"Who's got the chair."
He asked it lightly, in the manner of a man who has decided some time in advance not to mind the answer, and Spock was not deceived by it for a moment, and gave him the answer straight.
"Captain Christopher Pike."
And James Kirk went very still on a bench outside a laundry on Flatbush Avenue.
Kirk put a hand flat on the slats of the bench.
"Christopher Pike has commanded the Enterprise for fifteen years. He is in orbit above this street at present. He is the man who gave me the four hours, and he gave them to me knowing precisely what he was giving and to whom."
"Fifteen years," said Kirk.
"Yes, sir."
"Fifteen. So he never left her." He had put the hat down on the slats beside him and both his hands had gone flat on his knees, which was a thing he did on a bridge when he was about to be quite certain about something. "He never took the fleet captaincy. Never took a class of cadets out on some Class J that was twenty years past the yard."
"No."
"There was never a baffle plate."
"There was not," said Spock. "And he is not in the chair."
A bus went by, and then a long gap, and neither of them said anything for some time.
"I sat with that man for an hour, eleven weeks before I went through that portal," said James Kirk. His voice was not doing what he intended and he let it go on failing. "I couldn't hold his eye. I told myself it was the machine. It wasn't the machine. It was that I had his ship."
"I am aware," said Spock.
"You were there."
"I was there. I stood at the door and did not come in, because you asked me not to, and you did not tell me why, and I did not ask."
James Kirk laughed at that, once, with no humor in it at all, and then stopped, and Spock watched him work it. It took about four seconds. He had seen it take longer on easier problems.
"Then I did two," said Kirk.
"Sir?"
"I have spent thirty-eight years telling myself that what I bought was one woman and a kitchen." He was looking straight down the avenue at nothing. "I bought Chris Pike a body."
"That is correct," said Spock.
Kirk shook his head slowly, and then stopped, and Spock watched him take it apart again, and put it back together in a shape he liked better.
"No. Not all of it." He was almost angry about it, in the way of a man correcting his own work. "He was always going to end up on Talos. That was coming either way, and he is happy there, and I know that because I signed the order myself and I have never regretted an hour of it." He turned the hat over. "What I bought him was the four years in between. That is all. Four years of his own legs and his own ship instead of a corridor on a training vessel and a year in a box."
"That is a considerable purchase," said Spock.
"It's not nothing," agreed James Kirk. "Four years is a long lease."
"Does he know?"
"He knows there was another world and that he had a different place in it. He has never asked me what the place was, and I have never told him, and I do not believe he intends to ask."
"Don't tell him."
"Captain."
"I mean it." Kirk had turned to look at him. "There's nothing in it for him but a debt he can't pay and would kill himself trying to. Let him fly the ship. He earned her twice and he only knows about the once."
"Yes, sir," said Spock.
And Spock sat on a public bench in Brooklyn and said nothing else at all, because there was nothing available to him that was both true and sayable.
In eleven days he intended to give the four years back. The Class J vessel, and the baffle plate, and the delta rays, and the chair. And after that, Talos, and a woman called Vina, and a life in a city that does not exist, in which Christopher Pike is whole and will never be in any pain again.
Spock had carried him to it himself. He had committed mutiny to do it, and stood a hearing for it, and he remembered every hour of the whole business in a world that had since been rubbed out.
So there was a sentence available to him on that bench, and it was this. Christopher Pike ends happy. It was entirely true. He had witnessed it. And he found, sitting there with his hands on his knees, that he had been holding onto it since eleven o'clock that morning, and had not put it down once.
He had spent eleven weeks in contempt of an instrument for finding true reasons on the ground and picking them up, and he did not recognize it in his own hands for another nine hours.
* * *
"Why are you here."
"Sir?"
"You didn't come for me." Kirk was turning the hat over in his hands and looking at the traffic and not at him, which Spock understood to be a kindness offered in both directions. "You've got a stopwatch and a coat that's two years off and you came out of a doorway like a man working a schedule. Somebody sent you. So tell me what a starship's doing in 1968, and start at the top, because I've had thirty-eight years of people not telling me things and I've lost my taste for it entirely."
So Spock told him. The order, the year Command could not account for, the orbit. The beam intercepted at 0940 and the man in the dark suit who had been surprised for a second and a half. The launch, and the count, and a warhead that came apart on purpose at a height where the sky stops being blue.
It took him four minutes. James Kirk sat on a bench outside a laundry with his hat in his hands, and did not interrupt once.
"Yesterday," he said.
"Yesterday afternoon."
"Yesterday afternoon at four o'clock."
"Four minutes past."
And Spock watched him work it, the way he had watched him work a thing across a bridge two hundred times, the eyes going still and slightly to the left.
"I saw that," said James Kirk. "I watched that on the news last night. Cronkite. Seven o'clock." He put a hand flat on the slats of the bench. "Spock. I did not know what it was."
"No, sir."
"You don't understand what I'm telling you. I haven't not known a thing since the twenty-second of November, 1930. Not one. Thirty-eight years of sitting in that room knowing what's coming down the pipe before the man on the screen does. And last night, for about two hours, I sat there like everybody else on this block and I had no idea what happened in my own sky. Best night I've had in ten years. Edith laughed until she cried. We laughed at a nuclear explosion, Spock. We could not stop."
He turned, and looked at him for the first time since he had sat down.
"And it was you."
"It was the ship, sir."
"It was you." He was smiling. His face was wrecked. There was nothing to be done about either. "Thirty-eight years and the one present anybody ever sent me came out of a transporter room. I want you to know that before anything else gets said this morning. You gave me a night off. You didn't know you were doing it and I didn't know you'd done it and it's the only present anybody's handed me since 1930 and I'm keeping it."