Months Twenty-Six to Twenty-Nine
The order came in the routine traffic on an ordinary morning. Christopher Pike read it twice and called the senior staff to the briefing room.
"Historical research. Ours." He put the padd face down on the table, which he did not usually do. "Command has a year on Earth they cannot account for. The planet came within a few weeks of ending itself and did not, and nobody in three hundred years has established why. They want a ship in orbit with the recorders running. Observation only."
Nobody said anything.
"Target year is 1968."
* *
Spock did not move.
He was aware of not moving in the way a man is aware of holding his breath, and he sat with his hands folded and worked it, which took less than a second and which he had not asked for.
James Kirk had gone into the winter of 1930 at the age of thirty-four.
In the April of 1968 he would be seventy-two.
There was no record of his death anywhere in the Federation, because there was no record of him anywhere in the Federation. A woman had closed a mission on Twenty-first Street in the summer of 1931, and married a man the century had not troubled to write down, and a son had died on a hill in Korea in 1953, and after that the record simply stopped having anything to say.
Seventy-two. Which meant probably.
Which is the worst word in any language, and Spock turned it over at that table and found it did not improve with handling.
"Mister Spock. Feasibility."
"The maneuver is sound, Captain. I will have the figures by eighteen hundred."
*
McCoy waited forty minutes. Then he put both hands flat on a table in the mess and said it.
"I want to look at him."
Nobody answered.
"Not speak to him. Look at him. Stand across a street and look at what we are about to spend, because a man ought to have to see the thing he is signing for."
"Or he'd be in the ground," said Scotty.
"Or he'd be in the ground, and I would like to know which."
Uhura had not touched her food. Galloway, by the door, was looking at the table.
"No," said Spock.
*
He gave four reasons, all true. They had no address. Finding Kirk could consume the entire mission. If they did find him, they had nothing kind to say: either they told a seventy-two-year-old man that they meant to reach behind his life and remove it, or they stood in front of him and let him work out that they had come only to look.
Worse, any irregularity could put the crew under scrutiny before they took the Enterprise to the quarantined planet. One flag in the wrong record and there would be no Guardian, no bridge, no second attempt.
McCoy counted the arguments off on one finger. When Spock finished, he stopped. "You are right," he said. "Damn you."
* *
There was a fifth reason, and he did not give it.
He intended to go alone.