New York City, June 1939
Sam was four, and there was a fair out at Flushing Meadows, and Edith said they were going.
Kirk said it would be crowded and expensive, and that the boy was too young to remember it. She looked at him over the top of a dish and said, "James." And they went on a Saturday, on the subway, with sandwiches.
It was called the World of Tomorrow.
He stood in the middle of it for about a minute and a half with his son on his shoulders, and he did not say anything at all, and Edith, who missed nothing, let him alone.
They had built a white ball a hundred and eighty feet across, and a white spike six hundred feet high next to it, and set them in the middle of what had been an ash dump. The sight was so confident, so wrong, so completely and heartbreakingly game that a man who had commanded a starship had to stop and look at his shoes for a moment.
"Pop," said Sam. "Ball."
"That is a ball," Kirk agreed.
* *
The best of it was a thing called Futurama, which took an hour to queue for and moved you through it in a chair on a conveyor while a voice told you about 1960.
It was a model, and it was enormous, and it had half a million buildings in it and a million trees. It was the most beautiful thing James Kirk had seen since the Guardian's plain.
The voice explained that by 1960 there would be automated superhighways on which cars would be spaced apart by radio control at a hundred miles an hour, and there would be no traffic accidents, and the cities would have separate levels for walking, and the farms would produce so much that hunger in America would be over.
Sam fell asleep about a third of the way through.
Kirk sat with a sleeping four-year-old across his chest and watched a country that would spend the next six years killing itself explain, in a warm and reasonable voice, that everything was going to be all right by 1960.
He came out the other end with his eyes wet and told Edith it was the ventilation.
"Mm," said Edith Keeler.
*
At a booth run by Westinghouse there was a robot called Elektro who could smoke a cigarette, and count on his fingers, and say seven hundred words, and there was a man in a boater explaining that Elektro represented the future of household labor.
Kirk stood and listened to the whole pitch, twice.
"You've got a question," said Edith.
"I do not have a question."
"You have had a question for four minutes and it is coming out of your ears."
So he asked it. He asked the man in the boater what Elektro was for, exactly, and the man said household labor, and Kirk said yes, but what was he for, and the man, who had given this pitch two hundred times that week, said that was a heck of a question, mister, and that he supposed he was for showing people that it could be done.
"That's a good answer," said Kirk.
"Thanks."
"That's actually the right answer."
"You want a brochure?"
He took the brochure. He kept it for thirty-one years in a drawer with a black notebook and it was still there when he died.
*
The Westinghouse people had buried a time capsule the autumn before the fair opened, a torpedo of alloy seven and a half feet long, fifty feet down, and they had put things in it. Newsreels. A copy of Life. Seeds. A woman's hat. A dollar in change.
It was to be opened in the year 6939.
There was a plaque, and Edith read the whole plaque out loud because she read everything out loud, and there was a line in it about the people of that far future and what they might make of us.
"Five thousand years," she said. "Do you suppose there'll be anybody?"
And James Kirk, standing in a field in Queens in the summer of 1939 with a sleeping boy on his shoulder, said:
"Yes."
He said it flatly, and immediately, and with such total unguarded certainty that Edith turned, and looked at him.
"Well," she said, after a moment. "That's nice to hear from somebody."
"I'd bet the house on it."
"We don't have a house."
"I'd bet yours."
"It is my house," said Edith.
* *
They ate the sandwiches on the grass. Sam woke up and was appalling about it and then ate two of them.
On the way back the train was hot and packed. A man with an accordion got on at Woodside and played badly for six stops, and everyone hated him. Then a woman started singing along out of spite, and by Queensboro Plaza half the car was going, and Sam stood on his father's knees and conducted.
Edith laughed until she had to hold onto the strap.
And James Kirk, who had put his hand out and stopped the twentieth century in a road in 1930, and had spent nine years unable to decide whether he had ruined the world or paid for it, sat in a hot subway car full of singing people, and did not think about it at all for twenty minutes.