New York City, 1937
He left the docks in the spring of 1937, when his back began to go, and opened a radio repair shop on Flatbush with money that had taken six years to save and that Edith had counted, twice, on the kitchen table, in coins.
It was the correct trade for a man in his position, and he had chosen it with the same cold clarity that had once let him choose a firing solution. Radios were the highest technology the twentieth century had that he could touch without destroying anything. They were vacuum tubes and copper and solder and patience, and he understood all of it so completely, so far beyond the level of any human being then living, that he had to slow himself down on purpose, every day, the way a strong man learns to shake hands gently.
He was very good at it. He was, in fact, the best radio repairman in the borough of Brooklyn, and within two years the best in the city, and he did not know it and would not have cared, and people came from three neighborhoods over and did not know why except that Kirk fixed it and it stayed fixed.
He could diagnose a set from the doorway. He could hear a failing capacitor across a room. A man would come in with a console radio on a hand truck and start to describe the fault, and Kirk would say, "It's the second filter, and your ground is bad, and somebody has been at this with a screwdriver," and the man would stare at him, and Kirk would say, "Tuesday," and go into the back.
And it delighted him, and that was the thing exile could not reach. He would never command anything again, and he had made his peace with that in an alley in 1931, but a hard problem was still a hard problem, and a man who has run a starship does not stop enjoying the moment a dead thing comes back to life under his hands merely because the dead thing is a Philco. He whistled in that shop. He argued, cheerfully and at length, with salesmen who did not know a tenth of what he knew and would have fainted if they had. He kept the boys of the neighborhood at his counter with stories, half of them true, about ships, which they took for the merchant marine, and he never once corrected them.
He charged very little. He charged nothing at all if he thought they had nothing, and he was extremely good at telling, and he was never once wrong, and Edith found out about it in 1938 and said absolutely nothing and went on doing the books as though the numbers made sense.
And every day, in the back of that shop, with a hot iron in his hand and his glasses pushed up on his forehead, James Kirk sat looking at the guts of a console radio and knew that he could build a transistor.
He knew what it was. He knew what it did. He did not know precisely how to dope the germanium, because he had been a starship captain and not a semiconductor engineer, but he knew enough. He knew enough to take fifteen years off the twentieth century.
He could have walked into Bell Laboratories in 1938 with a sketch and a stammered explanation and changed the world. They would not have believed him. They would have thrown him out. And one of them, some quiet man in the third row, would have gone home and thought about it, and gone into the laboratory on Monday and tried something, and that is all it takes. That is genuinely all it takes.
And the world was on a schedule.
* * *
He kept a notebook.
It was a cheap black clothbound thing, bought at a stationer's on Church Avenue in November of 1936 for eleven cents, and he kept it in a locked drawer under the workbench for thirty-four years, and it had a title, which he wrote on the first page the day he bought it and never revised.
THINGS I MUST NOT DO.
The first entry was written in the back of the shop before the shop was a shop, when it was still an empty room with a broken window and a rent he could not afford.
1. Do not tell anyone what you are.
The second was written the same evening, and he sat and looked at it a long time before he wrote it.
2. Do not keep this notebook.
He kept it anyway. He knew, writing entry two, that he was going to keep it anyway, and he wrote it anyway, because he was a man who had spent his adult life writing accurate reports and he was not going to stop merely because there was nobody to read them.
There were, in the end, one hundred and ninety-five entries.
7. Do not mention the transistor.
14. Do not mention the jet engine to anybody at Wright Field, and do not go to Wright Field, and do not go to Dayton.
22. Do not correct the newspapers. Not even in your own head. It is a habit and it will show on your face.
31. Do not tell Sorkin to sell in September of 1929. It has already happened. I keep forgetting that it has already happened. I do not know what that is a symptom of and it frightens me more than anything else in this book.
44. Do not warn the men on the Reuben James.
61. Do not enlist. (See separate entry, at length, October 1941.)
94. Do not tell Sam anything. Not one word, not one hint, not one story about a ship. He is two years old and he already watches your face.
One entry appeared three times, on three separate dates, in three different years, in handwriting that got steadily worse: Do not tell Edith about the polio vaccine.
Sam Kirk had a friend on the second floor, a boy named Dominic Costello, and in the summer of 1944 Dominic Costello got polio and never walked again, and he was seven years old, and James Kirk carried him up the stairs to his mother's apartment twice a week for eleven years and never said one word about it to anybody, ever, including his wife.
104. Do not.
105. Do not.
106. You did not. Well done. Go home.