"IT IS NOT A CORRECTION," said the Guardian of Forever.
"No," said Spock.
"IT IS A READING."
"Yes."
The wind came across the plain in silence, as it had two years ago, as it had for a hundred and twelve million years.
There were seven of them standing in front of the ring: Spock, McCoy, Scott, Uhura, Galloway, Ensign Brandt, and a starship captain who had brought his own ship here against every standing order, knowing precisely what it would cost him, and had done it, by his own account, because he had found that he could not do otherwise.
"I HAVE BEEN WAITING," said the Guardian, "FOR TWO OF YOUR YEARS, FOR SOMEONE TO ASK ME THAT."
"You could have told us," said McCoy.
"NO. IF I TELL YOU WHAT TO ASK, I AM NOT A DOOR. I AM A HAND ON YOUR BACK. I WILL NOT DO IT."
"Then tell me why it is permitted," said Spock. "You will not alter a lived hour. And yet you will let us stand inside one and pull a relay."
"BECAUSE YOU WILL NOT BE ALTERING A LIVED HOUR," said the Guardian. "THE HOUR YOU MEAN TO ENTER IS NOT LIVED. IT WAS UNMADE WHEN YOUR CAPTAIN CHOSE THE WOMAN. A DEAD LAYER IS A RECORD, AND A RECORD MAY BE READ. YOU FIVE NEVER LEFT THE OLD WORLD. YOU STOOD IN MY FIELD WHEN IT TURNED, AND A PIECE OF EACH OF YOU IS STILL FASTENED TO WHAT WAS. THIS IS NOT A SECOND WISH. IT IS AN OLD DEBT THAT WAS NEVER PAID."
Spock inclined his head.
"Show us the layer beneath," he said.
And the surface of the ring clouded, the way a window clouds in winter, from the inside, all at once.
* *
They had braced for a bridge. What they got was an apartment.
It was small, and warm, and on an upper floor. Late afternoon light came slanting through a window with an iron fire escape beyond it and lay in a long gold bar across a rug that had been good once. There were bookshelves on every wall, floor to ceiling, badly built and overloaded, sagging in the middle like tired shoulders. A radiator ticked.
An old man sat by the window in a brown jacket with his back to them, reading. He was reading slowly, with a strip of newspaper for a bookmark held ready in his left hand, and the light was on the side of his face and they could see nothing but white hair, badly cut, and the corner of a jaw.
And then a woman came in from another room with two cups of tea. She was perhaps seventy. Her hair was gray and pinned up and coming down at the back the way hair does at the end of a long day. She moved through that room the way people move through rooms they have lived in for decades, without looking, her hip knowing the corner of the table before she got to it.
She set one cup down at the old man's elbow and said something they could not hear. And as she passed behind his chair she put two fingers on the back of his neck, briefly, without breaking stride, without either of them acknowledging it in any way.
*
Leonard McCoy turned around and walked eleven paces out onto the plain and stood with his back to all of them. Nobody went after him.
"That's her," said Uhura.
"Yes," said Spock.
Christopher Pike stood at the front, quite still, and looked at an old man in a chair by a window.
"Is that him?"
"That is Captain James T. Kirk. He is seventy-four years old. He commanded this vessel for two years and has spent the last forty repairing radios."
Pike did not move for some time. "He looks happy."
Spock did not answer.
"Spock. He looks happy."
"Yes," said Spock. "He does."
And on the other side of four hundred years and one impossible fracture, the old man put the strip of newspaper into his book, and closed it, and set it on the sill. And reached, without looking, for the hand of the woman standing beside him. And she gave it to him, without looking either, the way you hand a thing to a person who has stood in the same place for forty years.
"Close it," said Pike.
"Sir?"
"Close it, Commander. Right now." His voice had not changed. "Because I have been standing here ninety seconds, and I have already started building an argument for leaving him there. And it is a good argument. And I want that window shut before I finish it."
"Wait," said Uhura. The portal had begun to cloud. "Sir, wait. Don't close it. Turn it. Show us the room."
"Lieutenant..."
"Show us the room, sir."
And the Guardian of Forever, without being asked twice, turned.
*
It was a wall.
The wall of an ordinary front room in an ordinary apartment in Brooklyn in the spring of 1970, with bookshelves floor to ceiling, sagging in the middle. Astronomy, a great deal of it. Mathematics, far beyond the century, annotated and argued with. Medicine, a whole shelf, the spines broken on every one.
And in every gap between the books, and over them, and pinned directly to the plaster where the shelves ran out:
Drawings. A child's. All of them a child's, and all of them old, the crayon gone chalky with the years. Crayon suns with faces. A purple horse. A rocket ship with an enormous amount of fire coming out of the back, drawn by somebody about six. A single stick family under a rainbow, three figures, and one of them very tall and given, with tremendous care, a tiny scribble of white hair.
Every one of them signed, in the enormous, laborious, triumphant capitals of a child who has just discovered that his name belongs to him and means to make full use of the fact. The same name, over and over, on every one. SAM.
And photographs. A wedding in 1932, a woman in a blue dress with a badly sewn collar, laughing at something outside the frame. A boy of about twelve in a baseball uniform, scowling. A young man of seventeen in a uniform that was not a baseball uniform, grinning, his cap at an angle his father would have made him fix. And, framed and alone on the shelf where the others clustered, a folded triangle of flag behind glass, and beside it a single telegram, and beside that a photograph of a bare brown hillside somewhere very far away that no one in that room but the old man could have named.
*
Nobody on that plain said anything for a long time.
"How many," said Christopher Pike.
Spock could not answer.
"Commander. How many."
"None, sir," said Spock. And because that was not an answer a man could leave hanging in the air, he gave the rest of it, in the flat voice he kept for the things that cost him most. "We looked. Doctor McCoy and I, for the better part of two years, in every record the Federation holds. There is no James Kirk anywhere in the history of this world. There is a woman who ran a mission on Twenty-first Street and then, in the summer of 1931, walked away from it, and married a man of whom the record knows nothing at all, not where he was born nor where he came from, and kept a quiet house in Brooklyn for forty years. They had one child. A son. He is on that wall. His name was Samuel Kirk, and he was killed in Korea in the July of 1953, at the age of eighteen, and he left no children. The line ends with him. There is no descendant. There is no contribution. There is nothing down there that the history books will miss, and nothing they will feel when it is gone. We made certain of it. It is the only mercy in this entire undertaking, and it is a terrible one."
The wind went past in silence.
"And when we do this," said Uhura.
"THEY WILL NOT HAVE BEEN."
*
Leonard McCoy sat down on the ground. He did it without any particular drama. He simply stopped standing, and sat down on a rock on a dead world, and put his hands over his face.
"His name is Sam," he said.
Nobody spoke.
"I knew before we ever ran a record. He had a brother named Sam, back where we come from, back up the line, and he loved him past all sense, and I always knew that if that man ever had a son he would give him that name and dare the world to say a word about it. So there is a Sam Kirk down there. And he grew up in that apartment, and drew those rockets, and put on that uniform, and his father knew the shape of every war on the whole planet and could not tell him the one thing that would have kept him home. And the boy went, and got himself killed sixteen days before it ended. And his father did not weep, because his father had run out of that a long way back."
"He is nineteen years in the ground down there, and his mother and his father are old, and they are alive this afternoon, in that apartment, in the light. And in about six hours they are not going to have been."
*
"Doctor," said Spock.
"Don't."
"Doctor, I am going to say something you will not want to hear, and I am going to say it anyway, because it needs to be in the air of this place before we do this, and I will not permit any of us to do it while looking at a wall."
He turned around and faced them.
"That old man, and the woman, and the boy on that wall are not the cost. They are one line in it. There are three million four hundred thousand people alive on Eminiar this afternoon who will walk into a disintegration chamber when we are finished, and I have not seen their faces, and there is no wall with their drawings on it." He was quiet a moment, and looked at the wall. "It is not a scale. You cannot weigh three faces you have seen against three million strangers you have not, and read the result off the beam, because the instrument is broken, and it has always been broken. I want that understood before we do this. And then I do not want it said again."
He turned back to the portal.
"I am not going to pretend I am doing this for Eminiar. I would be lying, and you would know it. I am doing it because the other world is not true. It is good, and it is real, and it exists only because one man walked out of history and held a door shut for forty years. And I find I cannot leave him there to hold it. That is all the honesty I have. It is not very much."
*
Nyota Uhura stood looking at the wall.
"He looks happy," she said.
"Lieutenant."
"I am the one who is going to do it," she said. "I am the one who is going to walk down that corridor and put my hand on that relay. Not you. Not the doctor. Me. So I want to look at him first. The way he is now, before I take it. Show me the old man in the chair."
And the Guardian of Forever, without a word, showed her the old man in the chair.
She looked for eleven seconds. An old man in a brown jacket in a chair by a window in the sunlight, a closed book on his knee, his head tipped back, laughing at something his wife had said from the other room, wholly and simply happy, in the last afternoon of the only life in which he had ever been permitted to stop.
"All right," said Nyota Uhura. Her face did not change. "Close it. I have seen him. I will carry him. Let us go to work."
* *
Christopher Pike stood in front of a ring of stone on a dead world with his hands at his sides for a long moment, then took a breath and let it out.
"All right," he said. "Show us the bridge."