The entrance Robby used was not the one Morbius had shown them.
It lay behind the house, past the garden, in a shallow depression that looked like nothing but twenty thousand years of weather until the android put a hand against the rock, and the rock opened.
McCoy stopped dead. "How many doors does that man have?"
"That one isn't his," Kirk said.
Robby went first. Scott followed with one engineering case, then Kirk, then McCoy and Ostrow. The passage went down only a short way before it opened into a chamber Kirk had not seen, small by Krell standards, which meant that it was roughly the size of the Enterprise briefing room.
At the center of the floor stood a circular platform. There was nothing else in the room at all.
Scott turned around once. "This is it?"
"Yes."
"I expected more machinery."
"The machinery is elsewhere."
"Of course it is," said Scott.
Robby went to the platform. "What would you like?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"What would you like the system to produce?"
Scott looked at Kirk. Kirk was unable to keep it entirely off his face. "You wanted a demonstration, Mr. Scott."
"Aye. I did."
"Make something useful," said McCoy.
Scott ignored this on principle. "What can it scan?"
Robby indicated a recess in the rim of the platform, and Scott reached into his case and came out with a hyperspanner, which he held up between two fingers like a man showing a card to an audience.
"This."
Robby set it into the recess. A light went over it once.
The hyperspanner disappeared.
"What have you done?" Scott said, in a tone that would have brought an entire engineering deck to attention.
"Scanned it."
"You've vaporized my spanner."
"No."
"It's gone."
"Temporarily."
Scott looked a moment as though he intended to hold an entire two-hundred-thousand-year-old civilization personally to account. Then the platform brightened.
A hyperspanner appeared in the center of it.
Then a second one appeared beside it.
Then the original came back in the recess, exactly where it had been.
Scott did not move for several seconds. Then he picked up the first copy, and the second, and the original, and weighed all three in his hands like a man at a market who suspects the scales. He examined them. He opened one, and then the other, and looked inside both.
"Captain."
Kirk knew that tone as well. "What is it?"
"They're identical."
Ostrow had taken one and was turning it under the light. "Identical to what level?"
"Beyond anything I've got in this case, Doctor, and I'll thank you not to enjoy that."
"The differences," said Robby, "are below the functional threshold."
Scott looked up. "There are differences."
"Yes."
"How small?"
"Quantum state."
Scott sat down.
He did not need to sit down. There was nothing in the chamber to sit on, so he sat on the floor, like a man whose knees have taken a decision without consulting him.
"I think we've broken him," McCoy said.
Scott was not listening. "You can do this with anything."
"With a sufficient pattern."
"Could you copy me?"
"Don't encourage it," said McCoy.
"The system could reproduce your physical structure," Robby said.
Scott looked up from the floor. "Would it be me?"
"No."
The answer came with no pause at all, and the speed of it put the hair up on the back of Kirk's neck.
Ostrow's head came around. "Why not?"
"Because a structural pattern is not continuity."
Nobody said anything. McCoy was looking at the android in a way he had not looked at him before, and Kirk found he was doing much the same.
Scott got up off the floor. "That's a rather important distinction."
"Yes."
"Did the Krell understand it?"
Robby's expression did not change in any way that a human being could have measured. "They believed they did."
Kirk heard the tense and had opened his mouth to go after it when his chief engineer picked up one of the duplicated hyperspanners and turned it over, and the mood in the chamber changed, because there was a brightness in Scott's eye that Kirk had learned over five years to treat as a weather warning.
"All right," said Scott.
"What," said Kirk.
Scott turned to the android. "This machine makes food."
"Yes."
"And liquids."
"Yes."
"Any liquid at all."
"Within chemical constraints."
Scott smiled. McCoy put his face in his hand.
"Robby," Scott said, "do you know what Scotch whisky is?"
"Yes."
"Of course you do. You read the whole library."
"Mr. Scott," said Kirk.
"Scientific inquiry, Captain."
"Naturally."
Scott went into his case and came out with a small flat metal flask, and held it up, and McCoy's head came out of his hand.
"You carry whisky in your engineering kit."
"Emergency supplies."
"You are the emergency."
Scott unscrewed the flask, considered it with the air of a man about to do something historic, and handed it to Robby. "Can it copy that?"
Robby examined it. "Yes."
"Exactly?"
"Yes."
"How much would you like?" Scott said to himself, and then, to Robby, in a voice that had become entirely businesslike: "Specify quantity, you said."
"Yes."
Scott's grin was a thing of beauty. "Sixty gallons."
"No," said Kirk.
"Captain."
"Absolutely not."
"For calibration purposes."
"Mr. Scott."
"Twenty."
"No."
"Ten."
"One bottle."
Scott looked wounded in a place doctors cannot reach. "One bottle's hardly enough to establish repeatability."
"Give him two," said McCoy. "One for science and one for grief."
Kirk sighed. "Two."
Scott turned to the android in triumph. "Two bottles."
Robby placed the flask in the recess. The light went over it, and two dark glass bottles stood on the platform, labels and all, with the seals unbroken.
Scott picked one up as though it were an infant. He examined the seal. He opened it. He smelled it. His expression became, briefly, religious.
McCoy held out a hand. Scott moved the bottle out of reach.
"You're on duty," said Scott.
"So are you."
"I'm engineering."
"That is not an exemption."
Scott took the smallest sip ever taken by a Scotsman, closed his eyes, and stood there with the whole Krell civilization arranged beneath his feet.
When he opened them again he looked at Robby with a respect Kirk had rarely seen him extend to anything that was not the Enterprise.
"Perfect."
"There are minor molecular variations," said Robby.
Scott's eyes came open the rest of the way. "Where?"
"They are not perceptible to human taste."
"Then why in God's name would you tell me?"
"You asked for accuracy."
McCoy laughed until he had to sit down on the edge of the platform, and Kirk gave up entirely, and even Scott, after a moment of wrestling with his dignity, surrendered it.
Ostrow did not laugh. He was looking at the platform.
"Robby."
"Yes, Doctor."
"If the Krell could reproduce any nonliving object at will, why did they retain conventional manufacturing at all?"
The room went quiet again. It did that quickly, Kirk had noticed, in Krell rooms.
"At first they did," Robby said.
"At first."
"Later, most production became responsive."
"Responsive to what?"
Robby said nothing.
The silence ran a beat too long. Ostrow had spent six years learning to read silences of exactly that shape.
"To thought," Ostrow said.
Robby looked up at him. "Yes."
The word came out very softly, and Scott lowered the bottle.
Kirk thought about a man on a balcony describing a civilization that had abolished labor, and about machines running under a plateau for two thousand centuries with nobody to run them, and about a corridor that turned its lights on four meters ahead of wherever you were going.
"You think of something," he said, "and the system makes it."
"Eventually."
"Eventually?"
Robby's eyes went to the floor. "The final systems required less instruction."
Ostrow came a step closer. "How much less?"
Robby said nothing to that either.
Kirk stood in the middle of the small bright room and felt a shape begin to assemble itself at the back of his mind, not enough to see, only enough to know there was one, and that he was not going to like it when the light came on.
"Let's not ask a machine to finish that sentence," McCoy said, "until we're sure we want the answer."
For once nobody argued with him.
Scott put the bottle down. "Robby. One more question."
"Yes."
"Why did Doctor Morbius never show me this?"
The android looked toward the entrance, up the short passage, in the direction of the house. He took long enough that Kirk began to think he would let it go by.
"Because he believes that understanding gives possession."
Kirk looked at Ostrow, and found Ostrow already looking back at him, and neither of them said anything, and Kirk knew he would not be forgetting that sentence.
* * *
When they came up, Altaira was sitting on the terrace with the tiger stretched out beside her, and her father was nowhere in sight.
She looked at Scott's case. "What did Robby show you?"
Scott, who had lost a hyperspanner and two bottles of whisky to the Starfleet chain of command in the last four minutes and was still in a remarkably good humor, said, "Miss, your planet has the finest manufacturing system I have ever seen, and I include Utopia Planitia in that."
"And did Father approve?"
Nobody answered her.
Alta nodded. "I didn't think so."
Kirk sat down on the wall beside her. "You know about the converter."
"Robby used to make things for the house."
"What things?"
"Parts. Glass, when I broke it, which was often. Sometimes food, when the stores ran low."
McCoy stopped in the middle of putting away his own case. "Your father told us you survived out here on what he could provide."
"He did provide it," said Alta, entirely without irony.
Kirk looked at the house.
There it was again. Not a lie, exactly. A sentence cut back until only the useful part was left standing, a thing Edward Morbius did as naturally as other men breathe, and it was beginning to tell Kirk a good deal more about him than any of the answers had.
Alta scratched the tiger behind one ear. "My father doesn't like the machine."
Scott looked up. "Doesn't like it?"
"He likes what it can do." She said it without any particular emphasis, the way she said everything. "He doesn't like that it doesn't need him."
Kirk said nothing to that. There did not seem to be anything to add.
"When I was small," Alta said, "I thought everything came from him. Food. Books. Clothes. The parts for the house. He never once said so. I simply thought it."
"When did you find out?"
"When Robby showed me."
"And what did your father do?"
"He told Robby not to show me anything again without asking him first."
Kirk looked at the android, who had come up the path behind them and was standing at the edge of the terrace with a duplicated hyperspanner in one hand and two bottles of whisky in the other.
"Did you?"
"For several years," said Robby.
"And then?"
Robby looked at Alta. "She asked me."
Altaira smiled. It was very small, and it did not last, but Kirk saw it, and so did McCoy, and Kirk understood that the two of them had just been handed the first piece of evidence anybody had produced all day about what actually went on in that house.
Scott had begun packing his instruments. One of the duplicated hyperspanners was still in his hand.
Kirk pointed at it. "That stays here."
Scott looked stricken. "Captain."
"Starfleet's order. Nothing produced by Krell systems goes aboard my ship."
"It's my hyperspanner."
"It's another one of your hyperspanner."
Scott appealed to the android, which Kirk thought showed poor tactical judgment.
"The captain is correct," said Robby.
Scott said something in Gaelic.
"And the Scotch," said McCoy, pleasantly.
Scott went very still.
"The Scotch too, Mr. Scott."
"Captain, that was produced from my own private property."
"On a Krell machine."
"It's Scotch."
"It's Krell Scotch."
"There is no such thing as Krell Scotch."
"There is now," said Kirk, "and it's staying on Altair IV."
Scott looked at the bottles the way a man looks at a shore he is being carried off from. Robby took them from him, along with the spanner.
"I will keep them safe."
"Particularly that one."
"I understand."
"No, I mean particularly."
"Mr. Scott."
"Aye?"
"I understand."
Scott turned to Kirk. "Captain, he's mockin' me."
"He's learning," said McCoy.
And Kirk, watching the android carry two bottles of counterfeit whisky into a house built out of a dead starship's cargo, thought McCoy was probably right, and that he had no idea whether it was good news.
Then the communicator on his belt sounded.
He had it open before the second tone. "Kirk here."
Uhura's voice came through under a wash of static that had no business being there at this range. "Captain, we have been trying to reach you for three minutes."
Kirk was already on his feet. "What's wrong?"
"Interference, sir. It came up all at once. Mr. Spock asks me to inform you that we are losing surface telemetry."
He looked at the ridge. "Cause?"
"Unknown."
The signal broke. Came back. Broke again.
"Captain, there is something else."
"Go ahead, Lieutenant."
A longer burst, and when her voice came back it was thinner. "We are receiving a transmission."
"From where?"
"That is the difficulty, sir."
"Uhura."
Every person on the terrace had turned toward him.
"The signal originates below your position."
In the doorway of the house, Edward Morbius had appeared, and he had heard enough of it.
For the first time since Kirk had met the man, he looked frightened.
And a long way under their feet, in the dark, something had begun to call the Enterprise.
