They never explained it to him. There was nothing to explain. In the history that was now the only history, the Enterprise had charted a temporal disturbance, made planetfall, encountered an artifact of immense age which declined to be studied, recommended a science team, and moved on.
That was the log. Spock wrote it. It was accurate in every particular, and it was the greatest lie of his life, and he filed it at 0400 and then sat looking at the terminal afterward.
Kirk read it and signed it and did not question a word, because his science officer had written it.
* *
And the six of them remembered everything.
The Guardian had not warned them about that and would not discuss it afterward. They had stood in the field. Spock spent nineteen years constructing a theory to explain it and never published one word.
So Leonard McCoy went back to his sickbay and knew. And Montgomery Scott went back to his engines and knew. And Nyota Uhura went back to a communications station eleven meters from a man's chair and sat at it for eight hours a day for the next three years and knew.
And Spock stood at the science station and watched James Kirk command a starship, badly shaven, talking constantly, touching the arm of the chair with two fingers of his left hand when he was thinking. And knew.
And so did a sixth. Ensign Brandt, who had stood on that plain and come off it carrying the same impossible thing, and who took the same chair every second Thursday in Mister Scott's quarters, beside Galloway, with a full glass in front of him that he never touched, an ensign of twenty-two in a room of legends, who had earned his place there the only way any of them had, which was by having been there. He never spoke of it outside that room. He did not need to. He was one of the six.
And not one of them ever said one word about it. Not to him. Not to each other. Not to anybody, for the rest of their lives.
* *
Except once.
It was 2268, three months out, and Kirk was in the officers' lounge at 0200 with a chessboard and no opponent, working through a problem he had set himself and losing to it.
Uhura came in for tea because she could not sleep.
"Lieutenant," he said, without looking up. "Come and tell me why I'm an idiot."
She came and looked at the board. "You've abandoned the bishop, sir."
"I have not abandoned the bishop. I have made a strategic reallocation of the bishop."
"You've abandoned the bishop."
"Sit down," said Kirk.
She sat down. They played, and he talked the entire time, about a diplomat on Rigel and a supply officer he was going to murder and a book he was reading and did not want anybody to know he was reading. And she listened to his voice.
She beat him in nineteen moves.
He sat back and looked at the board. "Where did you learn that?"
"From you, sir," she said.
"I've never played you before."
Nyota Uhura picked up her tea. "No, sir," she said. "I don't suppose you have."