The second time Kirk came down to Altair IV, Morbius was waiting for him.
There was no vehicle. Robby stood at the edge of the terrace with his hands at his sides, and Morbius stood several paces in front of him with his own clasped behind his back, and out among the low trees to the west Altaira stood with one hand resting on the neck of an animal large enough to stop McCoy in the middle of a sentence.
It was a tiger, or near enough that the difference did not improve the situation. It stood shoulder-high to the girl, striped gold and black, the head broad, the forelegs heavy with muscle, and when the transporter let them go it turned and watched four men finish arriving on its planet. Its tail moved once through the grass.
"Jim," McCoy said.
"I see it."
"Good. I was beginning to think I was having another bad morning."
Ostrow had dismissed the animal altogether. He was looking past the house at the ridges, and at the ground in front of the ridges, like a man for whom the whole planet had turned transparent overnight.
Scott had not dismissed anything. "Captain. That lass is pettin' it."
Altaira heard him from thirty meters away. "He likes to be scratched here," she said, and put her fingers up under the animal's jaw, and the tiger lifted its head and closed its eyes.
"Of course he does," said McCoy.
Nothing in Morbius's face suggested that any part of this required comment.
"Captain."
"Doctor."
Kirk had decided on the way down that there was no graceful way to say it, and that Edward Morbius was not a man who would reward the attempt.
"Starfleet answered my report."
"I assumed it would."
"They want you aboard the Enterprise. You are to return to Earth with us."
Out among the trees, Altaira's hand stopped under the tiger's jaw.
Morbius did not move at all. "No."
It was not shock and it was not defiance. It was a refusal that had existed in the man before the order did, waiting for something to attach itself to.
"Doctor, this isn't a request."
"Then Starfleet has mistaken distance for authority."
"You're a Federation citizen and the surviving member of a lost expedition."
"I was a Federation citizen when Starfleet left this world alone for twenty years."
"After Captain Adams told them not to come back."
Something tightened in the older man's face. "And you believe yourself wiser than Adams."
"No. I believe I have information he didn't."
"You have questions."
"I have forty dead people, a starship pulled out of orbit, an artificial being nobody can explain, and an installation under this plateau you have spent two decades declining to discuss." Kirk let that stand. "That's past questions, Doctor."
The tiger's head came down. Altaira kept one hand on its neck, but she was no longer looking at the animal.
"And my daughter?" Morbius said.
Kirk had known it was coming and had been unable to think of a way to blunt it. "Starfleet's order includes her."
Altaira drew breath. Her father answered before she could use it.
"She will not."
"That's her decision."
Morbius turned his head, the smallest movement he had made since they materialized and by some distance the most revealing. "Captain. My daughter has no conception of what your world is."
"Then perhaps she should be allowed to find out."
"By being taken from the only home she has ever had."
"By being asked."
Out among the trees, Altaira's fingers tightened in the tiger's fur, and Morbius saw it. For a moment his whole attention went to her, and Kirk understood, watching him, that whatever else was or was not true about Edward Morbius, the fear was real and it was not for himself.
Then Morbius came back to him. "You came here to investigate Altair IV."
"Yes."
"And you propose to remove me before you have the faintest idea what you have found."
"I propose to follow my orders."
"Then have the intelligence to know what those orders are taking you away from."
Ostrow's head came around.
Morbius noticed, because Morbius noticed everything about Ostrow. "Doctor Ostrow has spent six years asking what lies beneath this plateau. You have been on this world two days and have already concluded that the answer will keep."
Beside Kirk, McCoy shifted his weight.
"I didn't say that."
"You did not have to."
Then, for the first time that morning, Morbius stepped aside. Behind him, at the house, Robby was standing beside a pair of doors that had been closed the day before and were open now.
"Come with me," Morbius said.
"Where?"
"To the answer to one of your questions."
"Which one?"
Morbius's eyes went to Ostrow. "Who built this world."
* * *
Scott left two of his security detail at the house and came with them as far as the opening in the ridge. Robby stayed behind with the others, which Kirk noticed and did not remark on. Altaira came, and the tiger came with her, moving at her hip with the loose unbothered stride of an animal that had never in its life learned to be careful of a human being.
At the black doorway McCoy stopped. "That thing is coming underground with us."
Altaira put her palm flat on the animal's shoulder. "He always does."
"Naturally," said McCoy, and the tiger went past him without interest.
The corridor brightened ahead of Morbius as he entered it.
Kirk had read about the effect in a twenty-year-old log at two in the morning. Having it happen around his own boots was a different proposition. The light did not switch on. It arrived, pale and even, four or five meters ahead, and went out behind them at the same rate, so that the party moved through the rock inside a travelling pocket of light that got where they were going slightly before they did.
Scott ran his tricorder along the wall as he walked. "Captain."
"Mr. Scott."
"I've six materials analyses here and they disagree with one another."
"Which one is right?"
"None of them, sir. That's what I'm tellin' you."
Morbius kept walking.
They went down farther than Kirk had expected. The first turn became a ramp, and the ramp became a corridor, and the corridor ended at a rail cut into the rock, and beyond the rail there was no more rock.
Ostrow stopped walking, and said nothing at all, and Kirk had seen that happen to men before, though rarely to Vulcans.
Below them lay a city under the planet.
Not a city as a human being would build one. No streets, no windows, nothing made to suit a body walking from one place to another. There were geometric masses set on levels that fell away into dark, and spans crossing gulfs too wide for the eye to price, and shafts of moving light going down out of sight, and machinery on a scale Kirk's mind kept trying to convert into architecture, because architecture was the only category he had for anything that size. The far wall was not visible. There may not have been one.
Scott said something in Gaelic, quietly.
"That good?" said McCoy.
"No, Doctor. That's me runnin' out of engineering."
Morbius went to the rail. "This is one peripheral installation."
Kirk turned to look at him. "Peripheral."
"Yes."
Ostrow found his voice at last. "How large is the entire complex?"
"I have no idea."
"You have lived here twenty years."
"I have lived here twenty years and I have no idea, Doctor, and if that satisfies you then you are a worse scientist than your file suggests."
Something in that answer reached Ostrow where nothing else had. Kirk watched him take it and put it away and go on standing there with his hands closed behind his back.
Morbius touched a control set into the rail, and a section of the dark below them came up bright, showing a suspended structure like an enormous lens hanging in nothing.
"The people who built this place called themselves the Krell."
Ostrow closed his eyes. It lasted no longer than a blink, and when he opened them again the scholar who had spent six years with four pages had been replaced, briefly, by someone a good deal younger.
"The Krell," he said.
"The word is in the material you showed me yesterday."
"Not as a word I could identify."
"No."
"You could have given it to Starfleet twenty years ago."
"Yes."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because a name is not understanding."
"No," said Ostrow. "It is the beginning of it."
Whatever passed between the two of them then had very little to do with Vulcan discipline or with human pride, and Kirk left it where it lay.
"How old?" he asked.
"The installation is upward of two hundred thousand years old."
McCoy was looking out across the chamber. "And it still runs."
"Much of it."
"Where are they?"
Morbius turned toward the dark. "Gone."
"How?"
"For twenty years," Morbius said, "I have tried to answer that question."
Kirk came up to the rail beside him. "And?"
"You will want me to tell you they were primitives who reached beyond themselves and were punished for it. They were not. By every measure I have been able to apply, the Krell had passed us so completely that comparison stops being useful. Their physics. Their energy systems. Their handling of matter. Their mathematics, which I cannot follow and Doctor Ostrow will not be able to follow either, and I say that without any pleasure at all." He looked down into his city. "We are children who have wandered into an abandoned laboratory and are picking up the tools."
Scott bristled on instinct. "Speak for yourself, Doctor."
"Mr. Scott, there is machinery beneath your boots whose waste output would drive your starship."
Scott opened his mouth, looked at his tricorder, and shut it again.
"They had solved problems we have not yet learned how to state," Morbius said. "They reshaped this planet. They reached other worlds. They made artificial life."
Kirk thought of a gray figure standing patiently beside a house.
"Then what happened to them?"
Morbius was quiet for a moment. "One night," he said. "They died."
McCoy's head came up. "All of them."
"All of them I have ever been able to account for."
"War?"
"There is no evidence of one."
"Plague?"
"No."
"Their world turning on them? Climate, atmosphere, anything?"
"No."
"So something killed an entire civilization in a single night," Kirk said, "and left the machines running."
"Yes."
"And you stayed."
Morbius turned and faced him. "Would you have left?"
Kirk did not answer at once, because the honest answer took a moment to find and was not comfortable when he found it. If the Enterprise had come on this place intact, if Spock had brought him proof that a people had climbed this high and then gone out in a night, he knew exactly how hard it would have been to give the order to break orbit.
"Maybe," he said.
Morbius's smile was thin and entirely without warmth. "At least that is honest."
Kirk turned back to the rail and looked out at it a while, at the bridges and the shafts of moving light and the machinery going down into a dark his instruments could not price, and thought about the order folded in his pocket.
It had been a simple thing to carry down here. Twenty-eight words, authenticated, from men who had never seen this. Take the witness off the planet and bring him home.
It was not going to be a simple thing to carry back up.
