Morbius was waiting on the terrace when she came back.
He had been waiting twenty-three minutes, though he did not mention it. Kirk knew because Robby told McCoy, and McCoy told Kirk in the tone of a physician reporting a temperature.
Alta materialized beside Kirk and Uhura in the circle of four stones, and for one second, standing on her own plateau, she looked at her father's house as though it had got smaller while she was gone.
Both men saw her do it.
"Well," he said.
She stepped out of the circle. "It is extraordinary."
"A starship is an efficient machine."
"It is not the machine."
Something moved across the older man's face and was gone.
"Thank you for letting us borrow her, Doctor," said Uhura.
"I did not."
Alta looked up at him.
Kirk came near to saying something, and did not, which cost him more than it should have.
"Good night, Alta," Uhura said.
"Good night, Lieutenant."
She watched the two of them dissolve out of the evening, and went on looking at the empty air a moment after it had closed.
Then she turned around, and her father had already started for the house.
"You are tired."
"No."
"You have had a considerable amount of stimulation today."
"Yes."
"You should rest."
"Father."
He stopped in the doorway.
Robby was at the far end of the terrace, standing where he always stood, far enough off to be absent and near enough to hear everything.
"I want to go with them," Alta said.
The sentence was very quiet, and nothing in the house moved after it.
Morbius turned slowly and looked at her as though she had spoken in a language he had known all his life and could not believe he was hearing here.
"For how long?"
"I do not know."
"To Earth."
"Perhaps."
"You have never been to Earth."
"I know."
"You know no one there."
"Then I would meet people."
"Altaira."
"I want to see it. And Vulcan. And the places in the archive that have weather, and oceans, and cities, and men who complain about waiting ten minutes to dock." She had begun fast and she kept going, because she suspected that if she stopped she would not start again. "I want to study. I want to hear people talking about things that are not in books. I want somebody to disagree with me who is not you."
That last one went into him. She saw it go, and nearly took it back, and did not.
"You do not understand what you are asking for."
"I understand that I do not understand."
"You have spent five hours aboard a starship."
"Yes."
"And you now believe that you know the galaxy."
"No."
"You believe that those people are your friends." He came back into the room. "Altaira, that ship will leave this system, and inside a year half of them will not remember your name."
"Then I will meet others."
"You will meet others." He said it the way a man repeats a sentence to demonstrate how foolish it is. "Do you know what is out there? Do you know what it took to keep this house standing for twenty years? You have never buried anybody. You have never been alone on a world with no help coming. You have never had to decide anything where the cost of being wrong was somebody else's life."
"No."
"Then do not tell me about the galaxy."
"I am not telling you about the galaxy," said Alta. "I am telling you about me."
"You are a child."
"I am nineteen."
"You are a child who has been protected from everything, and you have no conception of what protection costs, because I have never once let you see the bill."
"Then show me the bill!"
It came out of her louder than anything she had ever said to him, louder than anything she had known she could say, and it rang off the stone of his house and went out through the open windows into the dark.
Robby did not move at the end of the terrace.
Morbius stood absolutely still. When he spoke again his voice had dropped, and the drop was the worst of it.
"Everything here is safe."
"I know."
"You have everything that you need."
"I know."
"Then what," he said, "is missing?"
Alta looked around the room. The books along the wall. The instruments. The windows, and the garden past them, and the stones her father had laid himself in the first year. Robby at the edge of the terrace. Her father in the middle of his own floor with his hands closed.
She loved all of it. That was the difficulty. It had always been the difficulty.
"A life I chose," she said.
"You have no idea what you are choosing between."
"I have some idea."
"You have none whatever."
"Daddy." She had not called him that in four years, and it stopped him where he stood. "Who do you think dropped the shield?"
The room went very quiet.
"What?"
"The screen. The one you have been telling the captain has never once failed in twenty years." She was shaking, and she let it be seen, because it no longer mattered. "It did not fail. I found the interlock in the lower chamber when I was sixteen and it took me two years to be certain what it did, and four months ago I shut it off. I have wanted this for a long time. I hoped somebody would see us. That is how they found us."
Morbius did not move at all.
"And I am glad," said Alta. "I am glad they came, and I am glad that man in their sickbay is going to be all right, and I am sorry about everything else, and I am going."
The silence went on so long that she began to be frightened of it.
Her father's face had gone the color of the stone behind him. When he finally spoke it was not to argue and it was not to shout, and she would have given a great deal for either.
"You went into the lower chamber alone," he said.
"Yes."
"You operated a Krell system."
"Yes."
"Do you have the faintest notion," Morbius said, "of what is down there?"
"No," said Alta. "You never told me."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he did the worst thing available to him. He became calm.
"We will discuss this tomorrow."
"Father."
"Tomorrow," said Morbius, and walked out of the room.
She stood in the middle of the floor and listened to him go down the corridor, and heard the door of his study close, and did not hear it open again.
Robby came in from the terrace.
She looked at him. "Was that terrible?"
"Yes."
She almost laughed. "Thank you."
"You asked," said Robby.
She sat down. After a moment he sat down opposite her, which he did not need to do and had never done before, and neither of them said anything for a while.
Then she took the communicator out of her pocket, and turned it over twice in her hands, the way she had on the transporter pad, and opened it.
"Enterprise," said a voice. "Uhura here."
"I told him," said Alta.
"All of it?"
"All of it."
The channel was quiet a moment, and there was no surprise anywhere in it, and afterward Alta thought about that a good deal.
"Are you all right?"
"I do not know."
"That's allowed," said Uhura. "What do you want to do now?"
Outside the western windows the last of the light went off the ridge.
And a long way underground, in a circuit that had lain dormant since before there had been anybody on Earth to lay circuits, something changed state.
No instrument in the house registered it. No sensor aboard the ship in orbit found it. It appears on no record that was ever recovered, and the only reason it is in this account at all is that a machine standing in a room noticed it.
Robby lifted his head.
Alta saw him do it. "What is it?"
He was listening to something that she could not hear, and after a moment he turned his head, and he did not look toward the ridge.
He looked down the corridor, toward the door her father had closed.
"I do not know," said Robby.
