Brooklyn, July 1969
They put the television on the good table, and moved the good table into the middle of the room, and there was nobody in the apartment but the two of them, and it was enough, because it had been enough for a long time.
It was a Zenith. Black and white. Nineteen-inch screen. He had repaired it six times himself, and it ran better than it had any right to, and it was the one thing in the house he would not let her throw out.
It was close and airless. Every window was open. Down the block a dozen radios and a dozen televisions all carried the same broadcast, so that the whole hot street seemed to breathe with a single voice, and the stoops were empty, because everyone was inside, watching.
He had known the date for thirty-nine years. He had written it down in 1932 on a sheet of paper in a lawyer's safe on Court Street, item ten of eleven, and burned it in a kitchen stove in 1942, and never once forgotten it. He had thought about this night for four decades, and believed that when it came he would feel something enormous.
And it came. And it was a small gray picture on a nineteen-inch screen, and a man came down a ladder very slowly. The picture was terrible, almost nothing, a ghost in a white suit on a gray field. And a voice came from a quarter of a million miles away and said a sentence that somebody had plainly worked on.
And James Kirk did not feel anything enormous. He felt something small, and precise, and it went in just under the sternum:
It is the wrong ship. It is the wrong ship and the wrong century, and there are three of them instead of four hundred and thirty, and they have gone a quarter of a million miles instead of nine light years. And they are going to put a flag on it. A national flag. On the moon. And in a few days they will come home, and there will be a few more, and then it will be over, and nobody will go back for fifty years. And it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And Sam should have lived to see it.
He sat in a chair by the window in Brooklyn, seventy-three years old, and wept, silently, without moving, without making a sound.
Only Edith moved. She got up out of her chair and crossed the room and stood beside him and put her hand on the back of his neck. Two fingers. The way she had done it for thirty-eight years. She did not say anything.
He put his hand up and held her wrist.
"We went," he said. Very quietly.
"I know."
"Edith. We went."
"I know. You told me we would. In 1932. Item ten." Her hand tightened. "You were early. That is all that was ever wrong with you."
And they sat a while, the two of them, in the light of a small gray moon on a nineteen-inch screen, in a room that had held, once, a boy who drew rocket ships with far too much fire coming out of the back and signed his name to them in enormous careful capitals. The room was quiet now, and would stay quiet, and they did not speak of him, because they never did, because there was nothing to say that the silence was not already holding for them.