New York City, April 1968
Nothing that happened in the first eight hours was in anybody's plan.
They came out of the maneuver in a standard orbit at 0900 on the eleventh of April with recorders running, and a mission profile that said observation, and nothing else. Inside forty minutes the transporter had intercepted a beam of a power and a range that had no business existing anywhere in that solar system, and there was a man in a dark suit standing on the pad.
He was surprised. Spock never found a satisfactory way to put that in a report, and it mattered more than anything else that happened that day. The man was not alarmed, and not frightened, and not, in any sense Spock could measure, at a disadvantage, and he was surprised, in the flat unhappy manner of a professional who has just discovered an obstruction that should not exist.
And then he looked at Spock for about a second and a half.
At the ears, and then at the eyebrows, and then at the ears again. And something behind his face closed. He stopped being surprised, and said, in the voice of a man revising a schedule, that he supposed they were from somewhere considerably further along than this and that they had picked an extremely poor afternoon for it.
What followed took eleven minutes. Spock never wrote a satisfactory account of that either. A man who would not explain himself. A young woman who typed very badly, and talked without pause, and who turned out, in the event, to be the only person in the room who did the necessary thing at the necessary moment. A cat. A launch, out of a range in the south, with a warhead on the top of it. A count.
And at four minutes past four in the afternoon, over the Atlantic, at a height where the sky has stopped being blue, a nuclear device came apart on purpose.
Pike ran it beautifully. He ran everything beautifully.
* * *
Four blocks from a bench on Flatbush Avenue, at seven o'clock that evening, an old man sat down in front of a nineteen-inch Zenith he had repaired six times himself and watched Walter Cronkite tell him about it.
He had been listening to that man for years, and had heard him say a great many things, some of which James Kirk had known were coming and had sat and endured in advance. And one of which, on a Friday afternoon in November of 1963, he had known about for thirty-three years, and had gone out, and walked in the cold for two hours rather than be in the room for.
This one he did not know.
That was all. A detonation, high over the Atlantic, at a height nobody would confirm. Governments declining to comment. Observatories with plates they could not explain. No damage, no injuries, and no explanation.
And James Kirk sat forward in his chair with his hands on his knees, and did not know what it was.
He had not had that in thirty-eight years. Not once. Not once. There had been Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Korea, thirteen days in October with a swallowed coin in his chest and the whole of it laid out ahead of him like a road. He had never once, in all that time, been permitted the ordinary condition of every other human being on that continent, which is to look at a screen, be told a thing, and simply not know.
He was frightened, which was correct. And underneath the fright, in a place he could not have defended to anybody, he was so happy he could hardly sit still.
Edith looked up from her mending.
She looked at him for a while.
"You don't know what it is," she said.
"No."
She put the mending down in her lap.
In thirty-five years of marriage she had watched this man receive news. She had watched him receive it the way a man receives a bill he had budgeted for, quietly and without surprise, sitting very still, and she had learned to read him the way you read weather, and in all that time she had not seen his face do what it was doing at this moment.
"Jim," said Edith Keeler. "You have no idea."
"None," he said. "Not the first idea in the world."
And she began to laugh, and put her hand over her mouth, and could not stop, and he started too. The two of them sat in a front room in Brooklyn on the eleventh of April, 1968, at four minutes past seven in the evening, laughing helplessly at a nuclear detonation, because for one night out of fourteen thousand nights the man was in the dark like everybody else, and it was the finest present the century ever gave him.
"You have no idea," she said again, wiping her eyes.
"Not the first idea in the world."
"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's lovely."