He worked it out at 0300, alone, and it took him four minutes, and he had been avoiding it for fourteen months.
That was the shameful part. Spock sat in the science lab on the last night before they took her out, with the whole of the arithmetic laid out and a decision made and an operation planned, and understood that he had spent fourteen months refusing to ask himself one question.
What happens to Christopher Pike afterward.
Not the injury. He had established the injury, in nineteen pages of the most competent predictive work he had ever done, and deleted it, and lied about it to the man's face. But he had never once gone past it. He had let the projection end at the chair, because the chair was unbearable, and a mind carrying something unbearable will do a great deal of rigorous work in every direction except the one that hurts.
He spent the four minutes now.
Fleet Captain Christopher Pike, maintained at Starbase 11 in a life-support chair. Unable to move. Unable to speak. His mind entirely intact. For the rest of his natural life. Duration unknown. Estimated between eleven and thirty years.
Then he opened a second file, one he had not opened in thirteen years, classified above his own clearance, most of it written in his own hand.
TALOS IV. GENERAL ORDER SEVEN. NO VESSEL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE SHALL VISIT TALOS IV. THE PENALTY FOR VIOLATION IS DEATH.
And underneath it, in a survey report dated 2254, at the age of twenty-two: The Talosians are capable of generating illusion of a fidelity indistinguishable from reality, sustained indefinitely, responsive to the desires of the subject. Subject Vina, a survivor of the Columbia, is severely disfigured and has been maintained by them for eighteen years in a state of apparent physical wholeness. She is aware that it is illusion. She has elected to remain. Captain Pike declined their offer.
Spock sat perfectly still in front of that file for a long time.
There is a world, and I know where it is, and I have been there, and there is a woman on it who is also broken, and who has been made whole, and who chose to stay. And they asked him once, and he said no, because he had legs. And in three years he will not have legs. And he will still say no, because he is Christopher Pike, and he will not ask anybody to break General Order Seven for him. So he will not ask. So somebody will have to do it without asking him.
He put both hands flat on the console. And there it was. He examined it with the whole of his training, and found, at the bottom of it, the thing he had been afraid of.
I want this to make it easier.
He named it, and did not flinch.
I have found a door out of the chair, and the part of me that has not slept in fourteen months has just said: then it is all right, then I may cripple him, because I have a way to make him whole again afterward. That is a lie. It is an extremely good one, and it arrived within four seconds of the file opening, and it is the most dangerous thought I have ever had.
He closed his eyes.
Christopher Pike is going to burn, and sit in a chair, and be conscious, for years, and there is nothing I can do to spare him one hour of it, because it is his to choose and he has already chosen it, and would choose it again in front of me if I were fool enough to give him the chance. I am not going to be permitted the comfort of having spared him. But there is one thing I can do afterward, that he will neither ask for nor allow if asked.
He opened his eyes. He wrote nothing down, because he had a memory that had never failed him. He simply held it.
There is a world where the broken are made whole, and I know where it is, and I have stood on it. And in the year that he is in that chair I will take him to it, and give him back a body and a sky and a woman who loved him, and I will not tell him beforehand, because he would forbid it, and I will not tell him afterward what it cost, because he would grieve, and I will not tell Jim, ever, because he would work backward from it in nine seconds and be destroyed. So there will be no one who knows. And I find, examining it with everything I have, that I am not afraid of it, and I am not ashamed of it, and that it is the first thing in fourteen months that has felt like a door and not a wall.
He got up and put the room back the way he had found it, because the discipline of small correct actions is the only floor a man has when everything above it has gone.
And at the door, at 0340, Spock of Vulcan stopped, and stood a moment in the dark, and said out loud, to an empty room, the only prayer he ever made in his life, and it was not addressed to anything:
"I will put it right. Both of them. It will take me years, and I will not be forgiven, and I find that I have stopped asking to be."
Then he went to bed, and slept for four hours, and in the morning they took the ship.