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 in a room on the East Side of this same city, in this same year, on a mission that had folded time back on itself and set him down in an apartment he had no business standing in, arguing with a man in a dark suit and a woman who typed very badly, while a rocket that should have ended the world went up over the Atlantic.
He had stood eight feet from the man and watched him reach into a launched warhead 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.
Gary Seven. The name came up out of thirty-eight years of dark like a body surfacing.
He is here. He is in that apartment this afternoon, in this year, doing the thing I stood in the room and watched him do. And I am not there. I was there and I am not there, because I fell out of the world in 1930, and everything downstream of me is a different shape, and there is no Enterprise in the sky tonight and no man from the future standing at his elbow. And it happened anyway. Somebody drove that man to reach up and catch it with no one behind him, and I do not know who, and I am the only person alive on this planet who knows there is anything at all 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.