Kirk let the last of Adams's logs run out, and for a time he sat with the screen dark in front of him.
The Bellerophon was where it began. For twenty years it had also been where it ended: a lost ship, a sealed file, a planet no one would go near. Someone had needed to open that file again.
He switched the recorder back on. "Twenty years after the Bellerophon was lost," he said, "a Vulcan scholar asked the Federation to go back to Altair IV. It took him six years to be heard."
* *
Ostrow found Altair IV while looking for a civilization that had been dead for six thousand years.
He was twenty-two, a graduate student at the Federation Institute of Xenoarchaeology in Paris, and he had spent that morning on the burial chambers of Deneb IV. The work was respectable and it was useful, and it had become increasingly difficult to pretend he cared about it.
By midafternoon he had followed a citation from a Denebian paper into an old comparative index of abandoned Federation archaeological sites. Most of the entries were what he expected: settlements destroyed by tectonic activity, structures later proved natural, survey teams that had simply run out of time or funding. One entry held only a handful of words.
ALTAIR IV
BELLEROPHON EXPEDITION
ACCESS RESTRICTED
He opened it, and the terminal refused him.
He tried again through the Institute's historical research authorization. The screen paused, then asked him to state an academic justification. Ostrow considered the question with some care before he typed: Comparative analysis of abandoned extraterrestrial archaeological investigations.
It was technically true. The file opened, and he forgot about Deneb IV.
The first documents were ordinary Starfleet records, fourteen years old: crew manifests, mission orders, geological surveys, atmospheric studies, the captain's logs of J. J. Adams, commanding officer of the Bellerophon. Ostrow moved through them quickly. Then he reached the last archaeological transmission from the planet, and he stopped.
Four pages.
The symbols resembled no written language he had ever studied. At first glance they looked almost decorative, geometric forms gathered in irregular clusters. The longer he looked, the less random they became. Certain forms recurred, and they changed according to what stood around them, as though what mattered was not the symbols but the relationships among them.
He enlarged the third page. The transmission included scans of the expedition's field notes, and someone had annotated the margin by hand. Most of the annotations were questions. One had been set beside a figure that appeared several times throughout the four pages.
Containment?
Ostrow checked the notation against the expedition records. Doctor Edward Morbius, senior xenolinguist.
He opened Morbius's personnel file, then Adams's logs again, then the final communications from Altair IV. There was not much. The Bellerophon's last transmission recommended that no vessel attempt a landing. After that, there was nothing at all.
When the archive announced that the reading room would close in fifteen minutes, Ostrow had not moved except to request a second screen.
A librarian stopped at his table. "Mr. Ostrow? We're closing."
He glanced at the chronometer and found that six hours had gone. Beyond the tall windows the rain that had been falling on the gray roofs of Paris when he sat down had stopped, and the streetlights had come on. He had noticed neither. "I require another twenty-seven minutes."
The librarian smiled. "Tomorrow."
Ostrow looked back at the four pages. "That is inefficient."
"So is sleeping in the archive."
He considered pointing out that he had no intention of sleeping. Instead, he saved his notes.
The next morning he was waiting when the doors opened.
*
Within a week, his adviser noticed.
Professor T'Pran stood behind him in the laboratory while the four enlarged pages hovered above his desk. "Your thesis concerns Deneb IV."
"Yes."
"This is not Deneb IV."
"No."
T'Pran waited. Ostrow knew the technique. Vulcan instructors learn early that silence works better than interrogation, and Vulcan students learn to outlast it. He went on working.
She stepped closer to the display. "You have spent eleven days on this material."
"Nine days, fourteen hours."
"That correction does not strengthen your position."
Ostrow turned from the desk. "The symbols possess internal structure."
"So do many things that are not language."
"I did not say they were language."
One of T'Pran's eyebrows moved a fraction.
He indicated several sequences. "These figures do not recur independently. Their position changes according to the symbols around them. Meaning may be relational rather than lexical."
"You cannot establish meaning from four pages."
"I can establish that the pages are not random."
"To what purpose?"
"I do not yet know."
T'Pran folded her hands behind her back. "Then complete the work you were assigned."
Ostrow glanced once more at the Bellerophon pages. "I will."
He did. His Deneb paper was submitted three days early. Then he went back to Altair IV.
*
The problem followed him home to Vulcan.
In ShiKahr the heat of the day stayed long after sunset. His parents ate with the courtyard doors open to it, as they always had, and the air that came in was thin and dry and smelled of hot stone, and above the city the sky went to rust. His father listened over dinner while Ostrow described the structure he believed he had found. Sorel had spent most of his life on pre-Reform settlements and had the patience of a historian used to rebuilding civilizations out of damaged foundations and contradictory records. When Ostrow had finished, Sorel asked, "How many pages survived?"
"Four."
"And the civilization that produced them?"
"Unknown."
"The structures?"
"Inaccessible."
"The expedition?"
"Lost."
Sorel picked up his tea. "You have selected an unusually cooperative research subject."
Ostrow recognized the criticism. His mother did not look up from her plate.
"Has he established that the question is invalid?"
Sorel glanced at her. "No."
"Then it remains a question."
T'Lara had spent thirty years on Vulcan cognition and the limits of mental discipline. She had begun teaching her son techniques of concentration when he was seven, and Ostrow had long suspected she regarded his whole academic career as an extended experiment in the results.
Sorel regarded them both. "I appear to be outnumbered."
"There are three of us," Ostrow said.
"Yes. I had calculated that."
The matter should have ended there. It did not.
*
Months became years, and the four pages became a permanent part of Ostrow's life. He built relationships among the symbols, rejected them, rebuilt them, rejected them again. He ran their structure against thousands of known languages and symbolic systems. He tried mathematical models, harmonic relationships, spatial logic, and at last a form of cognitive mapping out of his mother's research.
It was T'Lara who found him one evening during a visit home, seated in the meditation alcove of the family house with the four pages spread across the floor in front of him and his eyes closed.
She studied him from the doorway. "You are not meditating."
"I am holding the patterns in mind."
"You are staring at them with your eyes closed." She paused. "It is not the same discipline."
He opened his eyes. "Is there a difference in result?"
"Yes," said his mother. "One of them permits you to stop."
Nothing he tried translated the pages. The patterns persisted, and so did Morbius's single word. Ostrow had long since stopped treating it as a translation. Morbius might have been wrong. The figure might mean storage, limitation, isolation, protection, or nothing any human or Vulcan concept could hold. What mattered was that Morbius had seen something in the same recurring structure Ostrow had found for himself.
It was evidence. It was not enough. It was never enough.
He went back to the Bellerophon records, and to what had come after them. Three search missions had been sent to Altair IV once the Bellerophon fell silent. The first found no survivors. The second met severe interference. The third detected nothing at all. None of them landed.
That fact began to trouble him more than any other. One night he wrote it across the wall display above his desk, in letters large enough to read from the door.
NO ONE WENT BACK DOWN.
The Tellarite epigrapher from the office next door found him staring at it at two in the morning. She kept his hours and treated every conversation as an opening position.
"You know," she said, "most people decorate with landscapes."
Ostrow stayed facing the wall. "This is more useful."
"That's debatable."
"It is not."
"Everything is debatable." She came in and squinted at the wall. "Still Altair?"
"Altair IV."
"There are other planets."
"Yes."
She waited for him to defend his position. He did not. After a while she made a disgusted noise, the sound of a Tellarite denied a perfectly good argument, and left him to it.
*
His doctoral dissertation was meant to concern comparative xenoarchaeological syntax. Altair IV consumed nearly half of it. The committee was not enthusiastic. One member called his conclusions provocative; another chose speculative. Ostrow regarded both as acceptable, since neither meant incorrect.
He defended the dissertation for four hours, and it passed.
Three weeks later he petitioned the Vulcan Science Academy. The first petition was denied. So was the second. The third was granted a hearing.
Seven academicians sat before him in a chamber whose every surface seemed designed to discourage unnecessary emotion. Ostrow approved of it, and put up the four pages.
The senior academician examined them without visible reaction. "You are asking this Academy to recommend that the Federation Council lift a planetary interdiction imposed at the request of a commanding officer who died there."
"Yes."
"On the basis of four pages you cannot translate."
"No."
That produced the first reaction in the room. Ostrow changed the display, and Captain Adams's image appeared beside the fragments.
"I am asking because an expedition discovered an artificial complex of unknown scale and was lost. Three missions followed. None conducted a surface investigation."
The academician did not look at the image. "The first of those missions found no survivors. The second encountered severe interference. The third detected nothing at all. Starfleet concluded that nothing remained on Altair IV worth the risk of finding out. That conclusion appears reasonable."
"It was reasonable," said Ostrow. "At the time."
The academician considered him. "And now?"
"Now twenty years have passed."
"Time does not alter evidence."
"No. But it alters our ability to evaluate it."
He brought up current sensor capabilities beside the specifications of the original search vessels. The gap between them filled the screen.
"We can detect energy signatures they could not. We can map subsurface structures they could not. We can place automated probes on the surface without exposing a crew. If Captain Adams's warning remains justified, we are better equipped to determine why."
Another academician spoke. "And if it is not?"
"Then the Federation has maintained an interdiction around an empty planet for twenty years while ignoring the remains of a civilization whose technology exceeds anything in our records."
The room was quiet. The senior academician's gaze went to Morbius's note. "You believe this word is significant."
"I believe Morbius believed it was significant."
"That distinction is careful."
"It is necessary."
"And what do you believe was being contained?"
"I do not know."
The academician leaned back. "You have spent six years on this."
"Yes."
"You have built your academic career on material you cannot translate, from a world you have never seen."
"Yes."
"Do you consider that obsession?"
Ostrow considered the question longer than any of the others. "I consider it a possible source of bias."
"That was not my question."
"No."
A few heads shifted. Ostrow went on. "Obsession implies persistence without sufficient reason. I have sufficient reason."
The hearing lasted another two hours. Eleven days later, the Vulcan Science Academy formally recommended that Altair IV be reopened for a single controlled investigation. The Federation Council debated the matter for three days. Then Starfleet issued the order.
Ostrow read it alone. For years he had imagined what success would feel like, satisfaction perhaps, or vindication. He stared at the authorization for nearly a minute and then sat down. His hands were perfectly steady, and that disturbed him more than shaking would have.
The mission had been assigned to a Constitution-class starship operating within range of the Altair system. USS Enterprise. Captain James T. Kirk.
Ostrow read the name twice. Then he began to pack. He took one case of clothing. The Bellerophon material required four.
* *
Two days later he stood in a transporter room at Starbase Eleven while Kirk looked over the cases.
The captain was younger than Ostrow had expected and more at ease. He walked the length of the research cases once and then looked at the single piece of luggage beside them. "Six years?"
"More."
"All of that for four pages."
"The four pages were sufficient to begin."
Kirk's mouth twitched. He glanced at the officer beside him. Spock raised his hand in the Vulcan salute, and Ostrow returned it.
"Doctor."
"Mr. Spock."
Ostrow knew Spock by reputation, as most Vulcan scientists did. Reputation is not acquaintance, and nothing in Spock's face suggested he intended to presume otherwise.
"Ostrow," Kirk said, trying the name. "I'd have guessed a lot of things, Doctor. Vulcan wouldn't have been one of them."
"It is a pre-Reform name, Captain," said Spock. "Few families still retain them."
"My father's family is one of the few," Ostrow said. "He is a historian. He considers it a form of fieldwork."
That drew a smile from Kirk, brief and genuine. Then it was gone, and Ostrow found himself being looked at the way he had seen engineers look at a structure they were deciding whether to trust.
"Doctor, you'd better understand something before you come aboard. If I decide that planet is unsafe, we leave."
"Of course."
"If I decide we don't land, we don't land."
"Agreed."
"Even after all these years?"
For six years Altair IV had been four pages, fragmentary logs, and questions nobody would answer. Now a starship was waiting to take him there. He had prepared his answer to this question a long time ago, and it was still true.
"Captain, I have wanted this mission long enough that I no longer consider my desire to reach the surface relevant."
Something shifted in Kirk's expression. "And if the evidence tells us to turn around?"
"Then we turn around." Ostrow paused. "But first I would like to see the evidence."
Kirk weighed him a moment. Then he smiled again. "Welcome aboard, Doctor."
Ostrow stepped onto the transporter platform. Six years ago, at two in the morning, he had written four words across a wall.
No one went back down.
Soon, someone would.
