They told Pike everything.
It took four hours, in the briefing room, door locked, recorder running, and Spock did it because Spock was incapable of doing anything else. He did it exactly and in order, beginning with a hypospray and a bridge that had bucked under a wave of temporal distortion, and ending with a street in 1930.
Pike listened without interrupting. He was good at it. He sat with his chin on his fist and did not move for four hours, and when Spock had finished he sat for perhaps thirty seconds more.
"Show me the personnel file," he said.
"There is no personnel file, Captain."
"I know. Show me the one you remember."
Spock hesitated. "I do not understand the request."
"You've got a man in your head. He commanded this ship. You say he was my successor. Three of my officers apparently loved him, and he does not exist. So sit there and tell me about him. Not the temporal mechanics. Him. What was he like."
The room was silent.
And Spock found that he could not begin. There was no protocol for it, no line of report, no efficient formulation. He sat with his hands folded and could not produce a single sentence about James Kirk.
"He cheated at chess," McCoy said.
Everyone turned. He had not spoken in four hours. He was slouched at the far end of the table with his arms folded.
"No," he said, after a moment, as if correcting the record. "That's not right. He didn't cheat." He turned a stylus over in his fingers. "He'd talk. The whole game. Ask you questions, tell you some story about somebody's sister on Rigel, and you'd think, this man is not even looking at the board. And then he'd take your queen."
He was quiet for a beat.
"I thought for about a year it was a technique. Something he did to rattle you. It wasn't. That's just how he thought. Out loud, at people, all the time, and if you weren't there he'd think out loud at the ship." He looked up. "He never stopped talking and he never told you a damn thing. Loneliest man I ever met, and he was never alone one minute in eleven years, and I only worked that out this afternoon, sitting in a sickbay I've apparently been standing in for a year and a half without him."
Nobody spoke.
Christopher Pike sat at the head of the table for a long moment.
"All right," he said, and stood up. "I believe you."
Scotty's head came up. "Sir?"
"I said I believe you." Pike walked to the port and looked out at a planet with no name. "Five officers came off that surface with the same internally consistent account, and not one of you contradicts the others. Mister Spock does not lie. Mister Scott hasn't the imagination. Lieutenant Uhura does not make mistakes. Lieutenant Galloway has said four words to me in three years and all of them were true. And Doctor McCoy has been sitting at my table looking like a man at a funeral."
He turned around. "And there is a hole in my ship. I have felt it since you came off that pad, and I cannot put my hand on it, and I have been in command of this vessel for thirteen years and I know what she is supposed to weigh."
"Sir," Spock said. "There is one thing you are entitled to understand, though I am not certain I understand it entirely myself."
"Go on."
"Six of us remember a history this universe does not contain. Everyone else aboard, yourself included, remembers only this one. I have considered why. At the moment the past was altered, the six of us were standing within the Guardian's field, on the surface, causally attached to the event. The change passed over us. It rewrote our records, our biographies, the cells of us, into this timeline. It did not reach what we were carrying."
"Your memory."
"Our memory. We are, in the most precise sense, the only witnesses in the universe to a thing that no longer happened. The ship was not in the field. You were not in the field. So you do not carry it, and cannot, and I would not wish it on you. There is a sixth, Captain: an ensign of security named Brandt, twenty-two, three weeks aboard, who stood in the field and carries exactly what we carry, and is one of us."
Pike absorbed that. "So what do you want?"
"We want to go back," said McCoy. "And take him out of it."
"And the thing on that planet has refused."
"Categorically," said Spock. "And permanently. I have examined its reasoning, sir, and I regret to report that it is sound."
"Then what am I supposed to do with that, Mister Spock?"
And Spock said, "I do not know, sir." He said it quietly, with his hands flat on the table, and he was thirty-six years old, and he had never said those four words in that order to a commanding officer.
Every person in that room heard it.
Christopher Pike looked at his science officer for a long moment.
"Then we'll find out," he said.