"There is a question every captain learns to ask early, and it has nothing to do with science," Kirk said to the recorder. "Not what is it. Who benefits."
He let the recorder run a moment.
"Forty of them were dead by the end of it. One more died later, of something ordinary, which I was told at the time was the only ordinary thing that ever happened on Altair IV. I had one man's word for all of it, and it was four days before I understood how much of that word was worth having. I set it down here the way it was given to me, because that is how I had it when I made my decisions."
* *
The briefing room was empty except for the three of them, and the planet turned slowly on the screen at the end of the table, green and unhurried, with the terminator creeping up on the plateau where the house stood.
Kirk had not eaten. He had gone from the transporter room to the bridge and from the bridge to here, and had spent most of the trip up thinking about a phaser held perfectly level at Spock's chest.
"All right, Bones. You asked me on the plateau." He looked at McCoy. "Exo III."
McCoy sat back. "I read the report."
"You read my report. There were about four things in it I couldn't put in a way that would survive a records clerk." Kirk turned his cup a half turn and did not drink from it. "There was an android down there called Ruk. Eight feet of him, roughly. He had been running under that ice longer than anybody could calculate, maintaining machinery for a civilization that was not there anymore. Spock will give you the figures. I only know how he sounded."
"Approximately five hundred thousand years," Spock said.
"Ruk told me what happened to the people who built him." Kirk looked up. "They made the androids. The androids got better at everything than the people were. And at some point the people worked out where that was going, and moved to shut them down."
McCoy was very still.
"They didn't get it done," Kirk said. "Ruk put it to me as an equation. The Old Ones had to be destroyed because survival cancels out programming. He had forgotten it for half a million years, and I watched him remember it standing two meters in front of me."
Nobody said anything for a moment. On the screen the terminator reached the plateau and the house went into the dark.
"You are describing Exo III," Spock said. "This is not Exo III."
"No. It's a dead civilization nobody has heard of, with an intact machine standing in a man's sitting room, and forty people in the ground." Kirk let that sit. "Doctor Morbius says something on that planet killed his expedition and he does not know what it was. He also says there is a machine down there that was on this world before anyone from Earth ever saw it, and that nobody woke it up, and that it came back on by itself." He looked from one of them to the other. "I'd like somebody to tell me why I shouldn't put those two sentences next to each other."
"Because they do not fit," Spock said.
"Then make them not fit, Mr. Spock. I'd be glad of it."
Spock folded his hands. He had, Kirk noticed, brought no notes with him, which meant he had done the work in advance and was not going to enjoy delivering it.
"I have compared the sensor record of Robby with the Exo III material. There are similarities of principle. The power system is of a kind we have encountered nowhere else, and the two are not identical, but they are not unrelated either. Convergent engineering is possible. Two species facing the same problem may arrive at the same solution, as unrelated creatures on unrelated worlds arrive independently at the eye."
"And?"
"And that is the most I can say. The alternative explanations are a good deal less comfortable, and I have no evidence for any of them."
"Then let me put the part I can't get past," Kirk said. "On Exo III the machines killed the people who made them. Ruk told me that himself, and he was proud of it in whatever way a thing like Ruk is proud of anything. On this planet the machine stands in the corner of a man's sitting room and will not lift a hand against anybody, and looks after the man who found it, and drives his guests in from the beam-down point because the walk would tire them." He looked at the screen. "The same kind of technology. The opposite outcome. Either something happened here that did not happen there, or somebody made very sure of it."
"That is a useful formulation," Spock said, "and it rests on two examples. Two points establish a line only in geometry."
"I know what it rests on. I want it written down anyway, because if we find out which of those two it is, we'll have most of this."
McCoy had been quiet a while. "There's a third thing neither of you has said, so I will. A machine that protects one man isn't safe. It's loyal." He turned his cup slowly. "Loyalty has a subject, Jim. Ours happens not to be it."
Nobody had an answer for that.
"There is a further question," Spock said, "which I have been unable to set aside since the surface. Doctor Morbius states that the android was inactive when the Bellerophon arrived, that nothing was repaired, nothing connected and no power supplied, and that he restored himself."
"That's what he said."
"Consider what a shutdown is. It is an order, given by whoever is doing the shutting down. If the builders of that facility deactivated their artificial population because they had become afraid of it, they had no reason whatever to provide a means by which it might resume. One does not fit a lock and then hand over the key."
Kirk sat forward. "Go on."
"Then either something was left attached to that order, a condition of some kind, or the shutdown was less complete than it appeared, or that android was not shut down in the manner of the others. I can see no fourth possibility." Spock paused. "There is one precedent. On Exo III the machines lay dormant for approximately five hundred thousand years, and Ruk did not wake on a schedule. He woke when human beings arrived."
The room was very quiet.
"So the question isn't only who built him," Kirk said slowly. "It's who let him wake. And what the condition was."
"Yes."
"And if the condition was somebody arriving, then the Bellerophon started this the moment she made orbit." Kirk looked at the planet, dark now on the screen. "Eleven weeks before she came out of the sky."
"That is suggestive," Spock said. "It is not proof."
"No. Put it in the file anyway."
McCoy shifted in his chair. "Jim, that machine had a phaser on Spock's chest at a range of two meters and was ordered to fire. Twice."
"I know. I was there."
"It didn't fire."
"It didn't fire in Morbius's house," Kirk said, "on Morbius's furniture, in a demonstration Morbius arranged, for an audience Morbius selected. Bones, I'm not saying it was staged. I'm saying I've been handed a safety certificate by the only man on the planet who knows what the machine can do, and he handed it to me before I asked for it."
"That is a fair observation," said Spock.
"Thank you."
"It is also not evidence."
"I know that too." Kirk got up and went to the screen, where the planet had gone almost entirely into night. "Spock. When you asked him how many others there were, what exactly did he say?"
"He said, there is one android on this planet."
"Is."
"Yes."
"Not there was one. Not we found one." Kirk turned around. "He's a precise man. Twenty years alone with nobody to correct him and he still builds a sentence like a lawyer. He answered the question he wanted instead of the one you asked."
McCoy rubbed his eyes. "All right. Suppose you're right. Suppose that thing killed forty of them. Why is Morbius alive? Why is his daughter alive? He's had twenty years down there sleeping under the same roof as it, and it does the dishes."
"That," Kirk said, "is the part that keeps me up."
"There is a further difficulty," said Spock. "On Exo III, the androids destroyed their makers and then continued. They maintained the installation and waited. Here, if the same thing occurred, we would expect to find a functioning civilization of machines. We find one android, a man, a young woman, and a house."
"So either it didn't happen here," Kirk said, "or something stopped it."
"Or something else occurred entirely, of which we presently know nothing."
McCoy looked between them. "You two realize you're sitting here calmly discussing whether a fellow who spent the afternoon serving us cold cider is living with the thing that killed his friends."
"Yes," said Spock.
"Just checking."
Kirk went back to the table and sat down, and for a while nobody said anything at all.
"There's one more thing," he said at last, "and I like it least. Adams reported the android the week he found him. Scans, contact recordings, all of it, and then for eleven weeks the reports go on coming and the android is never in them again. Not a line. A Starfleet captain sends home the most significant discovery of his career and then simply stops mentioning it, and eleven weeks after that his ship comes out of orbit and hits the ground." He looked up. "Somebody down there decided what Starfleet was going to be told. I don't know yet which one of them it was."
*
He wrote the report himself, and it took him three hours, which was two and a half hours longer than Starfleet allowed for such things and about a tenth of what the subject deserved.
He put in all of it. The house no search mission had seen, and Morbius's claim of a screen that was not operating. The android, the three facts Morbius had conceded, and the many he had not. The demonstration with the phaser, exactly as it happened, including his own doubts about it. Adams's silence. The subsurface readings and the depth at which the sensors gave up. The young woman born on that planet who had never had a conversation with anyone but her father and a machine.
He read it over once and added a last paragraph recommending a full scientific mission under starship escort, and then sat looking at that paragraph a long while before he decided to leave it in.
Uhura sent it at 0140 ship time.
The answer came back at 0655, priority, over Starfleet Command's own authentication, and Kirk read it standing up in the middle of his quarters with his uniform half on.
The Federation Council had been convened during the night. Doctor Edward Morbius was, as of that transmission, the surviving member of a lost Starfleet expedition and a material witness to the loss of a starship with forty hands. He was to be brought aboard the Enterprise at the earliest practicable opportunity and returned to Earth. His daughter, being a Federation citizen born of Federation nationals, was to accompany him.
The artificial being designated Robby was not to be brought aboard the Enterprise under any circumstances.
Kirk read that line three times.
No exception for observation. No exception for study. All examination of the android was to be conducted on the surface under the direction of the vessel's chief engineer, with security present, and no component, sample or recording of its internal systems was to be carried aboard. If the object could not be examined on the planet, it was not to be examined at all.
He put the message down and finished dressing.
Spock was waiting outside the briefing room with the overnight sensor summaries, and Kirk handed him the flimsy without a word and watched him read.
"Command has been thorough," Spock said.
"Command has been frightened. That's a different thing, and it's usually faster."
"The prohibition is not unreasonable, Captain."
"It isn't unreasonable at all. It's the order I would have written." Kirk took the flimsy back. "That's what bothers me about it. Somebody at Starfleet Command read the same page I did and arrived at Exo III without ever being told about it."
McCoy came around the corner with a coffee in each hand, which was as near to an apology as he came before seven in the morning. Kirk gave him the message and waited.
McCoy read it twice, and Kirk saw him get to the second paragraph, and saw his face change.
"They want him off the planet."
"They want him off the planet."
"Jim, that man has been on that world for twenty years. He buried his wife in it. Everything he's built, everything he's learned, whatever it is he's been protecting so hard he'd rather lie to a starship captain at his own table than talk about it, all of it is down there." McCoy set his cup down. "And you're going to walk into his house this morning and tell him he's leaving."
"Yes."
"How do you think that's going to go?"
"Badly," Kirk said. "The daughter's the part I can't work out. She's nineteen years old and she's never spoken to another living soul. Starfleet has just ordered me to put her on a starship and take her to Earth, and God knows I think she ought to see it." He looked at the door. "I also think there is exactly one person on that planet who is entitled to make that decision, and it isn't Starfleet Command and it isn't Edward Morbius."
"It's her."
"It's her."
McCoy said nothing for a moment. When he did, it was quieter than the rest of it had been. "We've seen this before, you know. One brilliant man, a long way from anybody, and a girl he keeps at home and decides what she's allowed to know."
Kirk looked up. "Where?"
And McCoy stopped.
Kirk watched him stop. It was not a man losing his thread. It was a man arriving somewhere and putting a foot down before he got there, and Kirk had known Leonard McCoy long enough to see the difference.
Spock said nothing whatever. He did not look at McCoy, and he did not look at Kirk, and the not-looking was so precise that Kirk felt it go by him like a draft from a door he had not known was there.
"Bones."
"It doesn't matter." McCoy picked his cup back up. "An old case. It came out badly and there's nothing in it that helps her."
There was something in the room that Kirk could not put a name to, and no reason at all to pursue it, and he had a landing party to brief. He let it go.
Behind him, his first officer and his surgeon exchanged one look, and neither of them put a word of it in a log.
Spock had gone back to the sensor summaries. "Captain. Mr. Scott's detail is standing by in the transporter room."
"Then let's not keep him." Kirk finished the coffee. It was terrible. He set the cup down on the nearest console for somebody else to deal with. "Bones, you're with me. Mr. Spock, you have the ship."
"Sir." Spock's voice stopped him in the doorway. "If the prohibition is correct, and the android is what Starfleet fears it may be, then this morning we will be removing from that planet the only two people it has not harmed in twenty years."
Kirk stood there a moment.
"I'd thought of that," he said, and went to get his party.
* *
The doors closed behind him, and the two officers he had left in the corridor did not immediately move.
"You know what I nearly said in there," McCoy said.
"I do."
"Say it, then. I'd like to hear somebody say it out loud."
"Flint," said Spock.
McCoy let out a breath. "Flint."
"The parallel is imperfect."
"The parallel is close enough to put me off my food." McCoy leaned back against the bulkhead. "One brilliant man, immortal or near enough, sitting on a private planet with a library and a laboratory and no company he did not design. He built himself a daughter. Taught her everything worth knowing and a good deal that wasn't. Seventeen fields, he said, and she could play Brahms better than Brahms, and she had never once in her existence walked out of a door he had not opened for her."
"Rayna Kapec," Spock said.
"And when the day came that she had to choose for herself, between him and something else, she could not survive the choosing. It killed her. Not him. The choice." McCoy looked up. "Now tell me what I watched this afternoon."
"You watched a nineteen-year-old woman recite the contents of her father's library."
"I watched a girl who counts things because there is nothing else to count, in a house with one door and one man and one machine in it. And I'll tell you the part that's worse, Spock. Flint had to build his. This one was handed a living daughter and made the same thing out of her anyway."
Spock was silent a while, in the particular way he had when he was not disagreeing.
"There is a distinction," he said at last. "Rayna Kapec was an artifact. Altaira Morbius is not."
"Is that a distinction, or is it just materials?"
"It is the distinction upon which everything else depends, Doctor, and you know that as well as I do. It is also, I would suggest, not the useful comparison. The useful comparison is not between the daughters. It is between the fathers."
McCoy said nothing for a while. Somewhere aft, the ship went on making the small sounds it made at that hour.
"He doesn't remember her," he said finally. "Does he."
"No."
"Was that mercy?"
"It was necessary."
"That isn't what I asked."
Spock looked down the empty corridor, at nothing at all. "No," he said. "It is not."
McCoy pushed himself off the bulkhead and picked up the cup he had set down. "Then I'll tell you what I want out of this one, and you can file it wherever you file the things I say. That girl is going to be asked to choose, sooner than anybody down there is ready for. I have seen this man's work before, and I have seen how it ends." He started for the turbolift. "When it comes, I want us to be better at it than we were last time."
Spock stood where he was until the corridor was quiet again.
Then he went to the bridge, and made no entry in any log concerning the conversation.
