Kirk let the subject of the android rest where it lay, and put the conversation where it had to go.
"Doctor Morbius. Starfleet's file says that Captain Adams reported attacks on his people, and that his last transmission recommended no vessel come down here. That's where our records stop. What happened after that?"
Morbius looked out the window. "The attacks continued."
"From what?"
"I do not know."
"You've had twenty years."
"I am aware of the passage of time, Captain."
Kirk let that pass. There was no profit in it, and he had the impression Morbius had been waiting for him to take the bait.
"And the Bellerophon?"
Morbius was quiet several seconds. Somewhere at the back of the house a clock ticked, which struck Kirk as an extraordinary thing to hear on a dead world.
"When Captain Adams decided at last to abandon the planet," Morbius said, "they attempted to take the ship out of orbit."
Beside Kirk, Ostrow leaned forward a little.
"They never escaped."
"What happened?"
"The Bellerophon began to descend."
"Engine failure?"
"No."
"Navigational?"
"No." Morbius turned from the window and looked at him directly for the first time since they had sat down. "The ship was pulled down."
For a moment Kirk was certain he had misheard. "Pulled."
"Out of orbit. Against full power."
Spock's attention came up off the table like a hand closing. "By what mechanism?"
"If I knew that, Mr. Spock, I should have spent the last twenty years very differently."
"What was the magnitude of the force?"
"Large enough. I have no better figure and I decline to invent one for your record."
Morbius's voice had gone quieter, and Kirk understood that he was no longer being difficult. He was describing something.
"She fought it. Adams did everything a man could do with the ship he had. It made no difference at all. She was dragged down through the atmosphere and broken on the surface."
McCoy stared at him. "And you survived that."
"I was not aboard."
The words were perfectly simple and they made the room no easier to sit in. Kirk let the silence stand and watched the man who had made it. Morbius had told this story before, he thought, though there had been nobody on the planet to tell it to. He had told it to himself, and worn it smooth.
Kirk was still deciding how hard to push when Spock, who suffered from no such hesitation, went straight at it.
"You remained on the surface while the expedition evacuated."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I believed the danger would pass."
"Did it?"
Morbius offered nothing, and the silence he left was the most informative thing he had said.
Ostrow had spoken almost not at all since they had come through the door. Now he reached into his field case and brought out a data slate, and Morbius saw it before the screen had even come alive. Something went across the older man's face, quick and involuntary, and Kirk, who had been watching for it, still could not have named it. Recognition, certainly. Under that, something nearer alarm.
The four pages came up on the slate.
Morbius looked at them for a long moment. "You have those."
"They were transmitted before the expedition was lost," Ostrow said. "They are the only archaeological material that survived it."
Morbius rose from the table, and did not appear to notice that he had.
Ostrow enlarged the third page, and there it was, the handwriting in the margin beside the recurring figure, the question that had eaten six years of a Vulcan's life.
Containment?
"I have spent six years on these pages," Ostrow said.
"Why?"
"Because no one knew what they meant."
"And you do?"
"No."
Kirk saw that the answer surprised Morbius, and that the surprise was not entirely unwelcome to him. A man alone for twenty years, he thought, learns to expect other people to arrive with their conclusions already formed.
"But I know that you believed this symbol signified containment," Ostrow said.
Morbius's eyes stayed on the screen. "I believed a great many things twenty years ago."
"Was that one of them?"
"Yes."
"What was being contained?"
Morbius turned from the display, and for the first time his control let irritation through. "You are assuming the word was correct."
"I am asking whether you still believe it was."
"You have four pages, Doctor, from an investigation that ran for months and was never completed. You cannot reconstruct what we found from fragments."
"No," Ostrow said. "That is why I came."
Nobody said anything. Kirk came close to smiling, and kept it off his face with some effort, because for the first time since they had beamed down, somebody had gotten through.
Morbius looked at the Vulcan, then went to the window and stood with his back to the room. Past the terrace the plateau ran away to the ridges, red and empty under the green sky, and somewhere under all of it lay whatever the Bellerophon had found.
Kirk let him stand. In his experience a man on the edge of deciding something should not be crowded.
When Morbius turned around, his voice had changed. "You have all come a very long way to satisfy your curiosity."
"No," Kirk said. "We came because forty-one people died here."
Morbius's eyes moved to him.
"And because whatever killed them was strong enough to pull a starship out of orbit and put it in the ground. That is not a local matter, Doctor. If it is still here, every ship that enters this system is at risk, and so is every world within reach of it. I am not prepared to file a report that says a man on the surface told me to go away and I went."
That landed. Kirk watched him take it in, and watched him decide against it.
"Then file your report," Morbius said. "Write that Edward Morbius survived. That he is in excellent health. That he requires nothing from Starfleet and asks only to be left in peace. That is a complete account, and it has the advantage of being true."
"It isn't complete and you know it."
"It is complete as far as I am prepared to take it."
"Doctor." Kirk kept his voice level. "My orders are to determine what happened to that expedition. Those orders were written twenty years after the fact by people who believed every soul aboard the Bellerophon was dead. One of them is standing in front of me. That changes the situation, and it changes it beyond anything I'm authorized to decide on my own."
Morbius said nothing.
"So tonight I'll transmit a full report to Starfleet Command and request instructions. What they send back will decide a great deal about how the rest of this goes. It may be a survey mandate. It may be an order to take you off this planet and seal the system for another twenty years. I don't know, and I won't pretend to." Kirk paused. "I'd rather go into that conversation able to tell them what you've told me."
"You will not do it with my help."
"Then I'll do it without."
For the first time Morbius looked as though Kirk had said something that genuinely interested him. "And how do you propose to proceed?"
"The way we would on any uncharted world. Survey parties. Instruments. A great deal of tedious work, most of which my first officer enjoys more than I do." Kirk let some of the edge show. "We have a starship in orbit, Doctor, with sensors that can map most of this hemisphere in a day and a half. I'd prefer to spend that time listening to you instead. But I'll spend it either way."
He took out his communicator and opened it, there at the man's own table, and did not look away from him while he did it.
"Kirk to Enterprise."
"Enterprise. Scott here, Captain."
"Mr. Scott, I want you on the surface in the morning with an engineering detail and a full geological survey package. Subsurface sounding gear, everything we've got. There are readings under this plateau nobody can resolve and I want them resolved."
The pause that followed was the kind Kirk had learned to read as a chief engineer looking at a duty roster and deciding which of his people were about to lose a rest period.
"Aye, sir. How deep are we soundin'?"
"I don't know. That's the problem."
"Then I'll bring the heavy set."
"Do that. Kirk out."
He closed the communicator and put it back on his belt, and only then looked up.
Something crossed the older man's face that Kirk could not read.
Spock chose that moment to speak, in the tone he used when he was being scrupulously polite to someone he had already stopped believing. "Doctor Morbius. Our instruments register readings below this plateau that we cannot resolve. They extend to a depth our sensors are unable to measure."
"Interference," said Morbius. "This planet is full of it."
"That is one explanation."
"It is the one I have."
Ostrow had not moved from his place at the table, and the four pages still glowed on the slate in front of him. "Doctor. One question, and I will not ask another today. Does that symbol recur elsewhere in the material you recovered?"
Morbius looked at him for a considerable time.
"There is no material," he said.
It was a flat and entirely uncomplicated lie, and it was delivered so simply that nobody in the room found it worth challenging. Kirk had been lied to by experts, and the interesting thing about this one was that Morbius did not appear to expect it to be believed. He seemed to be putting up a wall and inviting them to notice its height.
