The transporter room of the Enterprise smelled the way it had always smelled, of ozone and floor polish and, faintly, of the coffee somebody on beta shift kept illegally in a locker under the console.
Five people materialized on the pad. And Christopher Pike was standing in front of them.
He was leaning on the console with his arms folded, in gold, his hair going gray at the temples, weathered and easily impatient, and he was alive, and he was standing, and he was fifty-two years old, and there was not a mark on him.
Montgomery Scott made a noise.
"Report," Pike said.
Nobody said anything.
"Somebody report. You've been down there nine hours, my sensors have been returning nonsense the whole time, and I'd like to know what I'm looking at before I write it up."
Spock did not move off the pad.
"Mister Spock." Pike straightened. "Are you injured?"
"No, sir."
"Then get off my transporter and tell me what happened down there."
Spock stepped down, slowly, and stood in front of a man who had been dead to him for eleven months, and looked at him. Pike frowned.
"Spock?"
"Captain," said Spock. "Where is Captain Kirk?"
Pike's frown deepened. "Who?"
There is a particular sound a room makes when nobody in it is breathing.
"Sir," said Uhura. "Captain James Kirk. The captain of this ship."
Pike looked at her. "Lieutenant," he said, not unkindly, "I've been the captain of this ship for thirteen years."
* *
Doctor Leonard McCoy sat on the edge of a biobed in his own sickbay for an hour and eleven minutes without moving.
It was his sickbay. That was the obscene part. Every instrument was where he had left it. The diagnostic panel over bed three still had the flicker he had been complaining about for six months and Scotty had been promising to fix for five. His coffee cup was on the desk, his initials scratched into the ceramic with a laser scalpel in a fit of pique in 2266, because somebody in engineering kept taking it.
His name was on the roster. His service record was intact. He had graduated Ole Miss, been divorced, had a daughter named Joanna, and come aboard this ship in 2266. Under Captain Christopher Pike. There was a commendation in his file, signed by Pike, dated four months ago, for his work during an outbreak on Ariannus.
He remembered none of it.
He remembered a man named Jim.
He got up eventually and went to the wall panel and typed in a name.
NO RECORDS FOUND.
He typed it again, letter by letter.
NO RECORDS FOUND.
He typed it a third time, and stood with his hand flat on the panel, and read those three words for a long time. Then he went into his office and closed the door and sat down and put his head in his hands and did not come out for four hours.
* *
At the end of the four hours he came out and did the only thing he could think of to do. He opened a medical file.
PATIENT: KIRK, JAMES T.
There was no such patient. The system generated the file anyway, because the system did not care, and it gave him a blank form with a blinking cursor, and Leonard McCoy sat down and started typing.
Blood type: AB-negative. Rare. Two donors on the ship and I am one of them.
Allergy: retinax V. Cannot use it. Needs correctives and is vain about it and will not wear them where the crew can see.
Old fracture, right clavicle, Academy, unset for two days because he did not report it.
Scar tissue, left flank, Tarsus IV. He was thirteen. He has never once talked about it and I have never once asked and I have looked at it in this sickbay eleven times over two years and said nothing.
Sleeps four hours. Claims five.
Blood pressure runs high and he knows it and he lies to me about the coffee.
He typed for two hours. Then he saved the file, and encrypted it, and gave it a name that was not a name, and sat back and looked at it.
And then he put both hands over his face, because he had just understood what he had done, which was to write a medical history for a man who did not exist, in the hope that if he wrote down enough of it, some part of the universe would be obliged to account for it.
"You damn fool," said Leonard McCoy, out loud, to himself, in an empty office.
He did not delete it. He never deleted it.
Twenty-six years later an admiral of the Federation Starfleet with a bad back and a worse temper would find that file on an archived data core during a refit, and sit alone in a storage bay for two hours reading his own handwriting about a man he had by then known for twenty-eight years, and he would not be able to explain to anybody, including himself, why his hands were shaking.