Destiny in the Future

By Linda A Langworthy

“Damn you, Captain Russell! I’ll love whomever I wish!”

In May 1968, a 17-year-old high school girl is whisked suddenly into the 23rd century.

In October 2018, her story is discovered.

Originally written fifty years ago but never before seen in print, Destiny in the Future is a story inspired by one of the most influential science fiction TV shows in history—just before it was cancelled.

Part romance, part social commentary, this book is meant as a posthumous tribute to its author, whose personality shaped and was shaped by tumultuous events of a changing American society—to boldly go where no “girl” had gone before.

All proceeds from this book will be donated to the American Cancer Society in Linda A Langworthy's name.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Horaios Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463818114

Linda A Langworthy

Born June 10, 1950, in Lansingburgh, New York, Linda Alison Langworthy was an All-Area All-State chorus singer, participated in the Girl Scouts, and graduated cum laude from Lansingburgh High School in 1968. She graduated from Hudson Valley Community College Nursing School after receiving a scholarship as part of a pilot program to test whether those with cerebral palsy could qualify as nurses. She was a voracious reader and frequented Richards Library, often borrowing up to 200 books a year. An original Trekker, she held passionate viewpoints about religion and politics, was completely devoted to family, friends, and her faith, and fiercely proud of her Irish heritage. She passed away peacefully at the age of 68, following a courageous battle with cancer, on Monday, October 29, 2018, surrounded by members of her loving family. Destiny in the Future is her only book, published posthumously to raise cancer awareness.

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Star Trek is a Registered Trademark of CBS Studios, Inc. This book is unrelated to any productions of CBS or any of its affiliates or subsidiaries. References in the Preface are used solely for the purposes of literary and historical comparison.

Excepting for brief quotations for the purposes of reviewing, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without explicit permission from the Author’s Estate.

These stories are works of fiction. Names, places, and organizations are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, places, or organizations living or dead is coincidental.

Photograph on back cover ©2018 Thomas Dow Apple.

We gratefully acknowledge Nichelle Nichols and Sky Douglas Conway for the kind permission to reproduce this image.

Text copyright © 2019 The Estate of Linda Alison Langworthy Apple

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781092505222 (paperback)

ISBN: 9780463818114 (ebook)

Cover design: M. Thomas Apple

Dedicated to the memory of the author,

Linda Alison Langworthy Apple (1950-2018).

PREFACE

MY MOTHER WAS a complicated person. She was caring, passionate, belligerent, understanding, stubborn, compassionate, aggressive, and a dozen other seemingly conflicting adjectives. Being her oldest son, I’m not surprised that, on more than one occasion, these contradictory attributes have been applied to me as well. There are plenty of people who simply can’t comprehend how a person can be both nurturing and demanding at the same time.

Demanding, I think, is the best characteristic that can be applied to my mother. Demanding of others. Demanding of herself. She was a perfectionist, and yet constantly fell short of her own perfectionism, which made her demand even more of herself, and therefore of others, as well. Her standards may have seemed high, but she also set the standards high for herself. So high that nobody, really, would ever meet them.

Which partly goes to explain why the current story exists in the form it does. My mother began writing it on an Underwood manual typewriter borrowed from her father just a few weeks before she graduated from Lansingburgh High School in June 1968. For those who have never used one, even seen one outside a museum or Pinterest pin, this is the kind of typewriter that has to be supplied with a roll of ink tape with a black strip for typing and a red strip for correcting. There was no return key. On the left side of the machine was a return bar, a five-inch piece of aluminum that stuck out from the roller bar as you typed. Once you reached the end of a line, you had to manually push the return bar, which would slide the roller bar back to the right and advance the paper one or two lines, depending on the setting.

When you’re reading these stories, keep in mind that my mother had cerebral palsy (CP) in her right hand. She could barely use her right hand for anything. Think of the effort involved in typing with only one hand, on heavy keys that needed a fair amount of pressure to work. Then manually resetting the return bar at the end of every line. Think of how many US letter-sized, double-spaced pages she typed. Think of the noise it caused. It shook the table as she pounded on it.

Talk about demanding. And stubborn. No wonder she didn’t try to retype the manuscript after she had made some handwritten corrections.

Why handwritten? Her father told her not to waste the red ink. Remember, it was his typewriter.

Reality influencing fiction

Readers under the age of 30 may find it difficult to appreciate that the two stories presented here are over 50 years old. Both stories reflect several aspects of my mother’s then teenage life in the late 1960s, and in particular the turbulent, violent year of 1968.

That year began with the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam, marking the turning point of US popular support for the war. Just over two months later, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, and two months after that, Senator Robert Bobby Kennedy was shot at the end of a speech in Los Angeles. Prague Spring saw the brief democratization of Czechoslovakia, which was swiftly and brutally put down by Soviet tanks. The Democratic National Convention in the summer saw Chicago go up in flames.

But the events that most inspired my mother occurred while she was starting her studies at Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) as the first person in the history of her family to attend post-secondary school (the previous year, my father had begun to attend the same college, also as the first person in his family’s history to do so, and, fortunately for me, HVCC is where they met the following year).

In October, black American athletes wore black socks with no shoes and raised their black gloved fists in silent protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. For doing so, they were expelled from the US team and subjected to physical abuse and death threats. The next month, Star Trek® (often called The Original Series or TOS) aired what is usually acclaimed as US TV’s first interracial kiss. This is somewhat debatable, depending on how you define race (a cultural concept that has no scientific basis).

But in 1968, the kiss made an incredible impact on US popular culture. As Captain Kirk famously says in the episode (Plato’s Stepchildren), Where I come from, size, shape, or color makes no difference.

And on Christmas Eve, James Lovell and the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to visit the Moon, circling it once and reporting to Houston that, yes, Santa Claus existed. Their photograph of Earthrise, the very first photo of the Earth ever taken from outer space, has become iconic.

Meanwhile, my mother was writing the two stories you see in this book.

While reading the stories, I had to keep in mind that not only had my mother just turned 18 when she wrote them, but that she also had grown up in somewhat unique circumstances. In addition to the incredible events of 1968, the year of her high school graduation, she also had had not to overcome a permanent childhood physical condition (which some deemed a handicap) but also deal with the reactions of her family and her classmates to her perceived disability. I have no direct evidence that she was discriminated against, but she must have felt different.

All her life my mother felt a great attraction to and compassion for people who were different. Outcast. Othered. She hated bullies, yet had little tolerance for those who she felt were spiritually or emotionally weak and openly despised those who she felt did not stand up for themselves. These complicated, often contradictory feelings show up in her writing, starting with the names of her characters.

What’s in a Name?

In the original version of the typed text, the protagonist’s name is Alison Sue Kentworth. Alison is clearly the author—the A in Linda A Langworthy is Alison, her middle name. The character’s middle name, Sue, is for my mother’s paternal grandmother, Susan Susie (O’Leary) Langworthy. My mother’s grandparents don’t appear in Destiny, but they do to some degree in the unfinished love story at the end of this book (which I have titled simply Love is Blind). For example, the characters comment on the tablecloth—genuine Irish lace—which matches the tablecloth in my grandmother’s (and later grandmother’s) house in Eastside Troy.

The helper in Love is Blind, Mrs. Casey, has an Irish name but behaves more like my mother’s maternal grandmother, Caroline Carrie (Lewis) Connally. Her attitude was shared by most of my mother’s family: When she said she didn’t want us in the kitchen, that is what she meant.

My mother’s family observed strict gender roles, and each room in the house had a specifically designated purpose. My mother’s mother and both grandmothers used to shoo children and men out of the kitchen when they were preparing meals. After meals were over, everyone was expected to leave the table and go to the living room or TV room. Meals with family members only would be held in a separate, pantry-size room off the kitchen, while guests would be seated at the fancy tablecloth table (carefully covered in plastic once it became commercially available). This attitude of let the room fit the social need even appears in Destiny, when the Captain Russell (unlike Kirk in TOS) needs his own private office for discussions (see Predictions of future Trek).

The family name in Destiny (Kentworth) is obvious—no doubt too obvious, which is why in a handwritten alternative chapter 2 the character’s name was changed to Anderson. The typed text for chapter 1 was hand-corrected to Anderson, but the rest of the manuscript kept the name. However, the family name of the narrator in Love is Blind is also Anderson. Clearly, my mother didn’t want two main characters with the same last name. In the end, she kept Kentworth in her science fiction and specified the town as well. Alison’s hometown of Lansington clearly is Lansingburgh or Lansingburg, which is now North Troy but used to be a separate town before it merged with the city of Troy in the late 1800s. Locals still refer to it by its original name, and Lansingburgh High School still proudly graduates dozens of students every year.

In Destiny, other character names are inconsistent in the beginning two chapters before settling down in the rest of the typed text. For example, the communications officer and Alison’s roommate first appears as Miss Mullins but is quickly renamed Miss Millan, even within the same chapter. Although no special mention is made of her appearance, this character is probably meant to be Lt. Uhura, a character my mother idolized as the only female officer regular cast member of TOS. (Thanks to the efforts of my father, who was volunteering at Trekonderoga, a Trek fan festival in Upstate New York, my mother finally met the actor herself, Nichelle Nichols. Just a few weeks later she passed away. The photograph of meeting her idol appears in this book).

Mr. Sanders appears once or twice as Landers in the alternative chapter 2. The doctor is called Mc Roy in the final manuscript but initially was called McFarland and then Farland (and once Garland). The doctor is obviously patterned on Dr. McCoy from TOS; the captain in Destiny even calls the doctor Bones once or twice, although that nickname itself is based on sawbones, used starting in the US Civil War and often used in 1960s Western TV shows. I don’t know why my mother gave up on using the name Farland. Maybe she just preferred Mc Roy (always written with a space between the names).

The engineer in the original handwritten version is called Mr. Scott, and the captain calls him Scotty once, but this was too obvious (my mother probably thought). The typed text changes the name to Doogan, obviously based on the name of the actor James Doohan who played the original Montgomery Scott character. However, the engineer in my mother’s story never uses a Scottish accent. In fact, none of the characters have accents. The character Mr. Soola is probably meant to be Sulu, the helmsman, although he has little interaction with the main character Alison. It’s difficult to distinguish most of the characters, since the story doesn’t clearly describe their physical features. This matches my mother’s attitude in real life: she cared much less what people looked like and much more what they did or said.

As for the main character’s family, the father (Bill) is named after my mother’s maternal grandfather, William Bill Spenser Connally (also the name of her uncle, my great-uncle). The name Bill also appears suddenly in the alternative handwritten chapter 2. No explanation is given—perhaps there was yet another version of chapter 1 that explains this, as there is little chance the main character Alison would have called her father by his first name.

Even more confusing are the two Peters. In the original typed text, as well as in the handwritten alternative versions, the boy who goes on a picnic with Alison is named Peter. But her older brother is also named Peter. The typed chapter 1 corrects one of these Peters to Dick, but the name Peter remains in other parts of the manuscript. Another character named Peter also appears as the love interest in Love is Blind. Two Peters too many!

In a way, Dick/Peter as the older brother-slash-love interest is the most interesting of name changes. In Destiny, Pete is the older brother my mother never had and often wished she did. Pete goes to Viet-Nam, where he is killed in action. News of his death shatters Alison’s mother, although this happens in almost a stage aside after Alison is whisked into the future. This scene may mirror the reaction my grandmother must have had to receiving the death notice of her first husband, who was killed in northern France about one month after D-Day. The US Army death notice is still saved among my mother’s papers and photos.

I can well imagine my grandmother repeatedly relaying this experience to my mother; my grandmother constantly compared my grandfather to her first husband, Lt. John Hart, who was evidently more manly because he was an officer and received a posthumous Purple Heart, while my grandfather served merely as a combat engineer, building roads and supervising quarries in Italy under constant nightly bombardment. My grandfather loved telling stories (some likely fictitious, although to what degree, we’ll never know) about his life in the Army in the North Africa Campaign of WWII. Stylized, and somewhat stereotyped, images from his stories appear in Destiny, as Alison finds herself in a desert and eventually an oasis.

This leads me into the next section of speculation: in addition to character and place names, how much of my mother actually shows up in the story?

Science fiction as unwritten life story

In Destiny in the Future, the main character Alison is the second child of three. In reality, my mother was the oldest child of three, as well as the only daughter. This is likely the reason why she inherited old photographs and documents from our maternal family lineage. As the oldest child, she must have felt a great deal of burden and responsibility. Particularly being a woman in the pre-Feminist Revolution 1960s. And definitely because of her disability—cerebral palsy—which prevented her from using her right hand for most every-day tasks.

When she was born in 1950, CP was thought so debilitating that doctors were sure she wouldn’t survive past her 35th birthday. Her mother (Betty Anderson/Kentworth, in the story, Beatrice Betty Connally in real life) gave birth via caesarian section, a dangerous operation at the time. Due to complications from the C-section delivery, she was told she might never have any children again. So my mother was treated with kid gloves the first five years of her life. Isolated from other children in her neighborhood, out of fear that she might contract diseases like chicken pox and measles more easily. Treated like a princess.

In the story, the character of Alison loses the use of her right arm due to a knife attack in Chapter 4. When told that the surgery (Chapter 6) will leave her right arm useless for a month, she responds by saying she is left handed and the loss won’t affect her. The CP in my mother’s right hand made it permanently weak relative to her left arm due to lack of muscle and nerve control. Keeping in mind that