Morbius kept recordings of all of it, which is the single strangest fact in this entire account. A man who lied to me for two days about nearly everything had spent twenty years setting down, in detail and without flattery, the exact process by which he became what he became.
The rest of what follows is in the Bellerophon's medical log, in Lieutenant Quinn's engineering notes, and in one place I did not expect. The facility beneath that plateau kept its own record of what it did that night, and it kept it for twenty years, and nobody ever asked it.
* *
Twenty years earlier
Edward Morbius woke to the sound of two women arguing about him.
The voices had no meaning at first. They rose and fell somewhere past the light, one impatient and familiar, the other measured in the way physicians become measured when they would rather not admit to being worried.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling belonged to the Bellerophon's medical bay. He knew that before he knew where his own hands were, before he understood the pressure around his arm or the cold weight of the band across his forehead.
He also knew that one of the ceiling panels had been installed incorrectly.
The thought arrived whole, the way a name arrives. The fastening points were set at sixteen-centimeter intervals. The third support brace had been seated two millimeters high on the starboard side, which altered the load across the panel by less than one percent and would make no difference under any ordinary condition. Under sustained lateral acceleration above seven gravities, the fastener nearest the ventilation duct would fail first, and the panel would come down at its outboard corner.
He had never examined that panel in his life. He had never worked on a starship ceiling in his life.
"Edward."
Julia came into the light above him. He turned his head toward her, and pain arrived from somewhere behind his eyes, sudden and very bright, and he shut them again.
"Don't do that," Julia said.
"Do what?"
"Whatever that was."
"I turned my head."
"You looked like you were trying to turn it through the bed."
"Good," said a second voice from his other side. "Irritable and literal. Both reassuring."
He opened his eyes more carefully. The ship's surgeon stood at the diagnostic console with her arms folded. She had come up from the surface and changed into medical white, and the shadows under her eyes said he had cost her a night's sleep and that she intended to mention it.
"How long?"
"Fourteen hours since Robby carried you into the settlement clinic. Nine since we brought you up here."
Morbius looked at his wife. "You should not have transported me."
Julia's expression did not alter by anything measurable.
"And there goes reassuring," the surgeon said.
He attempted to sit up. Both women stopped him, Julia with one hand and the surgeon with a word that had almost certainly been taught in medical school for this exact purpose.
"What happened?" he asked.
Julia stared at him, because it was not the question she had been braced for. "What do you remember?"
He closed his eyes.
The chamber. The chair. The plate coming down toward his forehead, and a pressure that had not been pressure at all, and then.
He reached for what came after and found something so large that his mind stepped back from it the way a man steps back from an edge he had not seen. It was not memory. There was no other word he could put on it, so he tried space, and that was wrong too.
What he could feel were structures inside himself that had always been there and had somehow stood at a distance. Connections that should have cost him effort lay beside one another now like objects set out on a table. A word suggested a mathematics. The mathematics suggested a physical relationship. A fragment of Krell notation he had stared at for eleven days unfolded into three candidate grammars before he had finished considering its shape.
He opened his eyes.
"You used it," Julia said. It was not a question.
Morbius looked past her. "Doctor, would you give us a moment."
"No."
Julia came close to smiling.
The surgeon tapped the display. "You came in unconscious, with respiratory depression, cardiac irregularity, bleeding from the nose and the ears, and neural activity that made my instruments behave as though somebody had dropped them down a stairwell. You will stay where you are until I know whether it is going to happen again."
"I feel entirely well."
"I don't care."
"That is medically unsophisticated."
"It isn't."
Julia drew a chair over and sat down. The child had become plainly visible in the last weeks, and Morbius looked at the curve of her, and something happened that he could not account for. He knew the approximate volume of amniotic fluid. He knew the probable mass of the child within a narrow range. He knew the statistical likelihood of four separate complications at this stage.
He knew all of it without having calculated any of it.
He looked away, and his wife saw him do it.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Edward."
"Nothing is wrong."
"I did not ask whether something was wrong."
The surgeon looked from one of them to the other, and then turned the diagnostic panel around. "I have spent nine hours trying to decide whether that machine did you permanent neurological harm."
"And?"
"And I do not know. Your blood chemistry is normal. Organ function is normal. No hemorrhage, no edema, no tissue damage I can find. Your reflexes are better than they were at your last physical, which should not happen to a man overnight." She stopped. "And your cortical activity is."
"Is what?"
"I have not got a word for it."
Morbius glanced at the figures, and understood them before he had consciously read them. The wave patterns were not merely elevated. They were coordinated across regions that did not synchronize at that level outside of certain pathologies, and there was no corresponding loss of function anywhere.
The surgeon put one finger on a graph. "That should concern you."
"It does."
"You knew what it meant before I explained it."
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Edward," Julia said quietly. "Did you know what that machine would do before you sat down in it?"
"No."
The answer came out fractionally too fast, and he heard it himself, and so did she. The surgeon discovered a reason to examine a display on the far side of the room.
Julia waited. "Did Robby tell you not to use it?"
"He did not say that."
"Did I?"
He said nothing at all.
Julia sat back in the chair. There had been silences of this kind between them before, over risk, over work, over his standing conviction that understanding a danger conferred some protection against it. This one was a different animal, and they both knew it inside four seconds.
"You waited until I was asleep."
"I did not wish to argue."
"No. You did not wish to be stopped."
"Julia."
"You walked into that place alone, in the dark, and put an alien machine against your skull after telling me you weren't going to use it."
"I said that I had no intention of using it at that time."
She looked at him. Even the surgeon looked over. Morbius heard the sentence after he had finished it and understood precisely what was wrong with it. It was true.
Julia stood. "That is the answer a man gives when he has already decided the promise does not count."
"That is not what I meant."
"I know exactly what you meant."
She went toward the door, and he said her name, and she stopped without turning around.
He wanted to explain. He had not been reckless. He had believed himself careful. That was not the same thing and had never once been the same thing. He had tested the chair with instruments first. He had reviewed everything Robby had said. He had reduced the contact interval to what he calculated as a third of the minimum. He had been entirely certain that he could stop.
All of it was true, and none of it answered her.
Julia looked back at him. "Did you know what it would do?"
"No."
"Would you have done it if you had?"
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out of it.
His wife nodded once. It was worse than anger. Then she left.
The surgeon waited until the door had closed. "You are a very intelligent man, Doctor."
Morbius looked at the ceiling. "That is generally meant as a compliment."
"It wasn't."
*
Adams came three hours later and brought Quinn, partly because Quinn had asked to come and mostly, Morbius suspected, because the captain did not trust himself in the room alone.
By then he had been permitted to sit up. The surgeon had raised the bed as a compromise and informed him that if his feet touched the deck she would sedate him where he sat.
Adams stopped at the foot of the bed. "You used the machine."
"Yes."
"Alone."
"Yes."
"After your wife asked you not to."
"Is that relevant to a command inquiry?"
"No," said Adams. "That part I'm asking as a married man."
Quinn coughed into his hand. Adams ignored him.
"I misjudged the risk," Morbius said.
"That's one way of putting it."
"The result does not justify the procedure."
Adams stared at him.
"What?"
"I said the result does not justify the procedure."
"I heard you."
"Then why are you looking at me in that manner?"
"Because that was almost an apology," Adams said.
"I was going to say the same thing," said Quinn.
Morbius looked between the two of them. "You came for a reason."
Adams put a data slate on the bed. "I came to tell you that you are finished below until medical clears you."
"No."
"Good talk."
"Captain, in two weeks we have learned more about Krell systems than the Federation has learned at any archaeological site in thirty years."
"Then it'll keep for a few days."
"The installation is responding to us."
"Which is the other reason you're not going back into it."
Morbius reached for the slate. Adams put a hand flat on it. "Don't."
Morbius read it anyway, upside down and at an angle, which he noticed later and thought about for some time.
It held the construction projections for the settlement. Power requirements, foundation loads, water recycling, six residences, two laboratories, storage, shelter. Quinn's current figures.
His eyes crossed the page once.
"Your western power run is wrong."
Quinn blinked. "It isn't."
"You have calculated peak demand using the standard coefficient for six independent residential units."
"Because there are six independent residential units."
"The first laboratory and the environmental plant share a thermal sink. Under sustained operation the demand curves overlap. Your figure is high by something under eighteen percent."
Quinn took the slate back and looked at it. "No, it isn't."
Morbius held out his hand. Quinn, after a moment, gave it to him. Morbius did not touch the calculation field. He put his finger on three separate numbers, on three separate pages.
"Here. Here. And here."
"Those aren't connected."
"They are."
"Not directly."
"No," Morbius agreed. "Not directly."
"Then how did you..."
Quinn stopped talking. He took out a stylus, sat down on the edge of the next bed without being invited, and began working the figures through by hand.
Adams did not watch Quinn. He watched Morbius, and Morbius knew he was being watched and found he had no attention to spare for it, because he was looking at the slate with an expression he would not have chosen. It was not triumph. It was nearer the feeling of finding a door in one's own house that one does not remember.
Two minutes went by. Then three.
The surgeon came back in with a scanner, saw three men gathered around a bed that contained her patient, and became visibly suspicious.
Quinn stopped writing. "He's right."
"How far off?" Adams asked.
"Seventeen point eight percent."
"Closer to seventeen point nine," Morbius said, "once you include transmission loss."
Quinn looked up at him. "You haven't seen these plans."
"I saw the preliminary version."
"That was four days ago. Half of these changed yesterday."
"Then yesterday you changed them incorrectly."
Quinn turned toward the captain. Adams did not look back at him.
"How did you do that?" Adams said.
Morbius kept his eyes on the page. "I do not know."
Nobody spoke. The surgeon crossed the room and took the slate out of his hands.
"Good. We're finished."
"I was reading that."
"You're not anymore." She ran the scanner across his forehead.
"What are you checking?" Adams asked.
"Everything."
"Helpful."
"It is, when everything is what changed."
Morbius looked at the empty air where the slate had been. There had been no calculation. That was the part he could not put down. He had not worked Quinn's arithmetic faster than Quinn. He had seen the relationship, the way a man sees that a room is cold.
The difference mattered. He was not yet certain why.
* *
Julia did not come back until evening, and when she did she brought two cups and gave one of them to the surgeon.
"Tea."
"You're my favorite Morbius," said the surgeon.
"I have always suspected it."
"I am in the room," said Morbius.
"That's the trouble," the surgeon said, and took her tea out with her.
Julia sat down where she had sat that morning. For a while neither of them said anything at all.
"The child is moving," Morbius said.
"She does that."
"More than yesterday."
Julia looked up. "How would you know that?"
He stopped, and she saw him stop.
"Edward."
"I do not know."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that I can see the change and I cannot tell you how." He looked at the shape of her, and then away from it. "The way you are sitting. The muscles along your side. Your breathing altered before you put your hand there."
"Anyone might notice that."
"Yes."
"But you wouldn't have."
"No," he said. "I would not."
She took that in. "Does it frighten you?"
The old answer formed itself at once, the answer belonging to the man who had walked into that chamber in the dark, for whom fear had only ever been a name for insufficient information.
He stopped it on the way out.
"Yes."
Julia's face changed, a little. "Good."
"That is an odd response."
"It means you're still in there."
She reached across and took his hand. It was not forgiveness. It was something a good deal smaller, offered on account. He closed his fingers around hers.
"What did it feel like?" she asked.
He had been waiting for somebody to ask the right question, and had not known it until she did.
"I expected it to give me something."
"Knowledge."
"Perhaps. It did not."
"Then what did it do?"
He looked at the dark window of the medical bay, at the green curve of Altair IV beyond it, and went looking for words that did not yet exist in any human language.
"It moved walls," he said. "Things that were separate are not as separate. Ideas. Numbers. Shapes. I look at one thing now and the relationships are already attached to it. I no longer have to go and fetch them."
"Do you know more than you did?"
"No."
"Are you cleverer?"
He began to object to the word. Then he thought about a stylus moving across a slate for three minutes to arrive where he had already been standing.
"I do not know."
Julia squeezed his hand once. "There is a sentence I would like preserved for the historical record."
He looked at her, and she smiled in spite of herself, and he came within a very short distance of doing the same.
Then the ship's alarm sounded. Not general quarters. Surface emergency.
The smile went off his wife's face, and Morbius was out of the bed before the surgeon got back through the door.
