Twenty years earlier
Robby came willingly.
That was the part Julia never forgave, and she was right not to, and it took Adams a number of years to understand that she had not been angry about the order. She had been angry that it was so easy.
Morbius told the android there was a discrepancy in his power regulation and that the safest way to examine it was through the original service interface, in the chamber where they had found him.
Every word of that was true. Adams stood two meters away while it was said and could not have identified a single false statement in it, and he thought about those sentences for eleven weeks afterward, which was all the time he had.
Robby followed him below.
Adams went because it was his order. Farman went because Adams told him to. Julia went because there was nobody on that planet, her husband and the captain of the ship included, prepared to stand in the corridor and stop her.
The chamber looked exactly as it had on the first morning. The same black walls. The same pale patient light. The same recessed station where a machine had stood without moving for longer than there had been cities anywhere on Earth.
Morbius went to the console. Robby watched him do it.
"You understand this system now."
"Part of it."
"You did not before."
"No."
"Did the educator alter you?"
Morbius's hands stopped over the controls. Adams watched the back of his head and could not see his face, and was glad of it.
"Yes."
Robby considered that. "Are you well?"
Julia looked away. Her husband did not.
"I believe so."
"That is good," said Robby, and stepped up onto the recessed platform, and Adams felt something turn over in his chest. "What do you require?"
Morbius indicated the wall. "Place your hand there."
Robby placed his hand there.
The surface changed under his palm. Lines of light came up around his fingers and ran out into the wall in a pattern that was not quite symmetrical and was very beautiful, and Adams, who had seen a number of strange things in three months on that planet, found this was the first one that made him want to stop a procedure before he understood why.
"Doctor."
Morbius kept his back to the room. "I am working."
"Talk me through it."
"The interface is recognizing him."
"And then?"
"Then I isolate the executive system from the active power lattice."
Robby turned his head.
"That is not a diagnostic function," he said.
Morbius's hand stopped.
Nobody in the chamber moved. The lights went on spreading up the android's wrist, unhurried, the way everything in that place did everything.
"Edward," Robby said.
Julia closed her eyes.
"Remain still," said Morbius.
"Why?"
Adams stepped forward, because it was his order and because he had been a captain for nineteen years and there was a limit to how much of this he was prepared to let another man carry.
"Robby."
The android looked at him.
"This is a Starfleet order."
"An order to do what?"
Adams made himself say it plainly. There was no version of it that was not plain. "To deactivate you."
Robby looked back at Morbius. The light had reached his forearm.
"You knew."
"Yes."
"Before we came down."
"Yes."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"Because I could not predict your response."
Robby looked at him a while. Then he looked at Julia, who was crying and did not appear to be aware of it.
"You knew also."
"Not until this afternoon."
"Did you agree?"
"No," she said.
He turned back to Morbius. The light had reached his shoulder.
"Do I agree?"
Nobody answered him.
"That was not asked," Robby said, and lowered his eyes slightly, and Adams found that he had to look at the floor of the chamber for a moment.
Julia moved. "No."
Farman's hand came up toward her arm and stopped short of touching her.
"Julia," said Morbius.
"Stop it."
"I cannot."
"Stop it, Edward."
"If I interrupt the suspension now I may damage him."
"You should have thought of that before you began."
Robby's free hand moved.
Farman's hand went to his pistol. It was not a decision. It was twenty-two years of training in a man who had never once been slow, and it was the most honest thing that happened in that room, because it was what all of them felt and only one of them was armed.
Robby's hand stopped where it was.
For a second nobody breathed.
Then the android lowered his hand again, and looked at Farman, and said, "I will not harm you."
Farman's hand came away from the weapon very slowly.
Morbius's fingers moved across the control. The light brightened along the android's body.
"What will happen?" Robby asked.
"You will become inactive."
"For how long?"
Morbius gave him nothing, and Robby waited the correct interval for an answer, and then understood.
"Do the Krell require this?"
"No."
"Do you?"
Morbius hesitated. "No."
"Then why?"
"Because I was ordered to," Adams said.
Robby turned his head. "And you obey."
"Yes."
The android considered it with what Adams would have called patience in anything else. Then he looked back at Morbius.
"You also obey."
Morbius's jaw set. "For now."
Julia's head came up sharply. Adams heard the two words and put them away somewhere, and took them out again a good many times before the end.
Robby's eyes stayed on Morbius, and something in the set of him altered. It was not fear. Adams had seen fear on that face exactly once, and it had been on the second morning, and it had not been for himself.
It was recognition.
"You understand more of me now."
"Yes."
"Can you restore me?"
Morbius looked at the pattern under his hands. "Yes."
"Will you?"
The pause went on.
"If circumstances require it," Morbius said.
It was, Adams thought, exactly the kind of answer Julia had spent nine years learning to hate, and the first time he had heard the man use one on anybody but his wife.
Robby appeared to turn the sentence over and examine both sides of it.
"I understand," he said.
"No," Julia whispered. "You don't."
His eyes went to her. "Perhaps not."
The light reached his throat and his voice changed. Not mechanically. It was more as though each word had to be decided on separately now before it could be spent.
"Julia."
She went to him. Her husband said her name and she ignored it entirely, and she stood directly in front of the android so that he did not have to move his head.
His eyes found hers.
"You named me."
"Yes."
"That was before I could speak."
"Yes."
"You said that you would have changed it if I had objected."
"I remember."
"I did not object," said Robby.
Her mouth trembled. "I know."
The light reached his face.
He looked at her one second longer. Then he looked past her at Morbius.
"Edward."
Morbius met his eyes.
"You made me stop before."
Morbius went absolutely still.
Adams turned. "What? Doctor, what does that mean?"
But the android was already slowing. The words came farther apart, the spaces between them lengthening, and his eyes had gone to the black wall behind Morbius as though there were something written on it.
"I remember," Robby said.
The chamber was entirely silent.
"Nothing."
Morbius stared at him.
"After."
The light crossed his eyes and they went dark.
His hand stayed against the wall for another second. Then the interface let him go, and Morbius put out an arm to catch him.
Robby did not fall. He simply stood, exactly as he had stood on the morning they found him, arms at his sides, eyes closed, in the attitude of a thing waiting for something that was not in any hurry to arrive.
Nobody moved at all.
Julia spoke first. "You lied to him."
Morbius looked up at her. "I did what was necessary."
"No." She wiped at her face with the back of her hand, angrily, as though the tears were equipment that had failed. "You did what was easier."
She walked out. Farman gave it a moment and followed her, which Adams thought was the best thing Jerry Farman did on Altair IV.
Adams stayed.
Morbius remained beside the inactive android with one hand still resting on the platform, and neither man said anything for some while.
"You heard him," Adams said at last.
"Yes."
"You made me stop before."
"I heard him, Captain."
"What did he mean?"
Morbius looked at the closed face in front of him, at the eyes that had been open four minutes earlier.
"I do not know."
Adams waited. He had spent nineteen years learning when a silence would fill itself in and had become good at it.
This one did not. After a while Morbius turned back to the console, and that was the end of the conversation.
* *
Adams recorded the next transmission himself, in his own quarters, with the door shut.
"Captain's log, supplemental. Pursuant to Starfleet directive, the artificial entity recovered beneath Survey Area Twelve has been placed in inactive status. The procedure was completed without physical damage and without incident."
He stopped.
The last three words sat there in front of him. Without incident.
He erased them.
"The procedure was completed without physical damage. Doctor Morbius states that the condition is reversible."
He stopped again, and thought about a machine saying I did not object, and about a woman wiping her face with the back of her hand.
Then he added one line more.
"Until otherwise directed, no further study of the android will be conducted."
He sent it, and afterward sat a while in a small room aboard a small ship in orbit around a planet nobody had ever heard of, and did not turn on the light.
After that night, Robby disappeared from the Bellerophon's transmissions.
There was nothing further to report. He stood in the chamber where they had found him, in the dark, while the colony went up above his head. The house was finished. The laboratories opened. The garden went in on the western side, because Julia said a settlement without one was a camp. The child grew.
Morbius went deeper into the Krell records than anyone had gone, and found things there that he put into his own notes and no longer into anybody's transmissions.
And at night, things began to move through the settlement that no guard could see.
Doors opened. Machinery came apart and was laid out in neat rows. Prints appeared in dust where nothing had walked.
Captain Adams wrote all of it down, every incident, in detail, and sent every word of it home.
He never mentioned Robby again.
* *
Much later, after the Bellerophon came down out of the sky and the expedition was reduced to two survivors, Edward Morbius went back underground.
The chamber was dark when he entered it, and stayed dark until the light noticed him and came up, obliging as ever, a few meters ahead of where he stood.
Robby was exactly where they had left him.
Morbius crossed the floor to the control station. There was no Starfleet captain left on the planet to give him an order. There was no science council waiting on a report, and no ship in orbit, and no committee, and no legal adviser, and no admiral with a fair summary.
There was Julia, up in the house, with a child that was going to be born in about six weeks with nobody to attend it but the two of them.
There was a dead settlement on the plateau above.
And there was this.
Morbius put his hand on the interface, and the wall recognized him, and the light moved.
For the first time since the order, Edward Morbius smiled.
"Robby," he said.
The android's eyes opened.
