Chapter Forty-Nine

Kirk got up off the bench by himself. Spock moved to help and Kirk said, "Don't. Don't you dare," and got up on his own, and put his hat on, and squared it.

"Don't tell them you saw me."

"Captain."

"Don't tell them. Not Scotty. Not Uhura." He stopped. "Especially not Bones."

"Why not the doctor?"

"Because he'd come," said James Kirk.

And Spock, who had stood in a mess hall thirteen weeks earlier and given that man four true reasons why he must not, inclined his head.

They stood on the sidewalk.

"Spock."

"Sir."

"Is she going to be all right? Uhura. Six hundred entries and ninety voices." He was having difficulty. "Somebody needs to sit down with that girl."

"I will see to it."

"You won't. You'll mean to." Kirk almost smiled. "Get Bones to do it. Tell him it was your idea and let him fight you about it for a week and then he'll go."

"That is a better plan," said Spock.

"It's a very good plan," said James Kirk. "I used to be pretty good at those."

The old man put out his hand, palm forward, and his fingers would not part.

He looked down at them with an expression of enormous and entirely characteristic irritation. Then he took hold of them with his left hand and set them, one pair, and then the other, like a man setting a thing that has stopped working and that he fully intends to go on using.

And he held it up in the morning air on Flatbush Avenue, the way it had been held up at him once, ten feet away, on a street with a truck going up it, by a man who was going thin.

Spock raised his own hand. He set the fingers, which parted for him without any difficulty whatsoever, and held it up in the cool morning air, on Flatbush Avenue, in front of a laundry.

"Live long and prosper," he said.

He had said those words four thousand times. At ceremonies, at postings, at people he never thought of again before the end of the week. Not once had he said them to a man whose remaining life he had already decided to take. He heard the whole of that in his own voice as it left him and he did not take it back, because he meant it, and because both things were true at once and there is no instrument that holds them.

And then, because there were about nine seconds left of it, and there were never going to be any others:

"Jim."

It was the first time. It was, in the strictest accounting, the only time.

And James Kirk's face did something that Spock carried unchanged for a hundred and six years, and never got to the bottom of.

"I'm happy," he said.

That was the last thing he said to him.

Spock turned, and walked west, and at the corner he stopped, because he was not able to do otherwise, and turned around.

The old man was still standing in front of the bench with his hat in his hand and his coat open, three hundred years from everything, watching him go.

He raised one hand.

Spock raised his, and turned the corner, and the transporter took him at fourteen minutes past twelve.

Kirk came in at half past one with a paper he had not read and a bag of oranges he had bought for no reason.

Edith was at the kitchen table with the crossword, and a pencil, and her reading glasses down her nose, and she looked up.

"You've been crying."

"Wind off the avenue."

"There is no wind," said Edith Keeler, and looked at him for a long moment, and did not ask, because she had promised on a night in the rain in 1931 that she never would, and had kept it for thirty-seven years, and was not going to break it in a kitchen over a bag of oranges.

She got up. She put the oranges in the bowl. And on her way back past his chair she put two fingers on the back of his neck, and left them there rather longer than usual, and then sat down and asked him for a seven-letter word for a thing that comes back.

That evening he went down, and unlocked the drawer, and took out the black notebook.

He did not read it. He could have recited any line in it, and he did not open it past the first page, which he had written in 1936, and never revised.

THINGS I MUST NOT DO.

1. Do not tell anyone what you are.

2. Do not keep this notebook.

Thirty-two years. He had written entry two on the same evening as entry one, sitting in an empty room with a broken window, knowing perfectly well while the pen was moving that he was going to disobey it. And he had disobeyed it every day since, and it had never once occurred to him in all that time that there might come an evening when he would not have to.

He took it down to the basement.

The boiler had been failing since 1957. He had rebuilt it four times, and it was going to have to be replaced, and it was, at that hour, running, because he was the man who kept it running.

He opened the firebox with a rag.

A clothbound notebook does not burn quickly. It went in flat and lay there and did nothing for a moment, the way paper does. Then the cover curled and took, and he had to push it further in with the poker twice, and he stood in the heat with his hat still on.

He watched all of it. That mattered to him and he did not examine why. He had been the only witness to everything for thirty-eight years, and he was not going to look away from the last of it.

Then he shut the door, and checked the pressure, which was low, and wrote it on the card that hung on the nail beside the gauge, because the pressure was a real problem, belonging to a real building, and would still be a problem in the morning.

He did not need the other one any longer. That was all. A man who has been seen does not require a record.