Lieutenant Galloway was thirty-one years old, had been in Starfleet security for nine years, and had never once been mentioned in a dispatch.
He was good at his job, in the way men in his line of work are good at it, which is that nothing happened to the people he stood next to. He had been on forty-one landing parties. He had lost one man, in 2266, on Kappa Fornacis, and had written the letter himself and had not been asked to.
Nobody talked to him. That was not a complaint. He would have found the idea that it was a complaint very strange, and if you put it to him he would have said, truthfully, that a security officer who is being talked to is a security officer who is not watching the door.
But he had been on that plain. He had stood on it for nine hours and watched a Vulcan come apart, and he had gone back to a ship where a dead man sat in the chair, and he had gone to the armory and cleaned his phaser and racked it and signed the log. And then he had gone to his post.
And nobody had asked him anything. For three weeks nobody asked him anything. He kept the watch in a universe where his captain had never existed, and nobody had told him to, and every night at 0100 he wrote a line in a personal log that Starfleet permitted and no one ever read.
Day 19. Nothing to report.
Day 21. Nothing to report. Doctor McCoy has stopped eating in the mess. He eats in his office. Somebody should say something to him.
Day 22. Nothing to report. I have not said anything to him.
Day 26. Nothing to report. Mister Spock has requested computer time on the secondary banks. Those banks sit behind a security lock and I am the officer of record for it, and he came to my station and stood there and did not ask me for the code. I gave it to him. He did not ask why. I would not have been able to answer.
Day 31. Nothing to report. I have realized something and I am putting it here because there is nowhere else to put it.
There are six people in the universe who know that Captain Kirk existed. Four of them are extraordinary. The other two are Brandt and me, two security men who were only ever standing where we were told, and who remember anyway. We do not talk about it much. There is not much to say. But he knows that I know, and I know that he knows, and on the bad nights that has turned out to be worth more than I would have guessed.
I have thought about this and concluded it is not a coincidence. It is a fact about the door. Everyone who was standing in front of it remembers, and Brandt and I were standing in front of it, because standing in front of things is our profession.
I do not know what use I am going to be. But I was there, and I remember him, and if it comes to it I will go.
Nothing further to report.