Brooklyn, 1968 to 1969
In the January of 1968 he was seventy-two years old, and he was watching the evening news.
He watched it every night, the way he had once read status reports, out of a discipline he had never been able to put down: an old man in a chair with the sound turned low so as not to wake his wife, taking the temperature of a century he was not permitted to touch.
And on an ordinary Thursday a man in a grey suit at a desk said that there had been an incident. A rocket, launched that afternoon on what had been described as a routine orbital test, had carried, it now appeared, a nuclear device. And the device had detonated, harmlessly, at a great height, more than a hundred miles up, in a flash that several observatories had recorded and several governments were declining to discuss. There had been no damage. There had been, the man in the grey suit said, choosing his words with care, no injuries, and no explanation.
James Kirk sat very still in his chair.
Because he knew that flash. He had been there for it. Not here, in a chair, in Brooklyn, an old man with a blanket over his knees, but out there, in a ship, in the century he came from, on a mission that had folded time back on itself and set four hundred and thirty people down in this exact year to watch this exact thing fail to become the end of the world. He had stood on a bridge and watched a man he could never entirely account for reach into the workings of a launched weapon from half a world away and take it apart in the sky, on purpose, at the last possible second. And he had never fully understood how it was done, or whom the man answered to, and it had frightened him past any enemy he ever faced, because the man was not an enemy, and was better at Kirk's own trade than Kirk had ever been.
Gary Seven. The name came up out of thirty-eight years of dark like a body surfacing.
He is here. He is here, this afternoon, in this year, doing the thing I watched him do. And I am not out there. There is no Enterprise in the sky above him tonight, because I fell out of the world in 1930, and everything downstream of me is a different shape, and my ship is somewhere else entirely, or is nothing at all. And it happened anyway. He was here anyway. He reached up and caught it anyway, without us, and I do not know how, and I am the only man alive on this planet who knows there is even anything to wonder about.
He got up, very quietly, so as not to wake her, and went down to the shop, and unlocked the drawer, and wrote in the black notebook for the first time in years, in a hand that shook, and not from age.
The bomb over the ocean tonight was the one I watched him stop. He was here without us. I do not know how it happened without me in it. I have spent my whole life certain that I was a stone dropped in a pond, that every single thing I touched moved. And tonight the pond moved without me, exactly on schedule, and I cannot explain it, and I am not going to sit here and pretend to myself that I can. Some of the schedule is not mine. Some of it was never mine. I do not know whose it is. And that is the first genuinely new thing I have learned in thirty-eight years, and it has come far too late to be of any use to anybody.
He locked the drawer again. He went back upstairs and sat down beside his sleeping wife, and did not sleep, and in the morning he did not speak of it, because there was, as ever, no one to tell.
* * *
Eighteen months later they put the television on the good table, and moved the good table into the middle of the room, and there was nobody in the apartment but the two of them, and it was enough, because it had been enough for a long time.
It was a Zenith. Black and white. Nineteen-inch screen. He had repaired it six times himself, and it ran better than it had any right to, and it was the one thing in the house he would not let her throw out.
It was ninety-three degrees. Every window was open. Down the block a dozen radios and a dozen televisions all carried the same broadcast, so that the whole hot street seemed to breathe with a single voice, and the stoops were empty, because everyone was inside, watching.
He had known the date for thirty-nine years. He had written it down in 1932 on a sheet of paper in a lawyer's safe on Court Street, item ten of eleven, and burned it in a kitchen stove in 1942, and never once forgotten it. He had thought about this night for four decades, and believed that when it came he would feel something enormous.
And it came. And it was a small grey picture on a nineteen-inch screen, and a man came down a ladder very slowly, and the picture was terrible, almost nothing, a ghost in a white suit on a grey field, and a voice came from a quarter of a million miles away and said a sentence that somebody had plainly worked on.
And James Kirk did not feel anything enormous. He felt something small, and precise, and it went in just under the sternum:
It is the wrong ship. It is the wrong ship and the wrong century, and there are three of them instead of four hundred and thirty, and they have gone a quarter of a million miles instead of nine light years. And they are going to put a flag on it. A national flag. On the moon. And in a few days they will come home, and it will be over, and nobody will go back for fifty years. And it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. And Sam should have lived to see it.
He sat in a chair by the window in Brooklyn, seventy-three years old, and wept, silently, without moving, without making a sound.
Only Edith moved. She got up out of her chair and crossed the room and stood beside him and put her hand on the back of his neck. Two fingers. The way she had done it for thirty-eight years. She did not say anything.
He put his hand up and held her wrist.
"We went," he said. Very quietly.
"I know."
"Edith. We went."
"I know. You told me we would. In 1932. Item ten." Her hand tightened. "You were early. That is all that was ever wrong with you."
And they sat a while, the two of them, in the light of a small grey moon on a nineteen-inch screen, in a room that had held, once, a boy who drew rocket ships with far too much fire coming out of the back and signed his name to them in enormous careful capitals. The room was quiet now, and would stay quiet, and they did not speak of him, because they never did, because there was nothing to say that the silence was not already holding for them.