"Captain."
The old man did not look up. There was no reason he should have. It was a word in the air on Flatbush Avenue and it had belonged to somebody else for thirty-eight years, and it went past him the way the traffic did.
Spock moved into his light.
And James Kirk looked up.
He took his glasses off. He looked, put them back on, looked, and took them off again, and his hand was not steady, and he said, in a voice that came out of him wrong:
"No."
And he got up off that bench faster than a man of seventy-two has any business getting up off anything, and he did not look at Spock. He turned, and looked back down Flatbush Avenue toward Nostrand, at a building he could not see from there, at a second-floor window four blocks away.
"She's upstairs," he said. "She's upstairs. I left her twenty minutes ago. She was doing the crossword. Spock, she was doing the crossword."
And Spock did not understand for perhaps three seconds. And then he did, all at once, and it was the worst thing that had happened to him in two and a half years.
The man had asked a rock for four seconds at the end. And a door had opened.
The paper went out of his hands. He did not notice it go.
And then the old man took hold of Spock's sleeve with both hands, and it was not the grip of a man greeting anybody, and he said it very fast and very low, close in, the way a man says the only thing he has left:
"Don't take me away from her."
"Sir."
"I'll go. Whatever it is, I'll do it, I'll go wherever you want. I've been waiting thirty-eight years for somebody to come and tell me what the bill is and I'll pay it. Not that." His hands were shaking on the wool. "She's seventy years old, she does the crossword in pen, and there's nobody up there but her. Don't. Don't you take me away from her."
"I have not come to take you anywhere," said Spock.
Kirk's hands did not come off the wool.
"Nobody has died. Nothing has happened to anyone, on that street or on this one. I have not come to take you anywhere and I have not come to give you anything, and whatever you left upstairs this morning is exactly as you left it."
And Spock heard himself say it, and every word of it was true on the twelfth of April, 1968, and he did not permit himself to look at it any further than that.
* *
And then there were about six seconds in which nothing at all happened.
The man simply stood there. He had heard it, and he had understood it and his face did nothing whatever, and Spock had time to wonder whether he had been mistaken about everything, whether thirty-eight years does something to a person that cannot be undone by an afternoon, whether he had come three hundred years to be looked at politely by a stranger.
Then James Kirk said, "You called me Captain."
"Yes, sir."
And it came apart.
*
Thirty months for one of them. Thirty-eight years for the other.
Nobody had called him Captain since the twenty-second of November, 1930.
The word mattered more than the face. Faces had come back in dreams and vanished by morning. This was a voice he had lost, four feet away, refusing to disappear when he opened his eyes.
There was a witness. That was what took his legs.
*
He made a sound.
It came up out of him whole, and it was not quiet, and Spock had heard it once before, in a corridor on deck five in 2266, out of a woman who had just been handed a casualty notification.
His legs went. Spock caught him before he was halfway down and held him up with both arms, and an old man of seventy-two stood on a public sidewalk in Brooklyn in the middle of a Friday morning and wept the way children weep, without any dignity at all, without any management of it, his whole body going, his hat on the sidewalk where it had fallen and neither of them attending to it.
It went on.
Spock did not measure it, which was itself unusual. He knew only that it was somewhere past six minutes, because the woman salting the sidewalk outside the laundry with a coffee can had finished, and gone in, and come out again with a broom.
People stopped. It is a large city and a man weeping on a corner is not an event, but it went on long enough to become one, and two of them stopped. A man in a delivery apron asked whether the old fella was all right and whether he should call somebody. Spock said, without turning his head, that his friend had received news. The man said, ah, God love him, and went away. And that was the whole of the twentieth century's response to it.
And Kirk said, into the front of Spock's coat, over and over, in a voice that was hardly a voice at all:
"You're real. You're real. You're really here."
"Yes."
"Say it."
"I am here, Captain."
"Say the other thing."
"You are real," said Spock. "All of it happened. I was there through all of it and I have not lost one hour of it, and it happened, and you are not mad, and you never were."
And James Kirk put his forehead against a Vulcan's shoulder on Flatbush Avenue and let go of thirty-eight years.
*
He did not shield.
A touch telepath does not stand with both arms around a human being in that condition and receive nothing. He received all of it, in the two or three seconds before he understood what he had failed to do, and it came across not as thought but as weight, the way a thing arrives that has been carried a very long way by somebody who was not permitted to set it down. A roof in the rain. A telegram in a shop doorway. A coffin that weighed nothing at all. And under the whole length of it, like a wire, the flat unbroken hum of a man who has been alone in a room full of people for fourteen thousand days.
It is the one thing in a hundred and six years that he never described to any living being, in any language, including his own.
* *
"I'm sorry," Kirk said, eventually. "I'm sorry. Give me a minute. There's nobody I. Give me a minute."
"You have thirty-one minutes," said Spock, "and you may have all of them."
And James Kirk laughed, wetly, once, and it turned into something else halfway and he had to stop.
"Thirty-one minutes. God almighty, Spock, three hundred years and you brought a stopwatch."
"Yes," said Spock.
"Don't change." He sat down on the bench, hard, like a man whose legs have stopped being reliable. "Don't you dare change. Sit down. Sit down here."
Spock picked up the hat. He gave it to him, and sat down.