Prolific novelist Norman Spinrad wrote two scripts for the original Star Trek — but only one of them was produced, "The Doomsday Machine." The other one, "He Walked Among Us," was scrapped, and nobody's been able to read it — until now.

The sad tale of Spinrad's "He Walked Among Us" is like an object lesson in what went wrong with Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry had commissioned it as a vehicle for Milton Berle, who Roddenberry believed had serious acting chops — and Spinrad's script was designed to show what Berle could do with more straight-up dramatic material. But then producer Gene L. Coon, who also wrote "Spock's Brain" and "Wink of an Eye," saw that they were doing a story for Milton Berle and decided to rewrite the whole thing as a comedy. Spinrad was disgusted with the results, which he showed to Roddenberry, begging him to kill the story — and Roddenberry agreed.

Spinrad didn't hang on to a copy of his original script, which he wrote on a typewriter, and he'd thought it was lost forever. Until, as Spinrad explains:

I thought the text of my original version—written on a typewriter!—was lost forever until recently a fan asked me to autograph a faded copy he had bought somewhere. I did, and in return he sent me a pdf off a scan

He's uploaded that PDF to Amazon and other sites, so you can buy it for the Kindle and other e-book readers for just $9. [via StarTrek.com]