The planet had no name. It had a number, six digits long, assigned by a survey drone in the previous century that had passed within four light years, taken a spectrograph, recorded nothing of interest, and gone on.
Montgomery Scott had been standing on it for nine hours.
He had counted. That was the sort of thing a man did, at a certain point, when the alternative was to think, and he had passed through the thinking some hours ago and come out the far side into a flat gray country where he simply counted things: the hours, the columns he could see, the number of times Lieutenant Galloway walked the same forty-meter perimeter without being told to.
Nine hours since the doctor went through. Eight hours and forty since the captain and Mister Spock went after him. And the world had gone.
That was how Scotty thought of it afterward, and he never found a better way. Not changed. Gone. He had been standing on this plain, looking up at a sky with a ship in it, and then the sky had been empty and the communicator had gone dead, and the three of them left behind had stood in the silence and the silence had gone on and on.
Uhura sat on a fallen column with her arms around her knees. Every twenty minutes or so she opened her communicator and listened, and there was nothing in it. Not static. Not the hiss of an empty channel. Nothing, a nothing so complete it did not even sound like absence, and after the fourth time Scotty had asked her to stop doing it in front of him.
She had not stopped. She had moved eleven meters away and gone on doing it where he could not hear.
They had beamed down six. The captain, Mister Spock, Scott, Uhura, and two of security: Lieutenant Galloway, and an ensign named Brandt, twenty-two years old and three weeks aboard. Brandt stood the whole nine hours on that plain, and went through every part of what the rest of them went through, and beamed up with them when it was over. Whatever it was that happened to the five happened to him too, in exactly the same measure. He was the sixth of them, and he was there for all of it.
Galloway stood at what would have been a post if there had been anything to post to, phaser holstered, hands behind his back, eyes moving across a horizon that had not changed in six hours. Nobody had told him he could stop.
"Mister Scott," Uhura said, at last.
"Aye, lass."
"How long do we wait?"
Scotty did not have an answer for that. He had been not having one for some time. "We wait," he said.
She nodded, and did not ask again.
* * *
The ring of stone in the middle of the plain went white, and threw two men out of it like a body coming up out of water.
They hit the ground hard. McCoy came up on his hands and knees, retching. Spock came up in a single motion that was not quite a stagger, and turned, and looked at the portal, and did not look away.
Galloway got to McCoy first. "Doctor."
"Get off me."
"Doctor, are you..."
"I said get off me!" He got up. He was gray, and there was blood on his mouth, and Scotty realized after a moment it was because he had bitten through his own lip and did not appear to know it.
"Where's the captain?" Scotty said.
Nobody answered him.
"Mister Spock. Where's the captain?"
Spock did not turn around. "Guardian," he said. His voice was level, and stripped, with nothing behind it. Scotty had served with the man for two years and had never once heard it come out of him like that. "GUARDIAN. WHERE IS HE."
HE IS WHERE HE CHOSE TO BE, said the Guardian of Forever.
McCoy made a sound.
"You threw us out," Spock said.
YES.
"Why?"
BECAUSE YOU WOULD NOT HAVE COME. AND YOU WOULD BOTH HAVE CEASED. AND IT WOULD HAVE BEEN FOR NOTHING. HE WAS NOT COMING EITHER.
"Send us back."
NO.
"Send us back." Spock walked toward the ring, fast, and Galloway moved without being told and put himself between the Vulcan and the stone, and Spock stopped, because he was Spock, and because the alternative was to strike a subordinate. "You will return us to the instant of divergence. You will place us on that street, and I will remove him from it myself, and you may have your history back exactly as it was."
NO.
"You have already permitted a passage. Three. There is no principle by which you permit three and refuse a fourth."
THAT IS PRECISELY THE PRINCIPLE, said the Guardian of Forever.
The plain went quiet.
I HAVE CORRECTED ONCE. I WILL NOT CORRECT A CORRECTION. A DOOR THAT OPENS EVERY TIME A MAN REGRETS SOMETHING IS NOT A DOOR. IT IS A JAILER.
"He is one man."
HE IS ONE MAN. AND YOU ARE ASKING ME TO UNMAKE A LIVED HOUR TO RETRIEVE HIM. AND THE ONE WHO COMES AFTER YOU WILL ASK FOR TWO.
"There is no one who comes after us."
THERE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE WHO COMES AFTER YOU. THAT IS WHAT A UNIVERSE IS.
McCoy pushed past Galloway. "Then you tell me." His voice had gone to pieces. "You tell me what I'm supposed to do, because I'm the one who did this. I put the drug in my own stomach, I ran through your door, and that man went in after me to fix it. He went in after me. He is down there because of me, and you are standing there like a rock."
I AM A ROCK, said the Guardian of Forever.
McCoy stopped as though he had been struck.
I AM A ROCK, AND I HAVE BEEN A ROCK SINCE BEFORE THIS SUN CONDENSED OUT OF DUST, AND I HAVE WATCHED A GREAT MANY THINGS ASK ME FOR MERCY. I HAVE NOT ALWAYS REFUSED. I AM REFUSING NOW.
AND I WILL TELL YOU WHY, DOCTOR, BECAUSE YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO HAS ASKED ME A QUESTION AND NOT AN ORDER.
IF I OPEN THAT HOUR AGAIN, THEN NO HOUR IS REAL, AND NOTHING IN THIS UNIVERSE COSTS ANYTHING AT ALL. THAT IS NOT A KINDNESS. IT IS THE END OF EVERY MEANING THERE HAS EVER BEEN.
The wind moved across the plain in silence.
"Then history is broken," said Spock.
HISTORY IS CORRECTED.
Spock stopped. He stood in front of the ring with his hands at his sides, and Scotty watched something move behind his face that he had no name for.
"Say that again."
HISTORY IS CORRECTED. THE WOMAN DID NOT BUILD WHAT SHE WOULD HAVE BUILT. THE WAR CAME WHEN IT WAS MEANT TO. YOUR FEDERATION STANDS, AND YOUR EARTH IS GREEN, AND NOT ONE SOUL ON IT IS IN ANY DANGER.
"That is not possible."
IT IS ACCOMPLISHED.
"Explain it."
HE STAYED, said the Guardian. AND HE STOPPED HER. AND IT TOOK HIM THE REST OF HIS LIFE, AND HE DID NOT ONCE PUT IT DOWN.
McCoy said, "Oh, God." Quietly. The way a man says something at the bottom of a stairwell after a long fall.
"Then he is alive," Spock said.
HE WAS.
"Show me."
NO, said the Guardian of Forever. NOT TODAY. YOU WOULD GO THROUGH.
And Spock, who had not told a lie since he was seven years old, said: "I would not."
YOU WOULD. AND SO WOULD THE DOCTOR. AND SO, I THINK, WOULD THE ENGINEER, AND THE WOMAN, AND THE ONE WHO HAS STOOD BETWEEN US FOR NINE HOURS AND HAS NOT SPOKEN ONCE. GO HOME. YOUR SHIP IS IN ORBIT. IT HAS BEEN THERE THE ENTIRE TIME.
Uhura got to her feet. "Sir." Her voice was not steady. "There's nothing up there. The channel's been dead for nine hours. There's no ship. There is no anything, sir, and I know what nothing sounds like."
OPEN IT AGAIN, said the Guardian.
She looked at Spock. Spock nodded once. She opened the channel.
And a voice came out of it at once, clear and strong and entirely unbothered, a voice none of them had heard in a very long time, a voice that two of the six people on that plain had never in their lives expected to hear again.
"Landing party, this is Enterprise. Do you read? This is Captain Christopher Pike. Landing party, respond."
Nobody moved. The Guardian of Forever said nothing at all.
And then Lieutenant Galloway, who had not spoken in nine hours, said, quietly, to no one in particular:
"Who?"