New York City, 1930
The truck did not stop.
That was the thing he came back to, for forty years, in the small hours, lying beside her and listening to her breathe. It did not brake and it did not swerve and it never knew. It went through the space where she had been at about thirty miles an hour with its chain drive rattling and a boy on the running board smoking a cigarette, and it turned left at the corner and was gone, and nobody in it ever found out that it had been the most important vehicle in the history of the human race.
He was on his knees in the road with his arms around her.
She was saying something. He could not hear it. His hearing had gone wide, the way it did in a fight, everything at once and all of it too far away.
She was saying his name. She was asking if he was hurt.
He looked up.
Ten feet away, on the sidewalk, in the cold light of a Manhattan afternoon in the first winter of the Depression, two men were standing very still.
One of them was tall and dark and terribly calm, and he had already begun, and there is no other word for it, he had already begun to go thin. Not transparent, like a ghost. Thin. Like a photograph of a photograph. Spock was entirely there. He had shape and edges and weight, and he was looking directly at Kirk with an expression of perfect comprehension and no reproach at all, and he was less than he had been three seconds ago, and getting less.
McCoy was not calm. McCoy had his hand out, reaching, going faster than Spock was going, his mouth moving around a word.
And then Spock raised his hand. Palm out, fingers parted, held up into the freezing air for perhaps a second and a half. He did not say anything.
And then they were not there.
For about two seconds, kneeling in the middle of a road with his arms full of a living woman, James Kirk could not remember either of their names. He could not remember that he had ever had friends, or served aboard anything, or come from anywhere. There was a white nothing where a life had been, and in it there was a street, and a woman, and the smell of exhaust, and a man's hat lying in the gutter that belonged to nobody.
He heard himself make a sound. He would rather have died than make it again.
And then the world stopped.
It did not stop the way a heart stops. It stopped the way a phonograph stops when the power fails: everything simply ceased to advance. The crowd that had begun to gather stood with its mouths open in the middle of forming words. A pigeon hung six inches above the curb with its wings apart. A page of newspaper hung in the air like a thing on a wire. The light did not flicker. The light held.
She did not stop. She was still in his arms, warm, breathing, staring around her at a world gone rigid, and her hand closed on his coat.
"Jim," she said. "Jim, what is this?"
And a voice that was not a voice, a voice he had heard once before, in a canyon, on a dead world, on the far side of a great many years, came up through the paving stones and through his knees and arrived in the middle of his chest.
THEN YOU MUST DO IT INSTEAD.
That was all.
The pigeon completed its wingbeat. The newspaper hit a lamppost and wrapped around it. Somebody in the crowd finished a word and it turned out to be "lady," and a man came out of a doorway with his hands full of flour, and the world resumed, without comment, as though nothing had occurred.
James Kirk knelt in the middle of Twenty-second Street in the year 1930 with the woman he loved alive in his arms, and understood in one piece, like a bone breaking, what he had done and what it was going to cost.
"Jim." Edith Keeler had both hands in his coat now, and her face was very white, and she was not frightened. He would learn, over the next four decades, that she was almost never frightened, and that this was not courage exactly but something more useful: a kind of enormous practicality that declined to make room for panic on the grounds that panic never got the dishes done. "Jim, look at me. Where are your friends?"
He opened his mouth. And there he found the first of the several thousand things he was never going to be able to say, and he said instead the only true sentence available to him.
"They've gone home," he said.
She searched his face. "And you."
"No."
"Jim."
"No," he said, and got up, and helped her to her feet, and she was so much smaller than she had seemed thirty seconds ago and so much realer, and the whole world had narrowed to the single fact that she was standing in it.
He got her onto the sidewalk. Somebody handed her the hat, and she thanked them by name, because she knew everybody's name and would for the next forty years.
There was a crowd now. There is always a crowd. A woman was telling Edith, at length, that the driver ought to be horsewhipped. A man in an apron was explaining to another man in an apron exactly what had happened, in a version that was entirely wrong.
Nobody looked at the piece of sidewalk where two men had been standing. There was nothing there to look at. No scorch, no gap, no absence. The world had closed over them the way water closes, and a man in a cap stood exactly where Spock had raised his hand, picking his teeth.
Kirk stared at him.
"Jim."
"I'm all right."
"You are not all right. You have gone the color of a dishcloth and you are standing in the road."
"I'm all right, Edith."
"You will come inside," said Edith Keeler, "and you will sit down, and I will make you a cup of tea, and you will not argue with me about it, because I have just been very nearly killed and I intend to be insufferable about it for at least an hour."
And she took his arm.
And that was how James Tiberius Kirk walked away from the end of the universe: on the arm of a woman in a gray coat, up Twenty-second Street, past a man picking his teeth, into the rest of his life.