade? Chicago, obviously! Channel 32 is Chicago, and you could see where my father had worked in 1980, the John Hancock building, in one panel. Or maybe that was a loose interpretation of the Sears Tower. Either way, I found out that the artist, Dick Kulpa, lived near Chicago, just as I did at the time. Those kids would have been about five years younger than me in 1983.

How did the Enterprise manage to get to 1983 of a parallel universe? If they used the slingshot effect, how come on this trip it didn’t take them to 1983 of their own universe? Did Spock mess up the time travel calculations before they left in 2279? Or was there some spacial anomaly in the way that rerouted them? Either way, Spock got the calculations right the next time he made them, six years later for him in 2285, for the trip to retrieve those two whales in 1986 in Star Trek IV.

And what a parallel universe they showed up in. Was it the same parallel universe that involved the fan story “Visit to a Weird Planet,” in which Kirk, Spock and McCoy beamed into the transporter room set of Desilu Studios? And the flip side story, “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited,” in which Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley beamed up to the real Enterprise? What sort of amazing spacial anomaly was at work that allowed for the transposition? Was it the same anomaly or a different one? Good thing they didn’t wind up in 1983 in the Mirror Universe. Of course, that would have been a much different story!

How did that plague spread? First off, space shuttles weren’t landing at Cape Canaveral in 1983; that didn’t start till 1984. In 1983 they were still landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California. So what kept the plague from hitting California, until that shuttle had been returned to Florida atop one of those special 747s? Then I wondered how many people had been killed in the story. I looked up U.S. Census data and found that a little over ten million people lived in Florida in 1983. So “half the population” is five million. But Cape Canaveral is less than an hour’s drive from Orlando, where millions of people visit each week. The cycle of weekly vacation trips to Orlando means that once the plague spread to Orlando, then someone had to act fast or all the people in Orlando would be back home in their own states a week later. And then history wouldn’t have said that the plague killed half the population of Florida, it would have said that it killed half the population of the southeastern United States. So that means some quarantine was put in place before the end of the week that the plague hit Orlando. What’s its incubation period, and the period in which it was infectious? What were the symptoms, such that the infection could affect five million people but be able to be recognized and quarantined so quickly? That’s a whole story just there.

Where did those microbes come from? How did the microbes get into the space shuttle? I researched near-earth asteroids and comets in 1983, and lo and behold, coincidentally I’m sure, there happened to be a comet that passed within a few million miles of Earth in 1983, the closest comet pass in many years. So I imagined that the microbes had been dormant on that comet, and then when the comet got close to Earth, the heat from the sun creating the comet’s tail warmed up and expelled the little microbes, so that they’d be living actively (as they were in the story) rather than dormant (which they’d be if they had just been floating in the absolute zero of space), and they’d be pulled close to Earth by its gravity.

Why would the Enterprise be sent on a time travel mission to alter history? They usually protect the timeline from changes. More than a decade after this comic strip was written, Star Trek writers would invent the Department of Temporal Investigations for the episode “Trials and Tribble-ations” on Deep Space Nine. In-universe, though, the DTI was formed nine years prior to the events of this comic strip, so it had to have been the branch of Starfleet which assigned the mission. DTI must have discovered that history had been changed — that this plague should not have happened — and that it needed to un-happen.

But that would mean the microbes weren’t on that comet by accident. They were put there deliberately to change history in some secret, subtle manner. Or maybe a comet wasn’t involved at all, and the microbes had just been dispersed by an undetected spacecraft from the future.

Why send the Enterprise? The crew had the most experience with time travel, particularly to Earth in the 20th century. Also, at this time Kirk was commandant of Starfleet Academy, and the ship was normally used for training and miscellaneous missions. A ship not in regular service might be a safe choice for a risky time-travel mission.

Why order the space shuttle to be shot down? The Enterprise’s torpedoes might hit more than just the shuttle; they could hit other shuttles at Canaveral and certainly there would be loss of life beyond the astronauts. Firing on a space shuttle from orbit would also set Earth at global alert, with the U.S. and other nations arming their nuclear stockpiles and aiming them into space. Perhaps that sort of drastic action was needed to detect or stop whatever evildoer was back in 1983 playing with those microbes.

Were those time-traveling evildoers still in 1983? Would they recognize the Enterprise as being another ship from the future? Would they attack? Would the Enterprise discover them hiding in orbit?

What happened next? At the end of the story, the Enterprise was still in the past of an alternate universe. How did they get back to their own time and their own universe? Once back, did they stop the plague? And did they do it the most obvious way, by beaming up the microbe when it entered the space shuttle? Did they beam up the other microbes floating in Earth orbit while they were at it? Or was the plague part of the normal flow of events, like what ended up happening at the end of “Assignment: Earth” in 1969?

There’s an novella’s worth of material untold from that little comic strip. Really!

(Image ©1983 LA Times Mirror, licensed by CBS Paramount Television.)