He went to his quarters at 2140 and opened a file, and it was eleven weeks old before anyone on that ship knew it existed.
* *
The first thing in it was a line from a records index compiled in 2196, when a clerical program digitized nine million New York City vital records, and did not distinguish between them.
KEELER, EDITH. Marriage. New York County. June 1932. Spouse field blank.
McCoy had found that line in the fourth month and reported it accurately, which was that the record had nothing to say about the man. Spock went back to it in the second week and opened the source metadata underneath, which nobody had done.
The field was not missing. It was blank. The program had been unable to resolve the clerk's handwriting, and had entered nothing rather than guess, and the review flag it raised had sat in a queue in the twenty-second century for a decade, and been closed unread.
A man had stood at a counter and given his true name, and three hundred years later a machine had looked at it and been unable to read it.
Spock enlarged the scan, and looked at the hand himself, for some time, and concluded that it was legible to a reader with sufficient patience and no deadline.
He noted that he would have to go and read it.
* *
He established that the 1932 marriage register still existed in the Municipal Building on Chambers Street and that anyone could ask to see it. Then, because he was incapable of leaving the next question alone, he located the cemetery records for Kings County as well. He did not write the word grave.
The rest he prepared with professional exactness: a street plan of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, subway routes and fares, period currency, an overcoat, and a hat selected for one reason he did not pretend was practical. He built the walk in the computer until he could make Chambers Street, the subway, and Nostrand Avenue inside four hours.
Only after that did he understand what he had done in the mess hall. He had given McCoy four true reasons why nobody should go looking for James Kirk, watched an honest man accept them, and then gone to his quarters and planned the trip himself.
The method was familiar. Kirk had discovered it in a basement kitchen: a true objection can be used like a lie if the person offering it already knows he intends to act outside it. Spock sat with that.