Scott began by asking Robby whether he minded being examined.
The question stayed with Kirk for a long while afterward, because twenty years earlier nobody had thought to ask it.
They had set up on the terrace behind the house, where the afternoon came low across the plateau and made the ridges look nearer than they were. Scott had established what he called a proper work area: two open engineering cases, three scanners, a portable diagnostic unit and a quantity of cable that suggested no confidence whatever in wireless telemetry where anything important was concerned.
Robby stood in the middle of it. Morbius stood several meters off, and had not left, and gave no sign of intending to.
"Do I mind," Robby said.
"Aye."
"I do not experience inconvenience in the manner that you do."
"That's not what I asked you."
Robby looked at him briefly, and Scott waited him out, and Kirk watched Morbius's face while it happened. Something moved there and was put away again.
"No, Mr. Scott," Robby said. "I do not mind."
"Good." Scott opened the first scanner. "Then we'll start with whatever I can see without openin' anything."
"You will open nothing," said Morbius.
"That'll be why I just said it."
McCoy had settled on the low wall at the edge of the terrace with one ankle across the other knee, enjoying himself a great deal more than he had any intention of admitting. Ostrow had given up all pretense of being an observer and stood well inside Scott's working space, having been told twice not to lean over the equipment.
Altaira had gone into the house after the business underground and had not come out. Spock was aboard the ship. Kirk found, standing on that terrace in the late light, that he wished his first officer were down here and that Starfleet had asked somebody's opinion before writing its order.
Scott passed the scanner slowly across Robby's chest.
Nothing happened. He frowned and did it again. Nothing happened again.
"Bad?" said McCoy.
Scott ignored him, changed a setting, and got a single short tone out of the instrument. He stopped.
"Well."
Kirk knew that word. "What?"
"He's no' shielded."
"Of course he is not," said Morbius.
"I wasn't askin' you, Doctor." Scott went back to the android. "Internal power source."
"Yes."
"What kind?"
"I do not know the terminology you would use."
"Try me. I've a fair vocabulary."
Robby considered it with the seriousness he brought to everything. "It does not consume fuel."
"Conversion?"
"No."
"Stored energy?"
"No."
"External induction. Beamed, broadcast, anything of the sort."
"No."
"Then what in the name of all that's holy does it do?"
"It maintains a difference."
Scott's head came up. "A difference between what?"
"I do not know how to express the answer in English."
"Physics will do."
"I do not know how to express the answer in your physics."
That pleased Scott enormously, in the way that being told a mountain was unclimbable pleased him. "Now we're gettin' somewhere."
McCoy looked over at Kirk. "They're going to be here all night."
"Probably."
"You're enjoying this."
"A little."
Scott worked the scanner down the android's left arm. "Your outer material's no alloy I've ever met."
"It is not an alloy."
Scott stopped. "Mr. Spock said it was."
"Mr. Spock's instrument reported the nearest available classification. That is not the same statement."
"Then what is it?"
"Constructed matter."
"All matter's constructed."
"Not deliberately," said Robby.
Ostrow got there a half second before Scott did. "Matter assembled at the atomic level."
Robby turned his head toward him. "Below it."
Nobody on the terrace said anything at all for a moment.
Scott lowered the scanner very slowly, in the manner of a man setting down something that has turned out to be worth more than he was told. "Subatomic engineering."
"That description is closer."
"Closer," said McCoy, and unfolded his arms.
Scott looked at his scanner as though it had personally let him down. "You're tellin' me that suit of yours isn't clothing."
"No."
"Skin?"
"No."
"Armor."
"No."
"Then what is it, man?"
Robby looked down at himself with something that in a human being would have been mild surprise at the question. "My exterior."
"There," said McCoy. "There's your answer."
Scott walked a slow circle around the android, and Kirk watched what was happening to his chief engineer. He had come out here expecting an extraordinary machine, and with every answer the category itself got less useful, the way a ruler gets less useful when you take it out to measure the sea.
"Can you repair yourself?"
"Within limits."
"What limits?"
"Loss of structural integrity beyond a threshold. Destruction of central processing regions. Failure of the energy system beyond autonomous correction."
"Can you replace parts?"
"If material is available."
"What material?"
"Most matter."
Scott stopped again. "Most."
"Yes."
"You're tellin' me you can take raw stock, whatever's lyin' about, and manufacture your own components out of it."
"Yes."
"Using what?"
Robby looked toward the house.
"That is enough," said Morbius.
Scott turned. So did Kirk. The older man had gone rigid where he stood.
"Doctor?"
"I agreed to an examination of the android, Captain. Not to a guided excavation of Krell technology."
Scott shut the scanner with a snap. "Captain, I've learned more in a quarter of an hour on this terrace than I did in six hours under that hill."
"Keep going," said Kirk.
"You are exceeding Starfleet's instruction."
"No. Starfleet told me not to take him aboard, not to dismantle him, and not to carry off samples or internal recordings. Mr. Scott isn't doing any of those things."
"He is interrogating him."
Kirk looked at the android. "Does this feel like an interrogation?"
"No," said Robby.
"He does not understand the significance of what he is revealing," said Morbius.
Robby turned toward him. "I understand the questions."
"That is not what I said."
"No," Robby agreed. "It is not."
Morbius stared at him, and Kirk felt the shape of the afternoon shift by about a degree. McCoy felt it and came down off the wall. Scott, who had the single-mindedness of his profession, did not notice at all.
"What do you use to make the parts?"
"A matter conversion system."
Scott's entire face changed. "Where?"
"In the lower facility."
"How big?"
"There are several."
"How big is the smallest?"
"Approximately the volume of this room," said Robby, indicating the terrace and the space above it with one hand.
Scott let out a breath. "That's no' small."
"No."
"What'll it make?"
"Anything for which a complete structural pattern exists."
A pause went through the room of the kind that happens when several people understand something at different speeds.
"Anything," Scott said carefully.
"Within the capacity of the system."
"Metal."
"Yes."
"Glass."
"Yes."
"Electronic components."
"Yes."
"Food."
Robby paused fractionally. "Yes."
"Now," said McCoy, sitting up, "we're talking."
"Living tissue?" said Scott.
That one took longer. "Not living."
"Organic."
"Yes."
"Could it make a steak?"
"Scotty," said McCoy.
"I'm establishing parameters, Doctor."
"Yes," said Robby.
McCoy looked at the house, and then at the ridges, and then at the sky. "I am beginning to reconsider my position on this planet."
But Scott had gone somewhere well beyond steaks, and Kirk could watch him going. "You said it needs a complete structural pattern."
"Yes."
"Can it scan an object and reproduce it?"
"Yes."
"How accurately?"
"At the level required."
Scott gave him a look. "Required by whom?"
"By the object."
For possibly the first time in his professional life, Montgomery Scott had nothing to say.
Ostrow did. "The system determines the necessary fidelity from the function of the thing."
"Yes."
Scott looked from one of them to the other. "I liked him better before the Vulcan started translatin'."
Ostrow did not appear to take offense, which Kirk suspected was itself a form of Vulcan humor.
Scott opened the second case. "What powers your converter?"
"The system that powers the facility."
"The planetary system."
"Yes."
"Could one of these be built small enough to go aboard a starship?"
"No," said Morbius.
"Yes," said Robby.
Nobody moved.
Morbius turned toward him very slowly. Robby looked back at him without any discernible expression at all, and Scott's eyebrows went up about a centimeter, and Kirk felt the afternoon change again, further this time.
"You do not know that," Morbius said.
"I do."
"Nothing of that scale was ever constructed."
"That was not Mr. Scott's question. He asked whether it could be done. It could."
Scott looked delighted. Morbius did not.
"Mr. Scott," he said, "the Krell possessed an industrial infrastructure covering an entire world. Extracting one technique from it and imagining it installed on a Federation vessel is meaningless."
"No, Doctor. Difficult isn't the same word as meaningless. I've been told a thing was impossible about four hundred times, and about four hundred times I've had to do it before the end of the watch."
"You do not even understand the energy source."
"Not yet," said Scott.
Morbius laughed, short and with nothing in it, and Kirk saw his chief engineer's face close like a hatch. He had seen that expression perhaps a dozen times in five years, always at somebody who had just told the man the Enterprise could not do something, and it had never once ended cheaply.
"Robby," Scott said. "Could you show me one?"
"Absolutely not," said Morbius.
Robby kept his eyes elsewhere. "Yes."
Morbius stepped directly between them. "This examination is finished."
Kirk came away from the wall. "No, Doctor. It isn't."
"You have your orders."
"And you have an arrangement. You wanted time to transfer what you know before Starfleet takes you off this planet. This is what a transfer looks like."
"Captain."
"Unless what you meant," Kirk said, more quietly, "was that Starfleet gets whatever portion of it you decide it deserves."
Morbius said nothing for a moment. Then he turned to the android.
"Stay here."
Robby said nothing at all.
"Robby."
"I heard you."
Scott looked down at his equipment and became extremely interested in a perfectly ordinary connector. McCoy stopped smiling.
"Then obey me," Morbius said.
Robby turned his head a fraction. "Mr. Scott asked whether I would show him the system."
"And I have told you that you will not."
"Yes," said Robby.
The single word made more silence than an argument would have.
Kirk watched the man, and watched the machine, and was working out what he would do if this went further when Morbius did the one thing he had not anticipated.
He walked away.
Not into the house. Away from it, across the terrace and down the western path, at the pace of a man going somewhere on business. Altaira's tiger came out from the trees and watched him go by, its head turning the whole way, and Morbius never saw it.
McCoy let out a long breath. "Well."
Scott looked at the android. "Did I just start a family argument?"
"No."
"You'll want to study humans a while longer," said McCoy.
Robby looked down the path where Morbius had gone. "I have been studying Doctor Morbius for twenty years."
That put an end to the humor.
"Robby," Kirk said, and the android turned. "Do you want to show Mr. Scott the converter?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Scott looked faintly insulted by the question. Robby took it seriously, as he took everything.
"Because he wishes to understand it."
"So does Doctor Morbius."
"Yes."
"Then what's the difference?"
Robby looked at Scott, who had a scanner in one hand and grease on the other and had asked an alien machine's permission before touching it.
"Mr. Scott asks what it can do," he said. "Doctor Morbius asks what he can do with it."
McCoy stared at him. Ostrow lowered his eyes, which for a Vulcan is a considerable statement.
Kirk stood a while with that in his hands, turning it over, and found that it fit a great many things he had seen in two days.
"Show him," he said.
