New York City, April 1968
At ten minutes past eight the following morning, local time, on the twelfth of April, 1968, which was a Friday and the day after a nuclear device had come apart over the Atlantic for no reason that any newspaper on that planet could supply, Commander Spock beamed down alone into an alley off Duane Street in Manhattan, in an overcoat and a dark hat pulled low, with a communicator in the inside pocket, thirty-one dollars, most of which he would not spend, and four hours.
The City Clerk opened at nine. He stood in a doorway on Duane Street for fifty minutes, and watched the century go past.
That was not in the plan. He had allotted the fifty minutes as margin, and had intended to spend them reviewing the sequence. He reviewed nothing. He stood in a doorway and watched a city he had studied for eleven weeks turn out to be a place where people lived. A man sold newspapers out of a wooden box, and knew four of his customers by name. Two women argued about a bus. A boy went past on a bicycle far too large for him, standing on the pedals, with a fanatical disregard for the concept of braking, and Spock turned his head and followed him until he was out of sight, and could not afterward have said why.
* *
The clerk was perhaps sixty, and had a cardigan under his jacket, and a cold.
"Marriage registers, New York County, June of 1932," said Spock, in a sentence he had rehearsed for eleven weeks and delivered in a second and a half.
"Genealogy?"
"Yes."
"Everybody's doing it." He got off his stool. "Volume's heavy. Don't take it off the table."
Green cloth, forty centimeters across, a water stain up one corner from a leak in 1949 that the building had repaired, and never recorded. It smelled of dust, and old glue, and the inside of a room nobody visits.
There were nine hundred and forty of them that month. He went down the column with one finger. That was not necessary. He did it anyway.
And on a Saturday morning in the middle of the month, ninth of eleven that clerk had done before lunch, in a copperplate hand that a machine two hundred and sixty-four years later would look at and decline to read:
KIRK, JAMES TIBERIUS. KEELER, EDITH.
And below it, on the two ruled lines the law required, in blue ink, two signatures.
One of them he had never seen.
The other one he had read four hundred times. On status reports and requisitions, on nine commendations and two letters of condolence, on one appalling document in which the word necessary was misspelled four separate ways and every correction had been overruled in the margin, in capitals, by a man who could not spell it and would not be told.
Spock stood in the Municipal Building on Chambers Street with his finger a centimeter above a signature in a public register, and did not touch it, and did not move for a long moment.
The clerk went back to his stool and blew his nose.
*
"I need to locate a person living in Brooklyn. What is the procedure."
The clerk looked at him over the top of his glasses for about two seconds.
"You want a phone book," he said.
"Yes."
"Behind you. Shelf. Bring it back."
Eleven thousand names in six-point type. He ran a finger down a column and stopped.
KIRK JAMES T 1160 Nostrand Av BUckminster 2-4419
And Spock did not move again for some seconds, and the reason was not the address.
It was the number.
The man had a telephone. For thirty-five years any person on that planet with two coins could have lifted a receiver and asked an operator for BUckminster 2-4419, and James Kirk would have answered it, in his own voice, and said hello.
And nobody ever had.
At the door he stopped.
"Thank you," said Spock.
"Sure," said the clerk, and never thought about it again, and died in 1981, and was the only human being alive in that century who ever knowingly helped anybody find James Kirk.
*
The subway took forty-one minutes. It cost twenty cents. He stood the whole way, in a car with a dozen other people in it, under an advertisement for a brand of cigarette, and somewhere in the middle of Brooklyn the train came up out of the tunnel and ran above a street in the flat white light of an April morning. Spock looked out at four hundred roofs, and a water tower, and a schoolyard with children in it, and thought about nothing whatever, which had not happened to him in two and a half years.
* *
At twenty past eleven the street door of 1160 Nostrand Avenue opened and an old man came out.
He came down the steps one at a time, holding the rail. Brown overcoat. Hat. A paper bag under one arm. His hair was white, and had been cut by somebody who loved him and could not cut hair.
He was not tall.
Spock had been carrying a man of thirty-four for two and a half years. The man on the stoop had given two centimeters back to his own spine, and had given them back decades ago.
He turned east, and walked, slowly, in the way of a man who has nowhere to be and has had nowhere to be for two years, and has made his peace with it.
Spock followed him for four blocks.
He watched him hold a door for a woman with a pram and say something that made her laugh, and buy a paper, and count out coins, and refuse the change. Then the old man stopped outside a storefront that was in that year a shoe repair, and stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets for about four minutes, looking at nothing, and then walked on. Spock did not know what that was. It would be another month before he learned, on a plain of dead stone, in front of a wall of children.
And then the old man sat down on a bench outside a laundry, and unfolded his paper, and did not read it.
It was eleven thirty-four.
Spock crossed the street.