The Enterprise ran for five more days.
They were, Pike said afterward, the best five days of his command, and he said it without irony, and everybody who heard him understood exactly what he was telling them.
He ate in the mess. He had never done that. He sat down with a table of engineering ratings on the second night and asked them what they thought of the ship, and one of them, a nineteen-year-old named Diaz who had never spoken to a captain in his life, told him, at length and with feeling, that the port turbolift was slow, and Pike listened to all of it and thanked him and had it fixed. He went down to engineering at 0200 and sat on a crate with Scotty and talked about nothing. He played chess with McCoy, badly, and lost, and complained about it.
He went to the observation lounge on the fourth night and found Uhura there with a padd, and she stood, and he told her to sit, and sat down opposite her.
"What is it?"
"Sir?"
"You've carried that thing for two years, Lieutenant. You take it to the mess and don't open it, and you have it with you right now."
Uhura looked at the padd. "It's him. Everything I could remember, and everything the others could remember, and they mostly don't know they've told me. Six thousand entries."
Pike nodded slowly. "May I?"
She hesitated a long moment. Then she handed it to him.
* * *
Christopher Pike read for forty minutes, in silence, with the stars going past outside, and every so often he stopped and went back and read something again. At the end he handed it back.
"Thank you."
"Sir, if you have questions..."
"No." He sat back and looked at the stars. "I have commanded this ship for fourteen years. And I have been quietly telling myself, for two years, that whatever this man was, he could not have been better at it than I am. That's an ugly thing to say out loud."
"Sir..."
"It's an ugly thing to have thought, Lieutenant, and I have thought it perhaps four hundred times, and I want to be honest about it with somebody before the end of the week." He turned back to her. "He isn't better than me. He's worse. Objectively. He takes risks I would never take and gets away with them because he is lucky, and one day he will not be lucky, and he will lose people, and it will be his fault, and he will know it."
Uhura did not answer.
"And I have just read six thousand entries, written over two years by an officer who has never once complained, in a hand that gets worse toward the end of every session, which tells me you were crying and did not stop writing. And there is not one entry in there about a battle."
He stood up. "There are four hundred and thirty people on my ship, and if I fell out of the world tomorrow, they would grieve, and they would be right to, and in about eighteen months they would be fine. Not one of them would spend two years in the dark writing down what my voice sounded like."
He went to the door. "Sir," said Uhura. He stopped. "You are a very great captain."
Christopher Pike stood in the doorway with his back to her. "I know," he said. "That's what makes it interesting."