A year went by and left very little behind it. The list on the secondary banks reached one hundred and eleven.
He had developed, by then, a private and indefensible habit he never disclosed: he had begun to think of the failures as offerings. There was no ledger. There was nobody keeping score. The universe did not owe him a solution in exchange for a hundred and eleven documented negatives, and he had spent his professional life demonstrating that no universe with a conscience existed. He went on thinking it anyway, at 0400, at a console, and the thought never varied.
I am doing everything. I want it noted that I am doing everything.
* * *
And on the second and fourth Thursdays, the bottle came out, and two glasses stayed untouched.
The meetings got shorter. McCoy noticed it first, in the eighteenth month, and said nothing for six weeks and then said it all at once.
"Fourteen minutes," he said.
"Doctor?"
"That's how long we were in here last time. Two years ago these things went ninety minutes and I had to be thrown out. Last month we did fourteen minutes and Scotty was asleep."
"I was not asleep."
"You were asleep, Scotty."
"I was restin' my eyes and thinkin' about a coil."
"You were asleep," said McCoy, "and I am not blaming you, and that is the whole point. I want somebody in this room to look at me and tell me we are not, all six of us, quietly letting him go. Because that's what this is. It doesn't look like a decision. Nobody stands up and says, well, that's enough, I'm off. It looks like fourteen minutes."
Nobody looked at anybody.
"It looks like people who used to be desperate turning up out of politeness. And I have watched a lot of families do this, and I am telling you as a physician that it always looks exactly like this, and it never once looks like giving up, and it is always giving up."
The room was silent.
And then Nyota Uhura said: "Four hundred and eleven."
Everybody turned.
"That's how many entries I have. As of last night. I wrote eleven this week. I write between sixty and a hundred a week and I have done it every single week for two years and I have not missed one." She looked at McCoy. "So don't."
"Nyota..."
"Don't you dare tell me I'm letting him go." Her voice did not rise, and it was worse than shouting. "I am the only person in this room who has to sit eleven meters from that chair for eight hours a day. Doctor, you have a sickbay. Mister Scott has an engine. Mister Spock has a laboratory and a problem. Lieutenant Galloway has a corridor, and Ensign Brandt another. I have a station on the bridge. And I sit at it, in a room with a man in the chair who is not him. I do my job. I say 'Aye, sir,' and I say it to Christopher Pike, and every one of those times has cost me something I do not get back.
"You want to know why the meetings are fourteen minutes, Doctor? Because we've run out of things to say. Not out of wanting. Out of sentences. And you have confused the two, and accused five people who love him of quitting, and I want an apology and I want it now."
Leonard McCoy looked at her for a long moment. "You're right," he said. "I apologize."
"Thank you."
"I'm frightened," said McCoy.
"I know," said Uhura. "So am I."
And she sat back down. Scotty refilled her glass without being asked, and nobody said anything else for a while, and the meeting went on for two hours.