From the report of James T. Kirk, commanding, U.S.S. Enterprise. I have set the Bellerophon's last hours down as they were given to me, and I have put them where they belong in the account rather than where I learned them, because a man reading this ought to have what I did not. I did not know, that night, that a starship had been pulled out of the sky because a man on the ground was angry about being left behind. I did not know it four days later, when it would have changed everything I did. I knew that a ship was gone and that one man had lived, and I went to bed at 0100 with a dispatch from Starfleet Command on my desk and a young man in my sickbay with three cracked ribs, and I slept, which is the part I have thought about most since.
The dispatch had come in at 2140 and Uhura had brought it down herself rather than route it, which told Kirk what it was before he read it.
He read it twice anyway.
Doctor Edward Morbius, the last living member of the Bellerophon expedition and material witness to the loss of a Federation vessel, was to be brought aboard the Enterprise and conveyed to Earth. His daughter, a Federation citizen born of Federation nationals, was to accompany him. Starfleet acknowledged that the subject had declined. Starfleet noted that the subject's consent was not a condition.
The last paragraph was four lines long and said, in the careful language such paragraphs are written in, that the commanding officer was expected to accomplish this without the use of force, and that the Council would review the matter if force proved necessary.
Kirk put the slate down on the desk.
"Well," said McCoy from the other chair, "at least they've been clear."
"They've been clear about what they want. They've been extremely unclear about how."
"That's an old tradition."
"How's Rivera?"
"Asleep. Nineteen years old and three of his ribs are knitting and he spent forty minutes this evening telling a nurse about a tiger he never saw." McCoy stretched his legs out. "He'll be fit in six days. He asked me whether he was going back down."
"What did you tell him?"
"That it wasn't my department." McCoy looked at him. "Is he?"
"Not if I can help it."
Spock came in without announcing himself, which after five years Kirk had stopped noticing.
"Captain. Doctor Ostrow has requested to see you."
Kirk looked at the chronometer. "At this hour."
"He has been working since we returned to the ship. I believe he has stopped only to be told that you were unavailable."
"Then he's a persistent man."
"He is a Vulcan who has waited six years," said Spock. "Persistence is not the relevant quality."
* *
Ostrow came in carrying nothing.
That was the first thing about him and it bothered Kirk, because in two days he had never once seen the man without an instrument in his hands. He had put it down somewhere to walk down here without it, and that was a decision, and Kirk had been in command long enough to be wary of a man who had made a decision before he opened his mouth.
"Doctor."
"Captain. The interrogative is complete."
"Complete."
"I have the full sequence of the signal from beneath the plateau. Eleven seconds. Two hundred and six discrete elements. I have established the relationships among a hundred and ninety of them." Ostrow stood with his hands at his sides. "It is a question. It is addressed to a mind. It contains a provision for a response and it contains no provision at all for refusal."
Kirk let that sit for a time.
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning that the structure does not include the possibility that no answer will come. A Krell engineer, writing this, did not consider it necessary to plan for silence."
"And the other sixteen elements?"
"Are the reason I am here."
McCoy shifted in his chair.
"Three of them," said Ostrow, "are the inadmissible relationships I reported this afternoon. They violate every rule of Krell grammar I have derived in six years. This morning I would have told you my rules were wrong. I have spent the evening establishing that they are not."
"Then the sequence is wrong."
"No, Captain. The sequence is correct. It is simply not written for us." Ostrow paused, and it was the first time Kirk had seen him hesitate over a sentence. "It is written for a reader who can hold more than one relationship in the same position at the same time. I cannot do that. No human being can do it. No Vulcan can do it either, and I have spent some hours this evening satisfying myself on that point."
"But something can."
"Yes."
"What?"
"A Krell," said Ostrow. "Or a human being who has used the machine in Doctor Morbius's sitting room."
The cabin was quiet.
McCoy said, "No."
"Doctor McCoy has not yet heard my request."
"Doctor McCoy has heard it three times in his career from three different people and it's always been the same request." McCoy sat forward. "You want to put your head in that thing."
"I want to be permitted to evaluate it."
"That's a longer way of saying the same sentence."
"It is a more accurate way."
Kirk said, "Doctor Ostrow."
"Captain, I have six years and four pages and I am now within reach of the only body of Krell material that exists. I would not ask if there were another route."
"There is another route. The man who used it is sitting in that house right now and he can read every line of it."
"Doctor Morbius," said Ostrow, "did not help you this afternoon."
It landed harder than Kirk expected, because it was true and because Ostrow had not said it unkindly. He said it the way a man reports a figure.
"Say the rest of it."
"Something struck that settlement for eleven seconds and injured one of your crew. The only man alive who understands the systems beneath that house stood in his own garden and gave you nothing. He did not consult an instrument. He did not go below. He said he did not know." Ostrow's voice did not change at all. "I do not accuse him of lying. I observe that he is either unable or unwilling, and that in both cases the result to you is identical."
Kirk looked at Spock, who had said nothing and was watching Ostrow with an attention Kirk recognized and did not much like.
"Mr. Spock."
"Doctor Ostrow's analysis of the signal is sound. I have verified the hundred and ninety."
"That isn't what I asked you."
"No, sir." Spock put his hands behind his back. "You asked me nothing. I will nevertheless observe that Doctor Ostrow has described a machine which produced a man who has lived alone on a hostile world for twenty years, and that he has described it as a route."
Ostrow turned his head. "You believe I am reasoning from desire."
"I believe you are the second philologist to stand in front of that machine, and that the first one is downstairs."
It was said without heat, and there was no answering it.
Kirk stood up.
"The answer is no. Not tonight and not tomorrow. When I have Morbius aboard this ship and a Starfleet science team in that basement with a full survey behind them, somebody may look at that machine, and it will not be a man working alone at two in the morning because he cannot stand not knowing. Is that clear?"
"It is clear."
"Doctor."
"Captain, I have not argued."
"No," said Kirk. "You haven't. That's what worries me."
Ostrow inclined his head and went out.
McCoy watched the door close.
"He'll ask again."
"I know."
"He'll ask Morbius."
Kirk had not thought of that. He thought of it now, and did not care for it at all.
*
The call from engineering came at 0038.
Kirk took it standing up, which was how he took every call after midnight.
"Scott here, Captain. I've got something and I don't much like the shape of it."
"Go ahead."
"Access panel in the number four Jefferies tube, C deck. Eighteen fasteners." A pause. "They're out."
"Out."
"Off the panel and laid on the deck plate in a line. Longest to shortest."
Kirk was quiet for a moment.
"Who was in the tube?"
"That's the part I don't like. Nobody's been in there since 1400 and the hatch log agrees with me. I had two men run the whole tube. There's no damage, nothing's missing, nothing's been touched. The panel was lifted off clean and set down against the bulkhead. Squarely, sir."
"Squarely."
"Aye. Like a man tidying up after himself."
Kirk was quiet long enough that Scott said his name.
"Scotty. You saw that shed this afternoon."
The channel went quiet, and Kirk understood from the length of it that the engineer had been waiting to find out whether his captain was going to make him say it first.
"Aye," said Scott. "It came apart along its fastenings. Every panel off, nothing torn. I've thought about little else since, and I'd not have called you at half past midnight over eighteen screws otherwise."
"Neither would I."
"I'd like to post a man on that deck."
"Do it. And Scotty. Photograph it before anybody puts a hand on it."
"Already have."
Kirk closed the channel and stood there.
Whatever had crossed that garden this afternoon had crossed it on the ground, in front of eight witnesses, none of whom had seen anything at all.
This was his ship, in orbit, with four hundred and thirty people asleep in it.
He went to the intercom.
"Bridge. This is the captain. I want a full internal sensor sweep, all decks, and I want the results in my hands by 0600. Mr. Sulu, take us to a fourteen thousand kilometer orbit."
"Fourteen thousand, aye. May I ask why, sir?"
Kirk looked out the viewport, where Altair IV filled the lower third of it, green at the edges and red-brown across the middle, with the night side coming around.
"Because I want to find out whether distance matters."
* *
It did not, though he would not know that for another two days.
He slept four hours. At 0615 Uhura brought him the sensor report, which was clean, and at 0700 he sat in the mess with a cup of coffee he did not drink and decided not to put off the thing he had settled the night before on a dark terrace.
McCoy found him there.
"Sensors found nothing."
"Sensors have found nothing since we arrived."
"You're still bringing the girl up today."
"I am."
"With a ship that grew a tidy engineer in the middle of the night."
Kirk turned the cup around on the table.
"Bones, that man is going to be ordered aboard this ship inside of a week, and she is going to be ordered aboard with him, and neither of them knows it yet." He looked up. "She's nineteen. She has met four people in her life and two of them are her father. I'd rather she saw what a starship is before somebody hands her a transfer order."
McCoy considered that.
"That's either the kindest thing you've done this month or the most calculated."
"It can be both."
"Yes," said McCoy. "That's rather my point."
