He talked for seven minutes. Spock did not interrupt him once.
He talked about a boiler that had been failing since 1957, which he had rebuilt four times, and which was going to have to be replaced, and which was at present the largest unresolved problem in his life. He talked about a woman who wrote in books, in pencil, in the margins, arguing, and who still called him Tiberius when she wanted something, and had done since a courthouse step in 1932, and whom he had at some point around 1940 stopped wanting to cure of it.
There were eleven thousand radios in it somewhere, and the observation that the delight of a dead thing coming back to life under your hands does not diminish merely because the dead thing is a Philco.
A man on the second floor named Dominic Costello came into it, thirty-one now, with a wife, and a job at a bank, and a habit of calling in on Sundays, and Kirk did not say what he had done for him.
Then a girl called Anna Kosinski, and nothing else about her at all, and Spock did not ask.
And then he said, "There was a boy."
And stopped.
And started again.
He told him about Sam. Not all of it, and not easily: the name, and the rocket ships drawn with far too much fire coming out of the back of them, and Korea, and the eighteen years he had been given, and the fifteen since in which he had not said the name out loud to anybody but her. He did not perform it. He set it down a fact at a time, the way a man sets down something he has carried too far.
"Samuel George Kirk," said Kirk. "Ninth of April, 1935. He was real."
"I will remember him," said Spock.
And James Kirk put both hands over his face for a while, and then took them away, and looked at his first officer, and said:
"Then there'll be one."
"Sir?"
"One person. Somewhere. Who knows those forty years happened." His voice had gone very quiet. "That's all the notebook was ever for. Discipline. I always told myself it was discipline, a man keeping proper records because that's what he was trained to do." He was almost smiling. "And you came three hundred years and sat down on a bench. I don't need the drawer."
* *
And then he said one more thing, quietly, to the traffic, in the tone of a man clearing an account he had not intended to open.
"There's another one."
"Sir?"
"In your century." He was turning the hat over. "A boy. He would have been about six the week I walked through that door. His mother is a scientist and she asked me to stay away from him, and I did what she wanted, because she was right, and because it was easier, and I have never decided which of those two it actually was."
Spock did not say anything at all.
"I never met him. I know his name and I know his face out of a photograph I had no business having, and that's the whole inventory." He set the hat on his knee. "So there are two. One I was not permitted to raise and one I was not able to keep. And I got eighteen years with Sam, which is eighteen more than I had coming, and I have never once been able to work out whether that makes me the luckiest man who ever lived or the other thing."
"Does the doctor know?"
"Bones knows. Bones has always known." Kirk almost smiled. "And he never once asked me about it. He would deny that under oath."
"What is his name."
And James Kirk sat on a bench outside a laundry on Flatbush Avenue and said it out loud for the first time in thirty-eight years.
"David."
Then he shook his head, once, and would not say anything else about him, and Spock did not ask.
*
"There's a thing nobody is ever going to know," he said. "And you're the only man alive I can hand it to, so sit still."
"Captain."
"I saved her." He was looking at the traffic. "That's the part anybody would understand, if there were anybody to tell. I put my arm out and pulled a woman out of a road, and she's upstairs right now doing a crossword in pen. That's a good story. That's the whole story, if you stop there."
He turned the hat over once.
"Then I spent the next seven months taking her apart."
Spock did not say anything at all.
"She had a movement. Two hundred men in a basement on Twenty-first Street and she was going to grow it, and she was right about every last thing in it except the year, and the year was going to cost this planet the war." He was still not looking at him. "So I went to work on her."
"Captain."
"Eleven minutes in a kitchen the first time, and I was sick in the alley afterward. Then a roof in the rain. Then four months of it, forty-one different ways in, until I found the one that held. And by the summer of thirty-one she'd shut the mission down herself, and I have spent thirty-eight years telling myself she thanked me for helping her see it."
He stopped for a moment.
"She didn't. She stood in the rain and told me to my face she did not believe one word of it, and closed the mission anyway, because it was me asking. I prefer my version. I find I prefer it most at about three in the morning."
"Captain."
"Same hand, Spock. Seven months apart. I saved her life and then I took away the reason she had one, and I did it with nothing but true things, one at a time, until there was nothing left standing." He put the hat flat on his knee. "And then I married her. And I've been eating supper across a table from that woman for thirty-five years while she reads to me out of the margins of library books, and every so often she says something about the old place on Twenty-first, and I sit there and I finish my supper."
"Does she know."
"She knows I did it. She worked it out on a roof in nineteen thirty-one and she came down the stairs at midnight and married me anyway, which is the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me and I have been shot at by Klingons." He almost smiled and it did not hold. "She doesn't know why. Thirty-seven years and she has never asked once. That was the bargain and she's kept it better than I have."
The traffic went past on Flatbush Avenue.
"So when you go back," said James Kirk, "don't let anybody tell it as the other thing. Don't let them say I saved Edith Keeler. That's about a third of it and it's the easy third."
*
And then he said it.
"I'm happy, Spock."
He did not say it the way a man makes a report. He said it looking straight at him, with his hat in his hands, and his eyes wrecked, and a laundry behind him, in the flat spring light of a Friday morning in the middle of the twentieth century.
"I want you to hear all of it and I want you to take it back, because I've had thirty-eight years to work out whether it was true and I'm not guessing. I didn't get the ship. I've thought about the ship every single day and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. There has not been one day. But I got a kitchen, a boiler, a woman who writes in books, a boy who drew rockets, eleven thousand radios, and I would do it again. I would do it again tomorrow, and I would not have to think about it.
"I'm happy."
Spock looked at him.
"Now stop looking at me like that," said James Kirk.
* *
Spock had the sentence. He had carried it for eleven weeks and four days: We have a plan.
Under it sat the dead layer, the bridge, and the knowledge that restoring one life would erase another. He had come three hundred years to hand that knowledge back.
He opened his mouth, and James Kirk looked at him.
"Don't."
Spock stopped.
"Captain."
"No. Don't." Kirk had not moved. "I've watched your face for twenty minutes and I know that face. I've been wearing it since 1930." He turned the hat over in his hands. "I know exactly what a man looks like when he's got something in him he thinks the other person is owed, and he is about to hand it over, and it is going to make him feel better and it is going to take the other person's legs off. I've stood in that spot, on a roof, in the rain, with a woman four feet away from me. I know what it costs to say it and I know what it costs not to."
"You do not know what it is."
"No. And I've got eleven minutes left with you and I'm not going to spend one of them on it." He put his hand on Spock's arm, which he had not done once in two years aboard a starship, and left it there. "Whatever you have got, and whatever it is going to do, I am going to guess that you have looked at it from every side for a long time and that it is the right thing and that it is going to cost you everything you have. That is the only kind of thing you would ever have crossed three hundred years to tell me.
"So do it. Whatever it is. And don't make me carry it, because I've carried one of these for thirty-eight years and I wouldn't put it on a dog."
The traffic went past.
"That is not an absolution," said Spock. His voice was not entirely level and he did not attempt to correct it. "You do not know what you are giving me leave to do."
"No," agreed James Kirk. "But I know you."