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....

-- David Gerrold, 1996