Twenty years earlier
The first man died eighteen days after Robby was shut down.
Until then Adams had been able to tell himself, in the privacy of his own quarters and nowhere else, that whatever was loose on Altair IV was dangerous without being murderous. It was a distinction he had defended for weeks and it had cost him something every time.
Equipment had moved. Doors had opened. A power regulator had come apart in a locked shed and been laid out across the floor in perfect order, every washer beside its own bolt. A portable generator had been found thirty meters from the plate that held it, the mounting holes undamaged and the concrete unmarked. Two people had reported footsteps behind them in corridors where nobody was walking. Farman had found prints in the dust of an empty storeroom that began in the middle of the floor and ended at a wall.
Each of them had been impossible in a slightly different way, and that had given everyone room to invent a slightly different explanation.
Then Harris.
Lieutenant Daniel Harris was aboard the Bellerophon when he died, and that was the part Adams could not make fit. The ship was in orbit. Whatever walked in the dust two hundred kilometers below had no business on his deck plates.
Harris had been working in the secondary communications compartment with two technicians when the bulkhead behind him folded inward.
Not ruptured. Not blown outward by pressure. Folded, the way a man folds a sheet of paper, the metal bending around something that was not there.
One technician lived because she had crossed to the next console for a diagnostic probe. The other was thrown against the far wall and broke an arm. Harris was caught between the bulkhead and the communications rack, and by the time they cut him free there was nothing the surgeon could do but confirm what everyone in the compartment already knew.
Adams stood in sickbay looking at the sheet while the surgeon washed her hands.
"Explosive residue?"
"None."
"Pressure differential?"
"None."
"Structural failure?"
"Quinn says the frame was sound. He says it three times, which is how you know it bothers him."
Adams looked through the partition at the corridor beyond, where two crewmen went past carrying a cable spool and did not look in.
"Internal sensors?"
"Nothing."
"External?"
"Nothing, Captain. I have given you every no I have."
She dried her hands and put the towel down with more care than it needed.
"I am going to say something you will not enjoy."
"I have had that kind of day."
"We should leave."
Adams did not answer at once.
"I know."
"No. I do not think you do."
"I said I know."
She stopped, and he heard how it had come out, and he made himself say the rest of it more quietly.
"I am sorry."
"So am I."
She looked at the covered shape on the table, a man she had inoculated six months ago in a corridor on Earth while he complained about the needle.
"Whatever this is," she said, "it has stopped being interesting."
* *
Morbius used the educator that night.
Julia found him because he was missing, which had become the ordinary way of finding him. She had begun counting his absences without deciding to. A meal he forgot. An hour below when he had said ten minutes. A night when she woke and put a hand across the bed and found it cold.
The house was dark except for the library. His coat was gone. She stood a while with both hands flat on the table, and the child turned under her ribs, and she said, "Yes. I know," to nobody at all, and went below.
He was already in the chair when she reached the chamber. The oval plate had begun its descent.
"Edward."
His eyes opened. He did not sit up.
"You promised me."
"I promised I would not use it again until I understood more. I understand vastly more."
"You were unconscious for fourteen hours."
"I survived."
"That is not a scientific standard."
He almost smiled at that, and it would have been easier if he had argued.
She came forward until she was close enough to touch the frame of the machine.
"Harris is dead."
Morbius's expression changed. He had not known, and for one moment she saw her husband in his face, the man who had wept at his mother's funeral and been embarrassed about it for a year.
"When?"
"Two hours ago. Something crushed a bulkhead aboard the ship."
"Aboard the ship."
"Yes."
Then she watched the scientist in him take possession of the grief before the man had finished feeling it.
"Was there a field reading? Radiation? Did Quinn record the deformation pattern?"
"A man is dead."
"I heard you."
"No. You heard data."
That reached him. He stood, and for one moment she believed she had him, and then he looked back at the chair.
"If it can reach the Bellerophon, then the phenomenon is not confined to the settlement."
"Which means we leave."
"It means our understanding is incomplete."
"Our understanding has been incomplete since the day we landed."
"And that," said Morbius, "is precisely why I must continue."
There it was, laid bare and not even hidden. Not because men were dying. Because he did not know.
"Edward. Every time you learn more, this gets worse."
"That is superstition."
"The incidents began after you used that machine."
"They began after we woke a complex we do not understand."
"They got worse when you began to understand it."
"Correlation is not causation."
"No," Julia said. "But it is a reason to keep your head out of that chair."
He sat down in it.
She did not leave. She had thought she would. She stood against the wall with her arms folded over the child and watched the plate come down, and she was still standing there forty-three seconds later when he began to scream.
He screamed at thirty-one seconds. Her hand was on the cutoff at thirty-three. Then his arm came up off the rest and he shouted one word, no, and she froze, and the light went white, and his back arched off the chair.
Then the machine let him go.
She caught him before he came out of the chair. There was blood under his nose. His eyes took several seconds to find her.
"How long?"
"Less than a minute."
"Good," said Morbius, and stood up too quickly, and crossed the chamber without noticing that she had hold of his arm.
He put out his hand toward a panel.
It lit before he touched it.
Julia saw it happen. So did he. He stopped with his fingers still short of the surface and looked at them, and then he moved his hand toward a second panel, and that one lit as well, and a field of Krell notation unfolded across the wall of the chamber like something coming awake.
"What does it say?"
He read the first line aloud. Then the second. Then the third.
Julia listened to her husband read a dead language he could not have read the previous morning.
"Edward."
"I know."
"You could not do that yesterday."
"No," he said, and there was blood on his collar and his face was gray, and his eyes were brighter than she had seen them in a year. "I can now."
*
The second death was aboard the ship, eleven days later.
The third was on the surface. A security officer went off the eastern perimeter at 0214 and Farman found him forty meters out in open ground. No prints led to him and none led away.
The fourth was Quinn's assistant, in a maintenance console that came apart around him.
The fifth was a laboratory technician who died when a pressure door closed on a corridor the computer insisted was open, and went on insisting afterward.
By then nobody in the settlement used the word accident.
Adams called Morbius to the command shelter. Farman was already there. So was Julia, and Morbius stopped inside the door when he saw the three of them together.
"This is an intervention."
"No," said Adams. "It is unusual."
He put a data slate on the table.
"Five dead. Nine injured. Three incidents aboard my ship. The subspace radio dropped out twice this morning and Quinn cannot tell me why."
"I was not informed."
"You are being informed now. You stop using the educator."
Morbius looked at Julia. Julia looked back at him and did not apologize.
"No," he said.
"That was not a request."
"You have no authority over what I do with my own mind."
"I have authority over this expedition."
"Then exercise it over your expedition. I am a civilian specialist."
"You are also standing on a Federation survey site while people die around you."
"You cannot demonstrate that my work is causing these deaths."
"No."
"Then this is fear."
"This," said Adams, "is command."
Farman had not spoken. He spoke now, from the side of the room, without raising his voice.
"You want a scientific observation, Doctor? Before you put your head in that thing, nobody was dead."
"That proves nothing."
"It proves Harris was alive."
Adams stood up.
"You are finished with the educator."
And Adams, who had commanded men for nineteen years and been shouted at by experts, found himself looking at something in Morbius's face he had not expected and did not like. Not violence. Not even anger, at first.
Insult. Deep and personal and absolute, as though the order were not merely wrong but an intrusion into something that belonged to him and to nobody else alive.
"You are stopping me," Morbius said, "at the point where I might finally understand the danger."
"I am stopping you because five people are dead."
"And if stopping me kills the rest?"
"Then I will live with it."
Morbius looked at him for a long moment.
"No," he said quietly. "You will not."
Every light in the settlement went out.
Farman had his weapon clear of the holster before the dark had finished arriving. Then the emergency lamps came up amber along the walls, and Adams was looking at Morbius, and Morbius looked genuinely startled.
That mattered. It did not help.
The communicator on Adams's belt shrieked.
"Bellerophon to ground command."
"Adams."
The voice from the bridge came through under alarms.
"Captain, we have lost subspace. The main array is gone."
"Gone how?"
A pause that went on two seconds too long.
"Sir, it has been torn off the ship."
*
They watched her come over on the next pass from the western terrace, through a portable telescope set up on the wall.
The Bellerophon crossed the sky every ninety-three minutes. She was a bright moving point until the viewer found her, and then she was a ship, and half the ventral engineering hull was wrong.
The subspace array had not been burned away. It had not been blown off. It was simply absent, and the plating around the mounts was folded outward, petals of metal opened toward space.
Quinn came through on short range.
"We have got no long-range transmission capability. Whatever did it pulled the array straight out through its mountings."
"Can you rebuild it?"
"Not properly."
"Improperly."
A pause. "Maybe."
"That will do."
"For what?"
"One message," said Adams.
Morbius, beside him at the telescope, turned his head.
"You intend to warn them away."
"Yes."
Julia was watching her husband's mouth. So was Adams. Neither of them liked what they saw there.
* *
That evening Adams called the expedition together in the command shelter, everyone who could leave a station in person and the rest through short-range links from the ship, and told them the truth with the dead man's empty chair against the wall behind him.
Five dead. Nine hurt. A force that had acted on the surface and aboard the ship. No long-range communications. A discovery beyond anything humanity had expected to find in this quadrant or any other.
And no way of knowing whether staying another day would kill more of them.
Then he did something captains do not ordinarily do. He called for a vote.
Not on command. That remained his, and he said so twice. On whether the expedition should go on.
Morbius objected before the ballots were distributed.
"This is absurd. Scientific work is not decided by plebiscite."
"People deciding whether to go on risking their lives is not scientific work."
"They knew this expedition carried risk."
"Not this risk."
"Because we do not understand it."
"That," said Adams, "is the point."
Morbius came forward through the room, and people made way for him, and he did not appear to notice them doing it.
"Captain. If you end this mission now you may destroy the only opportunity we will ever have to understand what is happening here."
"And if I do not, I may destroy what is left of my expedition."
"You cannot know that."
"No." Adams looked around the room at the thirty-six faces still in it. "Neither can you."
The vote took eleven minutes.
Thirty-two to return to Earth. Three to remain. One abstention.
Morbius did not take a ballot when they were offered to him. Julia took hers, and marked it where he could see her do it, and put it in the box.
Adams read the result aloud once.
"The expedition is over. We begin packing the settlement at first light."
Morbius said nothing.
"Edward."
"You are making a mistake."
"Probably."
"You will never be permitted to return. You understand that. They will quarantine this system and bury everything we have found under committees and prohibitions until every man who understood the first thing about it is dead."
"Probably that too."
"And you accept it."
Adams looked around the shelter, at the places along the wall where five people were not standing.
"Yes."
Something moved across Morbius's face and did not entirely leave it. Adams saw anger. Julia, who had known him eleven years, saw something worse. She saw betrayal.
What Morbius felt was simpler than either, and he never once said it aloud, and afterward it would not have mattered if he had.
They were taking it away from him.
Two and a half kilometers beneath the shelter, in a lattice of control older than the human species, a pattern was recognized that the lattice had been built to recognize. Not language. Not instruction. Not conscious intention at all.
Want.
The machine listened.
