Nobody answered him.
Spock stood at the board with his back to the room. Uhura looked at Spock. McCoy looked at Uhura. Galloway, by the door, looked at all of them.
And Montgomery Scott, who had asked the question because somebody had to, and because an engineer's whole profession is asking what happens to the part nobody is looking at, watched three officers not answer him and understood.
"Ye know," he said.
"Yes," said Spock.
"How long have ye known?"
"Fourteen months."
Scotty sat back. "Say it," said McCoy.
Spock turned around.
"In the restored timeline, Christopher Pike is promoted to fleet captain shortly after the transfer of command. In that capacity he conducts an inspection of a Class J training vessel. There is a baffle plate failure. There are cadets on the other side of a bulkhead, and he goes through it, and he gets them out."
He put his hands behind his back.
"He survives. He is not killed. He is burned across the whole of his body and sustains catastrophic damage to the central nervous system, and he does not recover, and he does not die, and he lives for a very long time. He cannot walk. He cannot speak. And his mind is entirely unimpaired.
"He is in that condition because he chose to be. He weighs it, and goes through the door, and saves the cadets, and pays for it with his body, knowingly, and does not hesitate. And there is not one officer in this room who is surprised.
"And in this universe he is fifty-four years old, and asleep two decks above us, and whole. And he is whole because James Kirk fell out of the world."
* *
"So that is the arithmetic," Spock said. "I will state it plainly, and then I will ask for your views, and then I am going to decide, because it is my decision, and I am not going to permit any of you to take it from me.
"If we do nothing, this universe continues. It is a good universe. The war ended on time. The Federation stands. Christopher Pike commands this ship, and will command it another decade, and will retire to Mojave and ride horses and be happy. And James Kirk is a radio repairman in Brooklyn who will die in about 1970, and be buried, and be mourned by his family, and never once be known by anybody who understood what he was.
"If we act, then history is restored. And James Kirk gets his life, and this ship, and everything that came with it. And Christopher Pike burns.
"Those are the two doors. There is no third. I have looked for a third for fourteen months, with everything I have."
"Jim," said McCoy.
"That is not an argument, Doctor."
"The hell it isn't." He was on his feet. "I did this. My hand. My hypospray. And every day we leave him down there, I am the man who erased his best friend. You can call that emotional if it makes you comfortable, but it is also true, and you have not answered it in two years."
"It is true," said Spock, "and it is not sufficient. Because Christopher Pike did not administer that drug either. And if the standard is that a man may not be spent for another man's accident, then the standard protects him too. And it protects him more, because he is here, and he is real, and he is asleep two decks above us, and I have taken his coffee out of his hand."
McCoy stopped. Nobody said anything.
"You want to know what I think?" said Scotty. "We are debating whether we have the right to spend Christopher Pike, and the man himself is asleep two decks up. Not one of us has knocked on his door."
"We cannot ask him," said Spock.
"Why not?"
"Because he would say yes. He would say it in under four seconds, and every person in this room knows it. We are not protecting him from the knowledge. We are protecting ourselves from his answer."
Uhura looked at Spock. "Then do not use his permission to make this clean. It will not. If he says yes, the same man pays the same price. A blessing does not unspend him."
Spock looked around the room: McCoy gray with exhaustion, Scott with one boot on the floor, Uhura standing, Galloway at the door. Galloway nodded once.
"Very well," said Spock. "We will take the ship. And we will tell the captain."
* *
END OF PART TWO