On the balcony above the Krell city, a hundred and eighty meters down and twenty years later, a sound came from behind them, and Kirk turned.
The tiger had left Altaira's side and gone to the edge of the balcony, where it stood with its head over the rail, looking down into the moving lights.
Ostrow watched it. "Is it native?"
"No," said Morbius.
McCoy turned around. "I'm sorry. No?"
"No."
"Doctor, I've been a country doctor and a ship's surgeon and I've seen a fair amount of livestock in between, and that is a Bengal tiger with about forty kilos of argument added to it. It did not walk here." McCoy waited exactly long enough to be polite. "So where did it come from?"
"It came from this planet."
"That isn't what I asked and you know it isn't."
"No," Morbius agreed, "it is not," and turned back to the rail, and that was the whole of the answer.
McCoy looked at Kirk. Kirk gave him the slight shake of the head that meant later, and McCoy took it with the expression of a man putting something in a drawer he fully intends to open again.
"He dislikes being discussed," Altaira said.
"That makes two of us."
She crouched beside the animal and put an arm loosely around its neck, and it leaned into her with enough weight to move her half a step sideways, and she braced against it without appearing to notice.
Kirk watched Morbius watch them, and there it was again. Not ownership. Not pride, exactly.
Fear. The particular fear of a man who has one thing left and has just noticed it turning its head toward a door.
Altaira looked over at him. "Are there animals on your ship, Captain?"
"Not as a rule."
"Why not?"
"Because we already have engineers," said McCoy.
Scott gave him a wounded look, and Alta laughed.
It was a short surprised sound. It went out across the balcony and was swallowed by the Krell city, and her father's expression changed at once. Not anger. Something tighter than anger and a good deal more private.
Kirk filed it with everything else he had filed since yesterday afternoon.
Scott had not moved from the rail since they arrived on it. He was looking down at one of the shafts of light with an expression Kirk knew from the engine room at three in the morning.
"Mr. Scott."
"Sir, that shaft's carryin' power. I can't tell you what kind, and I can't tell you where it's goin', but I can tell you it hasn't stopped since we got here, and there's no' a man aboard my ship could switch it off if his life depended on it." He straightened. "That's the part I'd want in the log, Captain. Not how grand it is. That nobody down here has a hand on the tap."
Morbius said nothing whatever to that, which Kirk thought was the most informative thing the man had done all morning.
Ostrow had moved along the rail to a second control surface and stood over it with his hands deliberately behind him. Beneath a transparent layer, symbols drifted and rearranged themselves, the same forms he had been carrying in a case for six years.
"These are the same structures," he said.
"Some of them."
"The four pages."
"Fragments. Copied out of a system considerably larger."
Ostrow turned his head. "You can read them."
"Enough."
"How much is enough?"
"Enough to know that your word was wrong."
Ostrow's face did not change, which by now Kirk understood to be the loudest thing it did. "Containment."
"Yes."
"Then what does the symbol mean?"
Morbius hesitated, and Kirk, watching him closely, saw that it was not uncertainty. It was a decision being taken, and taken against them.
"Context alters it."
"That is not an answer."
"No. It is a refusal, and I would rather you recognized it as one than went on hoping."
Ostrow drew breath to go on, and Kirk stopped him with a look, and turned to Morbius.
"You brought us down here to show me why Starfleet shouldn't take you off this planet."
"I brought you down here so that when you file your report you will understand the scale of your own ignorance."
"Mine, or theirs?"
"Both."
Kirk put his hands on the rail. "Then reduce it."
Morbius looked out over the city. "There are levels below us I have never entered. Systems I do not understand. Records I have barely begun to translate. There are whole branches of their science for which no human language has the words. And under all of it there is a power system that has been running since before our species learned to write."
"The one that pulled down the Bellerophon?"
The older man's jaw set. "I do not know."
"Could it?"
The pause was longer this time. "Yes."
"That," said McCoy quietly, "is a hell of a thing to have left out yesterday."
"I told you the ship was pulled down."
"You left out that you're living on top of the only thing on this planet big enough to do it."
"I am living on top of a planet, Doctor. Planets contain a great many things."
"Most of them don't have machinery under the furniture."
Morbius turned away from him, which McCoy took, correctly, as a point.
Kirk let the silence go on a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he said, "The order hasn't changed."
He watched the shoulders go rigid.
"You wanted me to see this before I took you off this world. I've seen it. It changes what Starfleet needs to know, and it changes how many people they send, and it doesn't change the fact that you're coming with us."
"And the Krell?"
"We record what we can. Starfleet sends a proper scientific mission."
Morbius laughed once, without any humor in it at all. "A proper scientific mission."
"Yes."
"Men who will spend six months forming committees before anyone touches a control."
"That may be the most intelligent thing anybody does on this planet."
"Captain," said Ostrow.
Kirk turned. The Vulcan was still looking down at the drifting symbols.
"There is one respect in which Doctor Morbius is correct."
Morbius's head came around.
"To remove the only living person with substantial working knowledge of this installation, before any part of that knowledge has been transferred, would be scientifically indefensible. I am obliged to say so, and I will say so to Starfleet over my own name."
McCoy folded his arms. "You volunteering to send that message?"
"Yes."
"Thought you might."
Kirk considered it, and considered the man who had just been handed an argument by the one person on the balcony least likely to give him one out of sympathy. "How long would a transfer take?"
Ostrow did not answer at once. "I cannot estimate intelligently until I know what Doctor Morbius knows."
"And there," said Morbius, "is your difficulty."
Kirk almost admired the neatness of it.
Altaira had stood up. The tiger stayed pressed against her side.
"Father."
Morbius turned. She had not said one word through the whole of it.
"Captain Kirk said that I would be asked."
Kirk wished, suddenly and very much, that she had waited until they were back in the house.
"Altaira."
"You said I would not go."
"You will not."
"That is not the same as being asked."
The tiger's head came up. McCoy caught it in the same instant Kirk did, and neither of them moved. There was nothing in the animal's posture that suggested a threat. It suggested attention. It had heard the change in her voice and had come to see what the change was about.
Her father saw none of it. He saw only his daughter. "You do not know what you are asking for."
"I have not asked for anything."
"Good."
"I said that you have not asked me."
Below them the Krell city went on humming to itself, impossibly old, impossibly patient.
Morbius crossed to within an arm's length of her, and for a second Kirk thought he would take her by the shoulders. He stopped. "Everything I have done on this world has been to keep you safe."
Her face softened, which somehow made it worse. "I know that."
"You have no idea what is out there."
"No."
"There are dangers you cannot begin to imagine."
"Yes."
"You believe that because these men are courteous, the galaxy is kind."
"No, Father." That stopped him, and she put her hand down on the tiger's head, and finished it. "I think it is large."
Nobody spoke.
Then she turned from him and walked back toward the corridor, and the tiger went with her, and the light went with them both, arriving ahead and dying behind, all the way up the long slope until there was nothing left to see.
Morbius stayed where he was.
Far below, lights moved through the Krell machinery in long silent lines, going somewhere, the way they had been going somewhere for two hundred thousand years.
* * *
On the way up, Morbius said almost nothing.
At the entrance the daylight came at them hard after the colorless illumination below, and Kirk stood blinking on the stone while his eyes caught up. Scott's two men were where he had left them. Robby stood beside the house, facing the ridge.
He was already looking at them before they came out.
Scott went straight to him. "Captain, with your permission, I'd like to begin."
Morbius started to say something. Kirk cut across it.
"Starfleet's order is explicit, Doctor. Surface only, nothing removed, nothing carried aboard. You are welcome to be present for every minute of it."
Scott brightened considerably. "I've no intention of takin' the gentleman apart."
"That," said McCoy, "is the most reassuring thing you have said all morning."
Robby inclined his head. "I will cooperate."
Morbius stared at him, and Kirk caught it before it was gone: not annoyance, not calculation.
Surprise.
Then the older man's face closed, and he walked past them into his house.
Kirk stood a while longer looking at the ridge, and at the ordinary red stone lying over a city that had outlived its builders by two thousand centuries, and at the black opening where the light was still politely waiting for somebody to want it.
He had come down that morning to take Edward Morbius off this planet.
He understood now why the man had stayed. That was the easy part.
What he understood rather better, walking back toward the house, was that a man who would not leave a thing like that was a man who would do a great deal to keep it, and that Starfleet's order had just given him something to do it about.
