"Are they alive."
He said it flatly and immediately, in the tone of a man who has been holding a question in his mouth for twenty minutes, and has decided to stop.
"All of them," said Spock.
"Names."
"Doctor McCoy has sickbay. Mister Scott has the engines, Lieutenant Uhura communications, Lieutenant Sulu the helm. Galloway is in security and has not lost a man since 2266. Brandt made lieutenant, junior grade, in March and is insufferable about it. Four hundred and thirty aboard, and no fatality in fourteen months."
Kirk had both hands over his mouth.
"Bones."
"Doctor McCoy is alive and in a foul temper. He ate alone in his office for the first eight months. He had decided it was all his doing, and that if he allowed himself any comfort at all there would be nobody left in the universe who was sorry."
"And now?"
"He was argued out of it on Starbase 11. It took five hours and he did not enjoy one of them, and he has been all right since."
James Kirk shut his eyes.
"That's him," he said. "That's him exactly. Thirty-eight years and he hasn't moved a degree." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Is he all right? Now. Today. Not the speech, Spock, the truth."
"He is all right," said Spock. "He is tired, and he is angry a great deal of the time, and he is not sleeping the way a man should, and he is all right. I would not tell you otherwise. I am aware of what it would cost you to be told otherwise by somebody with a schedule."
"No," said Kirk. "You wouldn't. That's why I asked you and nobody else." He almost laughed. "There isn't anybody else."
* *
"And they know," he said, after a while. "About me. All of them."
"Six of us know. We were inside the field when the world turned. The rest of the universe does not, and cannot, and Starfleet Command received my report and filed it."
"Filed it."
"Yes."
"Good," said James Kirk, and meant it, and Spock had not expected that and had to sit with it for a moment.
"Sir?"
"Six is right. Six is about right." He was looking at the traffic again. "You don't want eight hundred billion people carrying this. You want six. Six is a crew." He turned the hat over. "So what do they do with it? Six people remembering a man nobody's heard of. What's that look like on a Tuesday."
"On a Thursday," said Spock. "Every second Thursday at 2200, in Mister Scott's quarters. He pours six glasses. Two of them go in front of the security men, and neither man has ever touched his, and Mister Scott has not once failed to pour them. It was ordered stopped in the sixth week. We stopped for one cycle."
James Kirk did not say anything. Not for a while.
"Every second Thursday," he said.
"For thirty months."
"In an engineer's quarters."
"Yes."
"With two glasses nobody drinks."
"Yes."
And James Kirk put his hat over his face and held it there.
*
"How long has it been for you," he said, when he came out from under it.
"Thirty months, Captain."
Kirk nodded slowly, looking at the traffic.
"Thirty months," he said. "That's nothing, that's a posting. That's a bad year." He turned the hat over. "You know what I did on the second anniversary? Nothing. I peeled potatoes. It was a Tuesday."
"Captain."
"I'm not being cruel. I'm telling you something you need." He was not looking at him. "Thirty months, you've still got all of it. Every bit. You could tell me the color of the carpet in my quarters."
"Gray with a red weave. Two shades. There is a burn near the door."
"There is a burn near the door," said Kirk, and his voice went, and he had to stop and start again, and when he did he was almost steady. "See. That's what I mean. You've got that."
"And you do not."
"I stopped being able to hear you in about 1946."
The traffic went past on Flatbush Avenue.
"I can tell you what you said. Word for word, whole conversations. I never lost the words, the words are all still in there. There's just nothing behind them. I read them. I don't hear them." He turned the hat again. "And I lost Bones's face somewhere around the war. I want you to understand that. I've tried. In a chair, in the dark, on purpose, a couple hundred nights over thirty-eight years. I can get you an impression. Eyebrows. The way he held his shoulders when he was about to be insufferable. I can't get his face. I lost my best friend's face. I was awake the whole time it happened and I couldn't stop it."
Spock sat on a bench in Brooklyn. He did not say anything.
"So," said Kirk. "You've got twenty-four minutes and an eidetic memory. Give him back to me."
*
And so that is what they did with the next nine minutes of it.
Spock sat on a slatted public bench outside a laundry on Flatbush Avenue in the April of 1968, and described Leonard McCoy to James Kirk.
The two vertical lines between the brows. The set of the mouth in the half-second before he said something unforgivable. The scar on the back of the left hand, about the size of a grain of rice, from a specimen jar on Omicron Ceti III in 2267. The way he stood in a doorway with one shoulder against the frame, and would not come in until he had been asked twice. And the habit, when he was about to lose an argument, of pushing a stylus around a table with one finger.
"He does that."
"He does it constantly."
"He does that," said Kirk, and put his hand over his eyes.
Then Uhura. The lyre, and the carved wooden bird, and the chip in its tail. The precise way she said "Aye, sir," which was not the way anybody else on that ship said it. The Swahili in a corridor in 2267.
Then Scott. That took four sentences, and made him laugh out loud.
And then Spock stopped, because he had come to a thing he had not planned, and could not avoid, and he gave it to him anyway.
"Lieutenant Uhura has written down six hundred and forty entries."
Kirk took his hand away from his eyes.
"What?"
"Everything you ever said. She began the night it happened and she has not missed a week." Spock looked straight ahead. "She showed it to Doctor McCoy once. He asked her how many she could still hear. She said nine hundred."
James Kirk sat on a bench with his hat in his hands.
"She keeps the sentence," he said, "and she loses the voice."
"Yes."
"That's exactly it." He was crying again and doing nothing about it. "Thirty months and she's at six hundred and forty. I've had thirty-eight years and one notebook in a locked drawer. That's my archive. That's the whole thing."
* *
"Ask me something," said Spock.
"What?"
"You are spending them on me. Ask me something."
And James Kirk laughed, and wiped his face, and looked out at Flatbush Avenue for a moment, and then began, at last, to talk.