Leonard McCoy won the argument on the last Thursday before they took the ship, and everybody in the room knew he had won it, including Spock, and it changed nothing.
Uhura remembered that he did not shout. He had shouted about smaller matters four hundred times in two years and about this one he did not raise his voice at all, and it was the worst she ever heard him.
He came in at 2200 to Scott's quarters, where six glasses were poured and two of them would not be touched. He sat down and said he had one thing, and then he would never say it again.
"Ask me who is suffering."
"Doctor."
"No. Ask me. Out loud. Because we have been in this room every other Thursday for two and a half years and nobody has ever asked it, and I want to hear somebody say the words."
"Who is suffering," said Spock.
* *
"Four hundred and thirty people on this ship," said McCoy. "They have a captain they would follow into a star. Chris Pike has his ship and his legs. Gary Mitchell is alive. Elizabeth Dehner is alive. Nine of our own people are breathing tonight who are dead in the other history."
"And Jim Kirk is seventy-two years old in Brooklyn, by his own arrangement with Edith he is not to be asked and not to be left, and we have decided not to find out what he would say."
He looked at Spock. "So who is suffering?"
Nobody answered.
"Us," said McCoy. "The people in this room. And we are about to spend a man's whole life to cure it."
Scott put his glass down. McCoy looked around the room. "That is my argument. I have had it fourteen months. Break it for me, because I am going to help you anyway and I would like to know what that makes us."
Then it was quiet. For a considerable time.
"You are correct," said Spock.
*
He said it the way he read out an instrument. Flat, and in order.
"Your argument is sound. It is the strongest argument that has been made in this room and it cannot be answered on its own terms, and I have not been able to answer it in fourteen months either, and I have attempted it in writing on nine occasions.
"There is no aggregate case. There is no calculus in which this comes out right. If you sum the well-being of every living thing in this galaxy under both arrangements, the arrangement we are proposing to destroy is the better one, and it is not close, and I have run it."
McCoy had gone very still.
"Then why."
"Because I am not going to leave him there."
*
It landed in that room like a dropped tool.
"That is the reason," said Spock. "There is no other one left that I trust. He is on that street because I helped put him there. I have spent two years assembling better reasons in front of that fact."
"Your argument is sound. I am going to act against it knowingly. I am going to get him, and I am not going to call the choice clean."
*
Nobody moved.
"That's no' how this works," said Scott, eventually.
"Mister Scott."
"No, sir. Ye've just told a room full of people ye're doin' the wrong thing for the only honest reason there is." He picked his glass back up. "That's the first time in two years ye've told us anything at all. Ye'll no' get rid of us now."
McCoy was rubbing his face with both hands.
"God help us," he said. "He's finally said something true and it's the worst thing I ever heard."
"Doctor."
"I am in. I have been in since the first Thursday and every one of you knew it and I made you listen anyway." He picked up his glass. "But it goes on the record that I won. Somewhere. Some log, somewhere, in somebody's hand, it says Leonard McCoy was right and we did it regardless."
"It will be in mine," said Uhura.
"Then that's enough," said McCoy.
* *
And they drank, the four of them, and the two full glasses sat where they always sat.
It is the only meeting in thirty months at which nobody spoke about James Kirk at all.