The light had gone long and low across the plateau while they talked, and the room had taken the color of the sky outside, which was the color of deep water with a lamp held under it. Morbius had not moved to turn anything on. Kirk had the impression the man could have found every object in the house blindfolded, and probably had.
He waited until Morbius had come back from the window and sat down again. Then he put the last of it on the table.
"There's one more thing my report has to account for," Kirk said. "The manifest. Forty-two names went into the Altair system aboard the Bellerophon, and Starfleet has carried all forty-two as dead for twenty years. You are one of them. I have to say something about the other forty-one, and about anyone else who is on this planet."
"There is no one else on this planet."
It came a fraction too quickly, and Morbius heard it himself, and Kirk watched him hear it.
Spock had already opened the file on his tricorder, and he read from it in the flat, courteous voice that made the thing worse rather than better. "The Bellerophon's manifest lists Julia Morbius, planetary geologist. The expedition's medical records, transmitted in the ordinary way before the loss, show her under the care of the ship's surgeon and pregnant, in her fourth month at the date of the last medical report Starfleet holds. That report predates the loss by some months."
Nobody at the table moved.
"My wife is dead," Morbius said.
"I'm sorry," said Kirk, and meant it.
"She lived six years after the ship." He turned his glass a quarter turn on the table, and stopped, as though he had caught himself doing something undignified. "The child was born eleven days after it fell. On this planet, in that room, with no physician within twenty light years and no help of any kind except what I could provide myself. She lived. She is nineteen years old."
McCoy had his elbows on the table. When he spoke he was no longer sparring with anybody. "Doctor. What did your wife die of?"
"Natural causes."
"That's not a diagnosis. That's a phrase people use at funerals."
"It is the phrase I have," Morbius said. "There was no physician. There was no laboratory worth the name, and the instruments I had were built to read rock. She was well, and then she was tired, and then she was ill, and it took less than a season, and at the end of it I could not have told you what I was treating." He looked at McCoy without any hostility at all, and that was harder to answer. "You would like a better answer. So would I. I have had nineteen years to want one."
"Was she in pain?"
"At the end. Yes."
"I'm sorry," McCoy said.
"So am I." Morbius turned his glass back to where it had been. "It was not the planet, Doctor, if that is your next question. Nothing came out of the dark and took her. She died the way people have always died, which is the one part of this world that turned out to be entirely ordinary."
McCoy let out a breath. "Doctor, she's been alone out here her whole life."
"She has not been alone. She has had me." Morbius stood. "And since you will otherwise report that I am concealing her, which would be inaccurate and inconvenient, you had better meet her. Robby."
The android had already turned toward the inner door.
She came in a few moments later, and Kirk, who had been prepared for a great many things, found that he had not been prepared for this.
She was perhaps twenty, fair-haired, in something light and plainly made by hand. She came to the end of the table and stopped, and looked at the four of them one after another with a directness that had nothing of shyness in it and nothing of flirtation either. It was not the way a young woman looks at strangers. It was the way a serious person looks at an exhibit described to her all her life that has now, unaccountably, turned up in her father's house.
"My daughter," Morbius said. "Altaira."
"Miss Morbius," Kirk said, and stood. The others stood with him, and she watched them do it with open interest, as though she had read about the custom somewhere and was pleased to find it accurate.
"You are the captain," she said. "I have heard your voice. It was different through the speaker."
"Most voices are. This is Mr. Spock, my first officer. Doctor McCoy, my chief surgeon. Doctor Ostrow."
"My daughter has had the advantage of a somewhat concentrated education," Morbius said. "She has read every book in this house."
"That's a good many books," McCoy said.
"Four thousand and eleven," said Altaira. "Six of them are in languages my father does not read, so I taught myself, and two of those are only poetry, which I think was a waste of the shelf. I also have the ship's technical library, the whole of the Federation cultural archive to the year the Bellerophon left, and hours of recordings." She said all of it the way another young woman might have given the time of day. "I have never had a conversation with anyone but my father and Robby."
Spock's eyebrow rose a considerable distance. "Doctor Morbius, that is a remarkable body of study for one person."
"She had no competing demands upon her attention," said Morbius.
McCoy's jaw tightened, and Kirk put a hand flat on the table, a small movement that meant not here and not now, and McCoy let it go.
She considered each of them in turn, and her eyes rested on Spock a moment longer than on the others, and then on Ostrow. She did not ask. Kirk watched her decide not to, and thought that whatever else Edward Morbius had failed to give this girl, he had given her a formidable amount of self-command.
"You came down in the open," she said, "three kilometers out, and rode in with Robby. I watched you from the terrace."
"We did."
"Why?"
"Because those were the coordinates your father sent us."
She turned her head toward her father, and something passed between them that Kirk could not read, and she let that one go as well.
"I have seen men before," she said, to Kirk, quite calmly. "In my father's recordings. A great many of them. They were not standing where you are standing."
"No," Kirk said. "I don't imagine they were."
"Altaira." Morbius did not raise his voice. He did not have to. "The captain is leaving."
"Yes, Father." She inclined her head to the four of them with a formality that would have looked absurd on anyone else, and left the room the way she had come into it, without hurrying and without looking back.
Kirk let a moment go by. "Doctor. My report goes out tonight. We should have Starfleet's answer by this time tomorrow, and we'll begin the survey in the morning either way. I'd like to come back, at whatever hour suits you."
Morbius's courtesy came down over everything like a lid closing. "You will do as you think best, Captain. You have made that clear."
Robby brought the vehicle around and drove them back across the plateau to the beam-down coordinates, and nobody said a great deal on the way. McCoy sat with his arms folded and his jaw set. Ostrow watched the ridges go by as though he could see through them.
Kirk looked back once. The house stood alone on the plateau with the last of the light on its windows, the ridges going up dark and empty behind it for kilometers in every direction, and somewhere under all of it, at a depth no instrument the Enterprise carried could reach, something had been waiting long enough to be patient about it.
"Kirk to Enterprise. Four to beam up."
* * *
Altaira waited until the sound of the vehicle had gone out of hearing before she came back into the room.
Her father stood where they had left him, at the window, with the four glasses still on the table behind him and one of them untouched. She had counted. She counted most things. There was not a great deal else to do with the hours.
"Father."
"They are gone," he said, without turning.
"Two of them were not like the others."
Now he did turn.
"The tall one, and the one with the case," she said. "Their ears. Their eyebrows. The tall one did not move his face when the doctor made a joke, and the other one did not move his face at all. And the color of them, under the skin, was not the color of yours."
"You observed a great deal in four minutes."
"I have had nineteen years to practice on you, and you are only one man." She said it without any malice whatever. "Are they ill?"
"No."
"Then what are they?"
Morbius was quiet long enough that she thought, as she often did, that he might not answer at all. Then he said, "Do you remember what I have told you about the galaxy? That it is not empty. That there are a great many worlds, and that a good many of them have brought forth life, and that some of that life thinks, and builds, and asks questions."
"You have told me since I was small."
"Then you have the answer already. They are not human. They are Vulcans, from a world called Vulcan, which is a very old and very disciplined civilization, and they are as much people as you or I. More than some." He said the last of it as though it had escaped from him, and there was no one in the room to hear it but his daughter, who noticed everything.
Altaira absorbed this. "They command their feelings."
"They set them aside. It is not the same thing, and I would not recommend it to you."
"The captain does not set anything aside."
Her father looked at her a while.
"No," he said. "He does not."
She went to the table and began collecting the glasses, and took her time about it, and thought about a man's voice coming out of a speaker and then, later, out of a man.
"They are coming back tomorrow," she said.
"So the captain informs me."
"Good," said Altaira, and carried the glasses out.
