A note on what follows, for whoever reads this after me.
This is not a log. A log is what a captain knows at the time, and if I set it down that way the whole of it would be four days of a man guessing wrong. This is the account afterward: what we knew going in, what we learned on that planet, and what I have since put together out of twenty-year-old logs, recordings, and the testimony of people who were there.
A word about the parts nobody lived to report. The Bellerophon's flight recorder was found, and the installation beneath that plateau kept a record of its own which Mr. Spock recovered and which runs to some eleven thousand hours. Between the two of them I have the bridge of that ship down to the last four minutes, and I have more of Edward Morbius than any man should have of another. Where I have had to put a sentence in somebody's mouth to join two things I know, I have done it, and I am telling you so here rather than pretending otherwise. The facts are theirs. The joining is mine.
Where I knew a thing at the time, it will be plain. Where I did not, that will be plain too, because most of what matters here I did not know until it was far too late to be of use to anybody.
It begins on the eighty-sixth day of the Bellerophon's survey, in a ship that had eleven weeks left.
* *
Twenty years earlier
"Captain's log, J. J. Adams recording. Stardate 827.4. The Bellerophon has completed its eighty-sixth day of survey operations in the Altair system. Surface teams have finished preliminary mapping of the northern continent and have begun geological work along the southern plateau. Atmospheric conditions remain stable, mineral deposits are extensive, and so far we have found nothing to suggest that Altair IV has ever supported intelligent life."
Adams paused and looked out through the narrow port beside his desk. From orbit, Altair IV was beautiful enough to make that last sentence feel premature. Its atmosphere bent the light of its sun into shades of green, deepest along the rim of the planet, where the curve burned against the dark. Eighty-six days, and he had not grown used to it, and he was not sure he trusted it. He had been in Starfleet longer than some of his crew had been alive, long enough to have become a careful man, and in his experience a world this peaceful was usually keeping something to itself.
He turned back to the recorder.
"Doctor Morbius continues to object to the phrase 'nothing to suggest.' He believes the geological anomalies near Survey Area Twelve warrant further investigation. I have reminded him that a xenolinguist finding meaning in rocks is an occupational hazard." Adams allowed himself a smile. "I expect his formal objection before dinner."
The comm panel chimed before he could close the entry. Adams regarded it for a moment. "Apparently sooner." He shut off the recorder and keyed the panel. "Adams."
Jerry Farman's voice came through under a wash of wind. "Captain, Survey Twelve. Nobody's hurt."
Adams sat back. Farman had been his security chief long enough that leading with that told him everything. It meant something had happened.
"That wasn't what I asked."
"No, sir." A pause, filled with wind. "Morbius found something."
"What kind of something?"
A longer pause. "You should come down."
Farman was not a dramatic man. He reported what he saw in as few words as the regulations allowed, and Adams had come to trust that economy almost as much as his instruments. When Farman declined to describe a thing, it was because he had no words for it yet.
"On my way."
He added a line to the log noting that he had been called to the surface, and stepped into the corridor.
The Bellerophon was smaller and older than the Constitution-class starships just coming into service, and she showed it. Her corridors were narrow, her bulkheads exposed in places, and after nearly three months in orbit every sound and smell aboard her had become as familiar to Adams as his own quarters. He could tell which environmental recycler was overdue for maintenance by the pitch of the ventilation. He could tell, from halfway down the deck, when Cookie was making lunch.
"Captain."
Cookie leaned out of the galley with a ladle in one hand. On the crew roster he was chief steward, a title no one aboard had used since the first week out.
"What did they find?"
"Who?"
"Morbius."
Adams stopped. "You've been listening to surface communications."
"I cook for forty-two people, Captain. Information comes to me."
"Food comes from you. Information travels through command channels."
Cookie thought about that longer than it deserved. "Then that would explain why command channels are always hungry, sir, and I say that with affection."
Adams walked on. Cookie came with him, ladle and all.
"Is it ruins?"
"I don't know."
"A ship?"
"I don't know."
"Treasure?"
Adams stopped again. "If it's treasure, I will personally see that you receive the first gold-plated potato."
Cookie beamed at him, and then looked faintly embarrassed about having beamed. "I'll hold you to that, sir. I don't mean to, but I will."
Farman had already sent coordinates and environmental clearance by the time Adams reached the transporter room. The transporter chief entered them into the old console, checked them twice, and looked up. "Surface team reports clear, Captain."
Adams stepped onto the platform. "Energize."
The ship dissolved around him, and a moment later he stood beneath a green sky.
Even now the planet could surprise him. The plateau spread out under a bowl of emerald light, broken by red-brown ridges and shallow valleys the wind had cut over ages. Thin cloud drifted high overhead, the edges burning where the sunlight caught them. The air was warm and dry and smelled of stone.
Farman waited beside the survey marker, a phase pistol on his hip and dust across the knees of his uniform.
"You weren't exaggerating," Adams said.
"I didn't tell you anything."
"Which is what concerned me, Mr. Farman."
Farman nodded toward an excavation several hundred meters off. "Morbius is over there. He's already told two engineers that safety regulations are philosophical suggestions."
"That sounds like him."
Edward Morbius was kneeling at the edge of a shallow trench when they arrived. His wife stood a few paces behind him with a geological scanner tucked under one arm. Julia was four months along and had taken to wearing her field jacket open, a development she regarded with far less alarm than the ship's surgeon did. The surgeon had cleared her for limited surface duty and reviewed that clearance every week, in writing, with a thoroughness Adams suspected was aimed at him rather than at her. Adams had signed the order, and had wondered more than once since whether he should have.
Morbius barely glanced up. "Look."
Adams climbed down into the trench.
At first he saw only the red stone of the plateau. Then the light shifted, and something black showed beneath it, a surface so smooth that it swallowed the light instead of returning it. It was not polished stone. It was not any metal Adams knew. It emerged from beneath several meters of compacted sediment and ran on into the wall of the excavation without a visible seam.
"How far does it go?" he asked.
Julia handed him the scanner. "We lose definition at four hundred meters."
"The structure ends there?"
"No," she said gently. "The scanner does."
Adams looked at Morbius. "Artificial?"
Morbius hesitated, and the hesitation was the answer. Adams had never known him to pause over anything he could classify.
Farman climbed down beside them, brushed loose soil from the black surface with a gloved hand, and exposed a narrow groove running across it, perfectly straight. A second groove crossed the first at a precise angle.
"Still geological, Doctor?"
"No," said Morbius.
It was the quickest answer Adams had ever heard him give to a scientific question.
They widened the excavation through the afternoon, and every meter showed the same thing: no joints, no fasteners, no sign that separate pieces had ever been fitted together. It seemed less built than grown. Adams stood at the lip of the trench a long time watching it come out of the ground, with a feeling he could not name. It was not fear. It was nearer to walking into a room and understanding, a moment too late, that it was occupied.
Near sunset, one of the technicians uncovered a depression in the black material, and Julia knelt beside it.
It might have been meant for a hand. If so, the hand had been nothing like a human one. The recess was too long and too narrow, and it branched in ways Adams could make nothing of. Whatever had pressed itself there had not been shaped like a man.
Morbius studied it with open fascination. "An interface."
Farman stepped between him and the wall without appearing to hurry. "No."
Morbius looked up at him. "I have not touched it."
"You were thinking about it."
"That is not generally prohibited."
"In your case it ought to be."
Julia laughed, and even Morbius's mouth tightened into something that might, in a different man, have been the beginning of a smile.
Adams crouched beside the recess. "Nobody touches anything until engineering has had a look."
"Captain, if this is an access mechanism, we may be standing outside an intact structure built by a civilization that existed before human history began."
"Which is precisely why I don't want you sticking your hand into it."
Farman nodded once. "I knew there was a reason he was captain."
Remote probes came down from the Bellerophon before nightfall. The first found no radiation. The second found no biological hazard. The third registered a faint energy field behind the black surface, and Morbius made the technician run it again. The reading held.
Julia stared at the display. "After all this time?"
Morbius did not answer at once. His eyes had gone to the wall and stayed there. "There is still power."
Farman looked at Adams. "That would be the point where sensible people go back to the ship."
"We have just confirmed that an ancient artificial structure remains operational," said Morbius.
"Yes."
"And you wish to leave."
"Because it remains operational."
Adams ended it before it could become an argument. "Regulations require a full engineering survey before personnel enter any powered alien structure, Doctor. On this occasion I find myself in complete agreement with the regulations." The probes would stay in place overnight. Engineering would come down at first light. No one would activate anything until he gave the order. Morbius disliked the decision and began to say so, and Julia stopped him by laying a hand on his arm.
"Edward. It has waited this long. I think it can manage until morning."
He looked at the structure one last time before he let Farman lead them back to the transporter marker.
Cookie was waiting outside the transporter room when they materialized. Farman saw him and groaned.
"Well?" said Cookie.
"It's a wall," Adams said, and kept walking.
"You were down there six hours looking at a wall?"
"A very old wall."
Cookie turned to Farman, who said, "There is no treasure," before he could ask.
"That's exactly what a man hiding treasure would say."
By dinner, half the ship believed Morbius had found an underground city. By midnight, Cookie had furnished it with an alien king, a vault of jewels, and a machine capable of manufacturing bourbon. Adams made the mistake of asking where that last detail had come from.
Cookie looked wounded. "Scientific speculation, sir."
*
The next morning, the truth proved stranger.
Engineering had mapped the outline of an enormous doorway around the recess. The opening stood nearly five meters high and was shaped for no human proportion Adams could think of, narrow at its base and widening as it rose. Its edges had been invisible until the computer plotted microscopic variations in the material.
The team withdrew behind a portable force screen while an engineer set a remote actuator against the recess. Farman checked the charge on his phase pistol. Morbius noticed.
"You intend to shoot the door?"
"I intend to have the option."
Adams nodded to the engineer, and the actuator pressed into the recess.
Nothing happened.
Then a line of pale light traced itself around the doorway, and Julia took an involuntary step toward it. The black panel withdrew into the surrounding wall without a sound. There was no grinding of ancient machinery, no rush of trapped air. One moment the surface was solid. The next, an opening stood before them, and beyond it ran a corridor lit with a soft blue-white glow.
Farman regarded it for a while. "For the record, I preferred the wall."
They tested the atmosphere twice before Adams let anyone through. He went first, with Farman at his shoulder. Morbius and Julia followed, then two engineers carrying portable scanners. The light brightened ahead of them as they advanced.
One of the engineers stopped. "Captain."
Adams turned. The corridor behind them had gone dim again.
Farman looked up at the glowing walls. "It knows where we are."
"The lighting responds to proximity," Morbius said, adjusting his scanner. "That does not indicate awareness."
Farman kept walking. "Put that in the report."
The corridor opened into a chamber so vast that their hand lamps could not find the ceiling. Rows of machinery marched away into the dark. Some structures rose several stories above the floor; others were no larger than a console. Lines of light moved beneath transparent sections of flooring and vanished into walls that seemed to go on far beyond the reach of their scanners. There was no dust anywhere. There was no corrosion. Whoever had built this place had vanished so long ago that human civilization would have been hard to imagine.
Its machines had not noticed.
Adams stood very still. He had seen a good deal in his years in Starfleet and very little of it had made him feel small. This did. He thought of the forty-two people aboard the Bellerophon and how little any of them, himself included, understood about where they were standing.
Morbius moved slowly into the chamber.
"Edward," Julia whispered.
He turned toward her with an expression Adams had never seen on him before, and it took a moment to recognize it as wonder.
For the next several hours they measured, scanned, recorded, and understood almost nothing.
The second chamber was smaller. Farman went in first, and his light crossed the far wall and stopped.
"Captain."
Adams heard the change in his voice and was beside him in three steps.
A figure stood against the wall. For one bad second Adams thought they had found one of the builders. It was humanoid, taller than a man, in what looked like a close-fitting gray suit. Its arms hung at its sides and its eyes were closed.
Farman drew his phase pistol. Morbius pushed past him. "Wait."
"I can wait with this in my hand."
Julia raised her scanner and approached more carefully. "No respiration. No circulation."
Morbius studied the face without touching it. "Artificial."
"An android?" one of the engineers asked.
"I believe so."
Adams looked at the silent figure. It did not look broken, and it did not look abandoned. It looked as though it were waiting.
Farman nodded toward a recessed control beside it. "Can we turn it on?"
Morbius looked at Adams, and the eagerness in his face said everything he had not.
"No," said Adams.
"Captain..."
"We've been inside this place less than four hours. We are not activating anything that can stand up and walk."
"If it was built by the people who constructed this facility, it could answer every question we have."
"And tomorrow it still can."
Julia had not moved. She stood directly in front of the figure, studying its face with the kind of attention Adams had seen her give to rock strata and very little else.
"Something wrong?" Farman asked.
"No." She smiled faintly. "He needs a name."
Morbius turned from the control. "Julia, it is an archaeological artifact."
"It has waited a very long time for someone to find it, Edward. Anything that waits that long deserves a name." She looked back at the still face. "Robby."
Morbius stared at her. "Robby?"
"It suits him."
"You cannot possibly know that."
"Then he can object when he wakes up."
Farman holstered his pistol and studied the motionless figure. "Robby," he said, trying it out. "I've heard worse."
Morbius looked to Adams, hoping, perhaps, that the captain would restore some scientific dignity to the proceedings. Adams looked at the android instead, at the closed eyes and the patient stillness, and found that the name suited it, though he could not have said why.
"Robby it is."
Julia smiled.
* *
They left the facility at dusk.
At the mouth of the corridor, Adams paused and looked back. All day the lights had followed them, brightening where they walked and dying behind them, section by section, as each place was left empty. They were going out now, one after another, down the long throat of the passage.
All but one.
Far down the corridor, where the second chamber opened, a soft glow remained. It lit the room where no one stood but Robby.
Adams watched it for some time. It did not go out.
That night he sat at his desk with the recorder and the green curve of Altair IV in the port beside him.
"Captain's log, supplemental. Survey teams have gained access to an extensive subterranean facility of unknown origin beneath Survey Area Twelve. Portions of it remain powered. We have also located what appears to be an intact android. Doctor Morbius has asked that his earlier objection be entered into the record as vindicated. So entered."
He stopped the recorder. After a moment he started it again.
"The facility's lighting appears to respond to the presence of personnel. On our departure this evening, the lights in one chamber did not respond as expected." He hesitated. "Probably a malfunction. We'll examine it in the morning."
He switched off the recorder and sat on at the port, watching the green light of Altair IV burn against the dark.
