Twenty years earlier
The beam did not form on the third attempt either.
Julia stood inside the marker with her husband beside her and her hand still in his, and for the third time the light came up around them and thinned and went out, and for the third time the terrace was exactly where it had been, and the afternoon went on being warm and clear and entirely ordinary.
"Bellerophon."
"We are trying, ma'am."
She had not asked a question. She had only wanted to hear a voice that was two hundred kilometers away and still trying.
Aboard the ship a transporter chief named Delacroix, nine years at that console and never once a lost pattern, ran the sequence a fourth time with his supervisor at his shoulder, the two of them calling it to each other like men landing an aircraft in weather.
"Lock."
"Marginal."
"Take it."
"Energizing."
On the terrace the light came and went again.
"Captain," said Delacroix, "I can hold a lock for about two seconds and then something eats it."
"Something."
"I have no better word, sir."
Adams did not stop. That was the thing Julia remembered about him afterward, when she remembered anything about that day at all. He shifted the ship's orbit nine kilometers to put them under a different angle. He had Quinn cut power to three decks to feed the transporter. He had them try the cargo transporter, not rated for people, and he authorized it anyway, in writing, in one line, and Farman witnessed it.
It failed the same way.
"Doctor Morbius," said Adams. "I am going to try one more configuration."
"Yes."
"Stand in the marker."
"We are standing in it."
Julia looked at her husband's face as he said it, and understood, with the particular clarity that arrives about four hours too late, that Edward had stopped expecting the beam to work and that he was not unhappy about it.
He was looking at the lower entrance.
"Edward."
"I am here."
"Look at me."
He did, eventually.
"If this does not work, they will have to leave orbit."
"Yes."
"And come back for us."
"Yes," said Morbius, and it was the flattest syllable she had ever heard out of him.
The fifth attempt failed at 1524.
Adams came up on the channel himself then, and the background behind his voice had changed, and there were alarms in it that had not been there twenty minutes before.
"Edward. Julia. Listen to me. I have had three more system failures since we started this and I have a ship full of people who are not going to survive a fourth. I have to take her out past the interference. We repair, we come back, and we get you off that rock. Tell me you understand me."
Julia said, "We understand you."
And Edward Morbius, standing on the terrace of the house he had built, with his wife's hand in his and thirty-five people over his head, said:
"Do not come back."
On the bridge of the Bellerophon, Adams took his hand off the transmit control and looked at the speaker grille above the communications station as though the fault were in the equipment.
"Say that again."
"You heard my captain's warning transmission this morning. You wrote it yourself. This planet is dangerous. You have made your decision and the expedition has ratified it. Leave."
"I am not abandoning you and Julia."
"You already have."
Julia turned toward her husband on the terrace and said his name, and he did not look at her.
Adams did not answer for a moment. When he did, his voice had gone very level, which was how he sounded when he had been hit.
"I had forty-two people in this system and five of them are in the ground. I made the decision a captain is supposed to make."
"And now you would like absolution."
"I would like you alive."
"Then go."
"Edward."
"Leave this planet. You voted to leave. Leave."
On the terrace, the communicator shook slightly in his hand.
He heard the cruelty in it after it was out of him. So did Julia. She said, "That is not fair," and she said it quietly, and he knew that she was right and did not take it back, and that was the part he would carry for twenty years.
Two and a half kilometers beneath the terrace, something enormous changed state.
No alarm announced it. No light came on in the house. No conscious thought in Edward Morbius said kill them, and no instrument that ever examined the wreckage could have found a command if it had gone looking for one.
There was only anger. Abandonment. Loss. The knowledge that they were taking his expedition and his discovery and his future away from him and flying them home to be buried under committees.
And underneath all of it, simple and absolute and without a word attached to it:
Go.
The machine listened.
* *
On the bridge, the helm alarm sounded.
"Report."
"Orbital drift, sir."
"Correct it."
"Correcting."
The alarm went on sounding. Adams came out of the chair and crossed to the navigation display and read it twice.
Twelve kilometers of altitude gone.
"That is not drift."
"No, sir."
"Impulse."
"Answering."
"Then why are we descending?"
Nobody had an answer for him. The old survey vessel had a helmsman named Jacobs, twenty-six years old, four years out of the Academy, and he had both hands locked on his controls as though force applied to them would travel down through the deck and into the ship.
Adams looked at the forward screen. Altair IV had more of it than it should have had.
"Increase thrust."
"We are at thirty percent."
"Fifty."
"Fifty, aye."
The deck took on a vibration that had not been there a minute before. They went on descending.
Quinn came up from engineering without waiting to be called.
"Bridge, what are you doing up there?"
"Trying to leave."
"Then somebody has forgotten to tell the ship."
"Engines."
"Normal."
"Power."
"Normal."
"Then give me more of it."
"You have got it."
Adams watched the altimeter lose another six kilometers while a man he trusted told him every system aboard was working correctly.
"Full impulse."
Jacobs turned around in his seat. "Captain, at this altitude the hull."
"Full impulse."
"Aye, sir."
The Bellerophon surged. Everyone on the bridge felt it come up through the deck despite the compensators, a hundred and ninety thousand tons of ship putting her whole shoulder against the sky.
For three seconds the descent slowed.
Then it resumed.
Adams stood holding the rail behind the helm and understood, and did not want to.
"Quinn."
"I see it."
"Say it."
A long pause on the intercom, and under it the sound of the engine room going wrong.
"She is being pulled, Captain."
The bridge became quiet except for the alarms, the loudest quiet any of them had ever stood in.
"By what?"
"I do not know."
"Find out."
"Working on it."
"Communications. Put me through to the surface."
"Channel open, sir."
"Morbius."
Static.
"Edward, come in."
*
On the terrace, Morbius heard him and did not answer at once.
Julia answered instead. "What is happening?"
Her husband was looking up. There was nothing to see. The Bellerophon was on the far side of the world and would not be over the plateau for another forty minutes.
"I do not know."
"Edward."
He opened the communicator. "Yes."
"We are losing orbit. Engines are at full thrust and something is pulling us down."
Julia's hand closed on the rail.
"That is impossible," said Morbius.
"I have had a sufficiency of impossible things. If you know anything at all, now is the time."
Morbius turned toward the lower entrance.
Julia caught his sleeve. "Where are you going?"
"The power system."
"Can you stop it?"
"I do not know."
"Then stay here."
He studied her, and she saw that he had already gone, and that the man standing on the terrace was a formality.
Adams's voice came up out of the communicator, and there was shouting behind it now.
"Morbius."
"I am here."
"Tell me something I can use."
And Edward Morbius stood on the stones he had laid himself and discovered that he could feel it.
Not as sound. Not as thought. As scale. Power moving under the crust of the planet in quantities beside which the Bellerophon's engines were a man pushing at a mountain with both hands, drawn from reactors the Krell had built when the human species was learning to keep a fire alight, and all of it pointed at one small moving object in the sky.
"I can feel the load."
"What load?"
"The Krell system. It is drawing."
"Shut it down."
"I do not know how."
"Then find out."
The channel went to static.
Morbius ran.
Julia followed him as far as the entrance and stopped there, because she was eight months along and the stairs went down two and a half kilometers, and because she already knew.
"Edward!"
He did not look back.
*
The Bellerophon crossed the altitude at which orbit stops being the correct word for what a ship is doing.
"We are entering the upper atmosphere."
"Angle."
"Too steep."
"Correct it."
"Trying, sir."
"Thrusters."
"Firing."
"Again."
"Already firing."
A faint orange line had come up along the lower edge of the hull display. Adams watched it lengthen with the attention of a man watching something he has seen in training simulations and never once expected to see on his own ship.
"Captain, hull temperature is rising."
"I know."
"We are not built for entry at this angle. We are not built for entry at any angle."
"I know that too, Mr. Quinn."
The ship shook. Not violently, yet. Enough.
A warning light came up over the engineering station and then a second one beside it.
Farman arrived on the bridge. Adams looked at him and almost laughed.
"I thought you would be below."
"Nothing to shoot down there."
"There is nothing to shoot up here either."
"No, sir. But the company is better."
The ship shook again, harder, and Farman put a hand out to the rail and looked at the forward screen, where Altair IV had grown until there was no black left around the edges of it.
"Can we get out?"
Adams looked at the back of Jacobs's head.
The helmsman did not turn around. "No, sir."
Farman nodded once, the way he did when a duty roster came back wrong and there was no point arguing about it.
"All right."
Adams opened shipwide.
"All hands, this is the captain. Secure for atmospheric entry. Damage control to emergency stations. Engineering, maintain full ascent thrust."
He let go of the switch, and then put his thumb back on it, because there were thirty-five people aboard his ship and he had one thing left that he could give them and it was ten seconds of his voice sounding unafraid.
"You have done everything I have asked of you on this expedition and a good deal I did not. Stand to your posts."
He closed the channel.
"Communications. Any subspace at all."
Mercer shook her head. "None, sir."
Adams thought about thirty seconds that morning and a man on his back under a console all night to buy them.
Do not come back.
He hoped somebody had heard it.
The first flame came across the forward ports. It was thin and orange and almost delicate, and it ran along the edge of the hull and disappeared, and then came back brighter.
"We have crossed into atmosphere."
"Hull temperature climbing."
"How fast?"
"Too fast."
Adams sat down in the command chair and put both hands on the arms of it, because that was where a captain belonged and because he did not intend to be standing when it came.
"Maintain thrust."
The Bellerophon fought.
Her engines drove upward with everything eleven years of service had left in them, and something beneath the surface of Altair IV pulled harder, and the orange went to red and the red went to white, and fire came across the forward view and stayed there.
The ship began to burn.
*
Julia watched it from the terrace.
She had come back up out of the doorway because there was nothing down there for her and because she could not be in the house, and she was standing at the western wall when the Bellerophon came over the ridge.
She knew what she was looking at before she understood it. There was a light in the sky in the middle of the afternoon, moving too fast and too low, with a tail on it, and it was the wrong color for anything that belonged there.
It came across the plateau from the west at an angle that no ship makes on purpose.
For eleven seconds Julia Morbius stood with both hands on the stone wall her husband had built and watched a thousand-meter streak of white fire cross a clear sky, and inside it were Captain J. J. Adams, and Jerry Farman, who had carried her bag up the ridge on the first day and pretended it was nothing, and Quinn, who had cut his hand open building a radio to save them, and the surgeon who had written her clearance out longhand every week for four months, and Cookie, who had given an unborn child her name.
The light broke apart over the eastern horizon.
There was no sound at all for a long time. The plateau was very quiet and very warm, and a bird she had never learned the name of went on calling in the garden the whole time.
Then the noise arrived, low and long, rolling up out of the east like weather.
Julia stood where she was until it had finished.
Then she went inside and sat down in the chair by the window and put both hands flat on the front of her dress, and the child moved under them, and she said, out loud, to a house with no one else in it:
"All right. Then it is you and me."
* *
Two and a half kilometers below her, the load came off.
Edward Morbius was standing in the central power gallery when it happened, in front of an instrument wall he had learned to read three weeks earlier, watching numbers he could not have named a year ago fall back through their ranges one bank at a time.
He had not touched a control. He had not found one to touch.
He watched the reactors go quiet, and the quiet came down through the gallery like a held breath being let out, and he understood that whatever had been happening had not been interrupted.
It had finished.
He stood there a long while.
Then Edward Morbius, once the most celebrated philologist of his generation and never to publish another paper, turned around and went back up two and a half kilometers of Krell stairway to tell his wife he was sorry, and found he could not think of one sentence in any of the nine languages he spoke that would be of the slightest use to her.
He found her in the chair by the window.
He did not say the sentence about being sorry. He said, "They are gone," which she already knew, and she said, "Yes," and neither of them said anything else until the light went off the ridge.
On the far side of the plateau, in a gallery under the fourth chamber, an android stood with his eyes closed and his systems shut down by order of the Federation Science Council, forty days inactive, and heard nothing at all.
