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Edith Keeler survives the car accident, after three Starfleet officers (and temporary vagrants) disappear in a flash of light.
She looks dead, but she’s not. Her limp body, taken to hospital by four regulars of the Mission, slowly recovers. She’s there for some time: kidney damage, broken bones, lung issues, utter exhaustion. She wonders why her nice young man wasn’t one of her rescuers, or that kind doctor with the colour newly returned to his face. She wonders where they went. If they were too scared to be associated with a tragic accident, and moved on. That kind of person often does.
Edith Keeler spends most of the Second World War still in recovery. Even when she’s able to return to the Mission, her speeches are a little fainter. She sits to deliver them. The energy she would have had for the peace movement is gone. The headlines upset her daily, but she can at least provide food and rest for her small corner of the world until Germany surrenders.
Edith Keeler looks at the stars, and wonders. Edith dreams of a life among them.
Hundreds of years in the future, things seem to have gone back to normal. Starfleet remains, the captain’s tragic errand complete. Nobody talks about it, and nobody checks the records for a 1930 newspaper headline. The trauma is too fresh; he doesn’t want to read about it a second time. They might not even be able to find anything, Jim Kirk reasons; the Eugenics Wars destroyed so many archives. Everything is the way it should be, it appears. That will have to be enough.
Edith Keeler gets to see man land on the moon, just like she predicted. She wishes she could gloat to that man who found the idea so funny, but he’s barely a memory, now, and she’s surrounded by life, friends, family. She found kinship in the hippie movement, and moved to San Francisco to wear some flowers in her hair.
And while she’s content to let younger, louder voices take the helm, she quietly continues to fight for justice. Her family jokes that she has a new cause every five years. Prison reform. Censorship. Environmental degradation. She’s never met with a president, but she does sometimes meet with important people. The policy changes are small, and don’t bear her name, but they exist. Just like she does.
Edith Keeler sits in a hospital once again, nearing the end of her life, undergoing interminable kidney dialysis as what’s left of her kidneys fails. It’s amazing she’s lived this long, the doctors say. She must have an iron will. She has an iron something, she jokes, after years of procedures. She’s lived a good life, though. She’s done good. She’d like to live for some time yet, but she’s ready to go; this is miserable, and she hasn’t had the energy to do anything in some time.
It reminds her of the years after the accident. At least she’s not unconscious, or demented. She’s been lucky, after what happened. How has it been so many decades since—since—
She feels unrecognizable from the woman she was more than 50 years ago, but her kind eyes are the same.
Kind eyes meet kind eyes in the hallway of a hospital. Arresting eyes. Blue eyes. A man in medical scrubs.
“What’s the matter with you?”
Brusque, but focused. Trying to help. She can identify with that. She answers in as few words as possible, to save him time.
“Kidney dialysis.”
He looks familiar, but from where is lost to time. Forty, twenty, fifty years of it.
Would she like to try for ’30?
He gives her a pill and some encouraging words, brusque affect melting with a pat on the cheek. She’s not in the habit of taking mysterious medication, but she’s oddly reassured. Something feels correct. So she swallows the pill, and he disappears down the hallway like a hallucination.
If she hadn’t seen him a second time, wheeling a gurney with two other physicians, she’d have said she didn’t believe he was real…but she did believe he was right. She feels settled, even when she looks at the other male doctor and feels a painful twinge in her gut. Perhaps it’s her new kidney.
The doctors pass by, and the pain passes, as well. An older pain passes, too, though she doesn’t know why. But she feels wonderful. What a miracle that pill was. Maybe they’re finally spending money on life after all.
In 1986, Edith Keeler is finally saved, albeit belatedly, by Leonard McCoy, her lifespan now unnaturally long, her energy mysteriously restored.
Refreshed, renewed, she decides to devote herself to a cause once more. She reads articles in the paper—the only two humpback whales in captivity, released to take their chances in a hostile world with their species’ population rapidly declining. A missing biologist, seemingly vanished out of time, her only wish to rescue them.
Whale conservation, she thinks. With the time I have left, let me help.
Edith Keeler lives.