The Enterprise flew for six months.
She went to Alpha Carinae and mapped a nebula. She carried a Tellarite trade delegation to Vega and was very nearly involved in a war over the seating at dinner. She lost two crewmen at Beta Aurigae, in an accident, on a survey, in a cave, and Christopher Pike wrote both letters himself and did not delegate it and did not talk about it.
And on the second and fourth Thursday of every month, at 2200, six people sat in an engineer's quarters and had nothing.
By the third month Spock had eliminated nineteen approaches. By the fifth, forty-one.
He kept the list on the secondary science banks behind a lock a lieutenant had given him without asking why, and it was the most rigorous work he had ever done, and it was a monument to failure, and he added to it every day. He came off an eight-hour shift, ate, went to the lab, worked six hours, slept three, went back on shift. He did this for six months.
At the end of the sixth month he was, by any Vulcan measure, in a condition his mother would have recognized at once and his father would have declined to discuss. He had lost four kilos. Twice, in a corridor, he had been unable for some seconds to recall the name of a junior officer he had served with for two years.
Nobody said anything.
Christopher Pike said something. In the corridor outside the science lab at 0340 on a Tuesday, in an off-duty jacket, arms folded, not raising his voice, not making it an order.
"Mister Spock. Go to bed."
"With respect, sir, I am at a critical stage."
"You've been at a critical stage for six months."
"Then it has been six months of criticality, sir, and I have no wish to interrupt it."
Pike stood in the doorway a while. "Spock. What happens if you find it?"
The console hummed. "Sir?"
"What happens if you find a way. What do you actually do?" Pike came into the lab. "You come to me. That's the answer, isn't it. You come to me with a method, and you ask for a ship, and the ship is mine, and I say yes or I say no. And I want you to know that I already know what I am going to say."
Spock turned around.
Christopher Pike stood in the middle of a science lab at 0340 in an off-duty jacket with his hands in his pockets, fifty-three years old, and there was not a mark on him.
"You do not have all of the information, Captain," Spock said.
"No. I don't. And you do. And you've had it for six months and you haven't given it to me, and I have decided not to ask, because I know exactly what kind of information a man keeps to himself for six months."
He turned to go. At the door he stopped.
"Go to bed, Commander. That's an order. You're no good to him dead."