Brooklyn, October 1962
The worst thirteen days of James Kirk's life were spent in a kitchen.
He had commanded a starship in wartime. He had stood on a bridge with the shields down and a cruiser closing at flank and nine seconds on the clock, and he had never been as frightened as he was for thirteen days in October of 1962, sitting at a kitchen table on Nostrand Avenue with a radio on the counter, doing absolutely nothing.
Because he knew. He knew how it came out, the way he knew the alphabet. And he sat there for thirteen days with the knowledge in him like a swallowed coin, and every hour a very quiet, very reasonable, entirely insane voice at the back of his skull said:
But you have never been here before. This is the corrected timeline, not the one you memorized. You know what happened in the world where she died. You do not know what happens here. You have no idea whether the man on that submarine is the same man.
* *
He did the arithmetic on the second day, at four in the morning, on the back of an envelope, and then he burned the envelope.
Changes I have made to this timeline that I know of: one woman does not die on 21 November 1930. One peace movement is not built. Two hundred men do not eat at Twenty-first Street after June 1931. One boy was born who would otherwise not have been, and is dead in a war in Korea, and leaves no one behind him. Halina Kosinski believed for two years that her son would live. I have repaired eleven thousand radios, better than the man who would otherwise have repaired them. Every one of those is a stone dropped in a pond. And in nineteen days, or nine, a submarine officer in the Atlantic is going to be asked to launch a nuclear torpedo. And I do not know his name. And I do not know whether he was ever born.
*
She found him on the fourth night at the window in the dark, fully dressed, at three in the morning.
"Come to bed."
"In a minute."
She came and stood next to him and looked out at the street, and the street was empty, and there was a light on in exactly one window across the way, and somebody else, somewhere, was also not sleeping.
"They have been at the market all day," she said. "Buying tinned things. Mrs. Ferraro has forty pounds of flour and no plan. Kathleen Sorkin has taken the children to her sister's in Vermont."
"Yes."
"Jim." She did not look at him. "Do we live?"
He did not answer.
"I have not asked you a single question in thirty-one years. Not one. Not about the war. Not about Anna Kosinski. Not about the sound you make in your sleep, or the drawer you keep locked, or why you would not enlist when every other man on this block went and you were the only one who was not afraid. I have never asked, because you told me once you could not tell me, and I decided to believe you, and I have kept that bargain, and it has cost me more than you will ever know.
"And I am asking now. One question. Once. Ever. Do we live?"
The clock on the shelf went on doing what clocks do.
And James Kirk, who had spent thirty-one years standing on a beam in the dark, closed his eyes and made the only calculation of his entire life that he never afterward regretted.
"Yes," he said.
She did not move. "Say it like you know."
He opened his eyes. "I know. It ends on the twenty-eighth. There's going to be a broadcast, and it's going to be short, and it's going to sound like nothing, and it's going to be everything. And there's a man on a ship out there, Edith, and nobody is ever going to know his name, and he is going to say no. That's the whole of it. One man in a metal room saying no. We live. Everybody lives. This one, we win."
And Edith Keeler stood at a window in Brooklyn in the middle of the night at the end of the world and let out a breath she had been holding for four days.
"Then come to bed," she said.
* *
He lay awake until dawn. He lay awake until dawn on every one of the remaining nights, and on the night of the twenty-seventh he did not go to bed at all, because on the twenty-seventh, in the world he had memorized, a Soviet submarine designated B-59 had been depth-charged by American destroyers, out of contact with Moscow, with a nuclear torpedo aboard and two of the three required officers voting to launch it.
He sat in the kitchen from midnight until six with the radio off. He did not know the man's name. He never found it out; it was not released in his lifetime, and would not be for another forty years. And James Kirk sat in a kitchen in Brooklyn on the twenty-seventh of October, 1962, in the dark, and said, out loud, to a man he could not name and could not reach and could not help:
"Please."
And at six o'clock the sun came up.
And on the twenty-eighth there was a broadcast, and it was short, and it sounded like nothing. And Edith came into the kitchen and found her husband with his head in his hands, and she did not ask, and she put two fingers on the back of his neck, and stood there a long time.