Starfleet took nineteen hours to answer. The answer was four lines.
The planet was designated a Class One Temporal Hazard, to be quarantined at a radius of one light year, effective at once, enforced by beacon and by treaty. No vessel was to approach it. No research authorized. No further contact of any kind, by any party, in perpetuity.
The Enterprise was to withdraw and proceed to her next assignment, a routine survey of an ore-bearing system nine days away at warp six.
And the report submitted by the science officer of the Enterprise, concerning an officer named James T. Kirk, was noted, was appreciated, and was filed.
* *
"Filed," said McCoy.
"Yes."
"They filed him." He was on his feet. "A man walked into the past and gave up his whole life to hold this rotten universe together, and there is not one human being in eight hundred billion who knows his name, and Command read the report and put him in a drawer."
"They do not remember him."
"That is not an excuse."
"It is not an excuse," said Spock. "It is an explanation. There is a difference, and at this moment it is the only difference available to us, and I would ask you to hold onto it, because I am holding onto it with both hands."
McCoy stopped. They were in the corridor outside the briefing room, and crewmen were going past in both directions, all of them pretending very hard not to look.
"I'm sorry," McCoy said.
"You have nothing to apologize for."
"I have everything to apologize for. I put that hypo in my own stomach, Spock. My hand. There is not one event in this whole catastrophe that does not start with my hand, and every one of you has been careful for four days not to say so, and I would take it as a kindness if somebody would."
Spock looked at him for a long moment.
"Doctor. There is not one event in this catastrophe that does not begin with a console overload on a bridge you were not standing on, during a distortion wave you did not cause, on a mission you did not order, in a sector we were sent to by an admiral who has never heard of any of it."
"That is not..."
"It is precisely the same argument, and you may have it, and I am not going to permit you the other one. I have run out of officers."
McCoy stared at him. And then, unsteadily, he laughed. It was not much of a laugh. It was the wreck of one.
"You've run out of officers."
"I have four. One of them is you. And I intend to keep all of them."
* *
The Enterprise went to warp at 0600 the next morning.
Spock stood at the science station and watched the planet with no name go off the aft screen. Uhura sat at communications and did not look at the screen at all. Scotty was in engineering with his hands on a core that was working perfectly and would go on working perfectly for the entire nine days, and he hated it.
And Christopher Pike sat in the center seat of the Enterprise, whole and alive and fifty-two years old, and gave the order.
"Warp six, Mister Sulu. Take us out."
"Aye, sir."
The stars stretched, and the ship went. And behind them a ring of stone stood on an empty plain under a sky full of daylight stars. And four hundred years and one impossible fracture away, a man of thirty-four in a shirt he had worn the day before carried a pot of soup up a flight of stairs for a woman who was going to change the world and would not be allowed to.
He would do it again tomorrow.
He would do it for the rest of his life.