Spock asked at 2300 ship time, four hours after the man in Brooklyn had stopped laughing and gone to bed.
Christopher Pike had been awake for thirty-one hours, and he was standing at the port with his back to the room when Spock came in, and he did not turn around, and he spoke first.
"They sent us here to find out how this planet survived 1968."
"Yes, sir."
"We found out at four minutes past four this afternoon." He turned around. "It survived because a starship three hundred years out of its own century put a man's transporter beam in the wrong room and made him improvise. We are not observers, Commander. We are the answer to the question we were sent to ask. I have been standing here for seven hours trying to decide whether that is the most frightening thing anybody has ever told me, and I have decided that it is."
"Captain, I would like to request the surface excursion tomorrow morning."
"No."
It came out flat, and immediate, and without any interest in being discussed.
"Sir."
"No, Commander. We established it this afternoon. By direct observation. This ship is inside the history it was sent to look at. Every hour we stay is a variable. Every step anybody takes down there is a variable. I am not putting one more foot on that surface, and I am not arguing about it at eleven at night."
"That is correct, sir. I would not."
"Then we understand each other."
"No, sir," said Spock. "I do not believe we do."
* *
Pike stopped.
"There is one human being on the surface of that planet," said Spock, "whom it is safe to touch."
Pike turned round.
"There is one human being on that planet whom it is safe to touch." Spock did not raise his voice and he did not hurry it. "Doctor McCoy and I have spent two and a half years in every record the Federation holds, looking for James Kirk in the history of that world, and there is nothing. No patent, no company, no letter to a newspaper, no name on a list, and not one line in any index in any field. The record shows the woman had one son, born 1935, killed in Korea at eighteen, no children. The record does not connect that boy to him, because the record does not know he exists. Doctor McCoy found a Samuel George Kirk on a casualty list and put the two together, and I am satisfied that he is right. There is no descendant. There is no contribution. He has spent thirty-eight years being so careful that he has left no mark on the twentieth century of any kind whatever.
"Sir, you have just told me that this ship is a variable. That is accurate. He is not. He is the one object on that planet that history does not touch and cannot feel, because he has already been removed from it, and whatever I do down there tomorrow morning propagates into precisely nothing, forever."
The ready room was very quiet.
And Spock heard it. He heard all of it. In the air, in his own voice, a second after it had left him.
He had just stood in front of his commanding officer and made a case for being permitted to go and look at James Kirk, and the case was that James Kirk did not matter.
He did not withdraw it. He had no other. It was true. He stood there with it.
Christopher Pike sat down on the edge of the desk.
"Say the rest of it," he said.
"Sir?"
"You have given me a perfect argument. It is airtight, and it is correct, and I could not break it if I had a week. And you have not said one word about why you want to go." He folded his arms. "Say the rest of it, Commander."
Spock stood in the middle of a ready room, and did not speak for eleven seconds.
"I want to see him," he said.
* *
Pike understood. So did Spock.
Pike got up. He went to the intercom.
"Bridge. Have Mister Scott take us to a polar orbit and go dark. We are staying nineteen hours." He closed the channel. "Four hours on the surface. Alone. You are back on this ship by twelve fifteen local or I will break orbit without you, and I want you to believe that."
"I believe it, sir."
"Mister Spock."
"Sir."
"You have served under me for thirteen years," said Christopher Pike, "and that is the first thing you have ever asked me for."