"Mister Spock. A word."
It was 0230. Spock had been in the science lab for nineteen hours, which was not unusual, and had been running the same class of simulation for eleven of them, which was, and he looked up from a console covered in failed solutions to find Christopher Pike in the doorway in an off-duty jacket with two cups of coffee.
He held one out. Spock took it.
"You don't drink coffee," Pike said.
"No, sir."
"Hold it anyway. It gives your hands something to do." Pike sat on the edge of a laboratory table, against three regulations he had written himself. "How long has it been?"
"Sir?"
"Since the planet."
"Fourteen months, sir. Four days."
Pike nodded slowly. "You've been in this lab three nights a week for fourteen months. You've filed nineteen requests for computer time on subjects that have nothing to do with any mission this ship has flown, every one of them approved, none of them approved by me. I gave you a direct order to stop, Commander, in the sixth week, in my ready room. You kept it for one fortnight. And I have known, every day since, that you were disobeying it, and I have chosen, every day since, to let it happen."
Spock said nothing.
"I have a hole in my ship," said Pike. He turned the cup slowly. "You told me that fourteen months ago. There was a man who was supposed to have this chair, and I believed you, and then you all went back to work and I flew this ship to nine systems and told myself it was over. And it is not over. And I know it is not over because I feel the hole every single day, and I cannot put my hand on it, and it is driving me out of my mind."
He looked up. "So I am going to ask you a direct question, Commander, and I want a direct answer. If you find a way. If you get him back. What happens to me?"
The lab hummed.
Spock stood with a cup of coffee he was never going to drink in a hand that did not move.
* *
He had run the projection nine weeks earlier.
He had run it in this room, at this console, at 0400, alone, and he had known before he ran it what it would say, and he had run it anyway, because he was a scientist and did not permit himself the luxury of not looking. It had taken him four days and drawn on eleven separate sources, and it was the most competent piece of predictive historiography anybody in Starfleet had ever attempted.
In the corrected timeline, James T. Kirk assumes command of the Enterprise in 2265. Command of a Constitution-class vessel is transferred from Captain Christopher Pike, who is promoted to fleet captain. Fleet captains conduct inspection tours. Inspection tours include Class J training vessels. There is a baffle plate.
The projection went on for nineteen pages, and Spock had read all of them, and then read them again, and sat perfectly still in front of the console for one hour and forty minutes.
Probability that the injury to Christopher Pike does not occur in the corrected timeline: 0.4 percent. Probability that it occurs: 99.6 percent. Nature of injury: irreversible. Ambulatory function: nil. Verbal function: nil. Cognitive function: unimpaired.
Cognitive function: unimpaired.
That was the line. Spock had looked at those three words for a very long time, and discovered that a Vulcan can be sick, and that it does not feel like an emotion, it feels like a fact arriving too fast to be absorbed, and he had gone to his knees once, briefly, beside the console, and gotten up again, and told nobody, and never told anybody, for a hundred and six years.
And then he had deleted the file. Completely, at the root, purged the buffer, overwritten the sector. It was the first time in his adult life he had destroyed a finding, and he had known exactly what he was doing, and had done it anyway.
* *
"I do not know, sir," Spock said.
Christopher Pike looked at him.
And Spock, who had been raised on Vulcan and educated at the Academy and had spent his life inside an architecture of exactness, discovered that a lie does not feel like anything at all when you tell it. It goes out of your mouth like any other sentence. It is only afterward, in the two or three seconds afterward, watching the other man's face accept it, that you find out what you have done. And by then it is a thing that has happened.
"All right," Pike said.
He put the coffee down on the console, stood, stretched, rubbed the back of his neck the way a tired man does, and went to the door, and stopped there.
"Spock."
"Sir."
"You're a bad liar," said Christopher Pike.
And he went out.