The argument about the name lasted three weeks and Leonard McCoy won it.
It began because he asked, in the mess, what the thing was called, and Spock said it was designated Research Project Four Alpha.
"That's not a name. That's a parking space."
"It is a designation. A name is unnecessary."
"A name is the most necessary thing there is." McCoy put down his fork. "In medicine we name everything. We named a disease after a man who wrote it down in 1817 and did not live to hear it called anything. You know why? Because you cannot ask six people to spend two years of their lives on a thing that has a number. The number is what you put on it when you have given up."
"That is sentiment."
"It is procedure," said McCoy, "and I have been at the bedside end of it a good deal longer than you have."
Spock declined. Spock declined for three weeks, on the grounds that naming a research program implied an expectation of a result, and that there was no basis in the data for such an expectation, and that a designation was accurate and a name would not be.
Which was, as everybody in the room privately understood, the actual reason.
* *
Christopher Pike ended it on a Tuesday by asking, in front of six people, what the doctor wanted to call it.
"I don't want to call it anything. That's his job." McCoy jerked a thumb. "He won't do it because if he names it he's admitted he thinks it might work."
Pike looked at Spock for slightly longer than was comfortable.
"Mister Spock, give it a name."
"Sir, I am not able to."
And that, said McCoy afterward, was the single most honest thing the Vulcan had said in two years, and Pike had known exactly what he was doing when he asked.
*
It was Montgomery Scott who solved it, and he did not mean to.
He came up from engineering at 0200 with a coil he had rewound himself and no sleep in him. He looked at the board, which had fourteen eliminated approaches on it, and nothing else, and he said:
"Ye do understand this is a snipe hunt."
"Explain."
"A snipe hunt." Scotty set the coil down. "It's a thing they do to apprentices. Ye send the lad out into the field at night wi' a sack and ye tell him to wait for the snipe, and he stands there for four hours in the wet, and everybody goes back to the pub. There is no snipe. There was never any snipe. That is the entire joke, Mister Spock, and it has been funny for three hundred years."
There was a silence in the laboratory.
"That is an appalling name," said Spock.
"Aye."
"It is also inaccurate. There is a snipe."
"There ye are, then," said Montgomery Scott, and went to bed.
*
It stuck the way those things stick, which is instantly, and permanently, and against everybody's wishes.
By the end of that month there were four hundred and thirty people on that ship who had never heard of James Kirk and about nine of them who knew the search existed, and every one of the nine called it the snipe hunt. Scotty logged spare parts to it. Chapel asked McCoy, in sickbay, whether he was going up to the snipe hunt tonight. Galloway wrote it in his private log, twice, in a hand that got steadier every year.
Spock used it exactly once, late on a Thursday, in the phrase "the snipe hunt has consumed the secondary banks," and Scotty put his head down on the console and laughed until he had to be helped up.
McCoy had won, and knew it, and was insufferable about it for two weeks, which everybody permitted him because he had been eating alone in his office, and had stopped.
* *
Only Uhura ever said the other thing about it, and she only said it to herself, in her quarters, the night the name took.
A snipe hunt is not a hunt for a rare bird.
It is a hunt for a thing that does not exist, arranged by people who know it does not exist, and the point of it is the person left standing in a field in the dark with a sack, waiting.
She wrote it down, and then took it out again, because she had a rule about what went in and what did not.