For a moment there was no chamber. There was only light.
Ostrow did not experience it as brightness. Brightness is a property of vision, and vision had become one small function among a great many others, no more significant than the pressure of his body against the chair.
He knew with perfect precision that his heart was beating one hundred and seventy-three times a minute. He knew the temperature of the metal against the base of his skull. He knew the distance from the chair to the wall to within a centimeter.
Then those facts opened, and what they opened into was not more facts.
It was relationships.
The wall stopped being an object. It became position and composition and purpose and history and load and memory and connection, and every one of those occupied the same place in his mind at the same instant without displacing any of the others.
For six years he had studied four pages.
He understood now why he had failed. The pages had never been difficult.
He had been small.
That was the first thought. The second was that he could become large enough.
The machine heard the second one, and opened him further.
* *
McCoy saw the blood first, a thin line from Ostrow's nose and then another from one ear.
"Now."
Morbius's hand was already on the control, and the light changed, and Ostrow screamed.
Spock did not move. Kirk did. "Morbius."
"I am stopping it."
"Faster."
"There is no faster."
McCoy reached for the Vulcan's wrist and thought better of touching him.
The chair released with a sound like a held breath going out. Ostrow came forward and Spock caught him, and for one instant the two Vulcans were looking at each other from a distance of about twenty centimeters, and Ostrow smiled.
It was so unexpected that Spock nearly failed to lower him carefully to the floor.
"Move," said McCoy, and Spock moved.
He scanned once, and then again, and his face became furious. Not afraid. Leonard McCoy was at his angriest when fear would have been no use to anybody.
"Pulse a hundred and fifty. Neural activity all over the chart. What did that thing do to him?"
"What he asked it to," said Morbius.
"Keep talking and I'll decide what to do about you."
Kirk crouched down. "Doctor."
Ostrow's eyes found him. "Captain."
His voice was entirely normal. Nothing about that morning was worse than that.
"Can you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Do you know where you are?"
"Yes."
"Don't encourage him," said McCoy.
Ostrow turned to him. "I would prefer to sit up."
"No."
"I can assist you."
"That is precisely what I am preventing."
Ostrow considered this with what appeared to be real care. "Your reasoning is sound."
McCoy stared at him. "Spock, was that a joke?"
"No, Doctor."
"It felt like one."
"Ostrow," said Kirk. "Why?"
The Vulcan closed his eyes. It was not unconsciousness. It looked more like pain being filed somewhere out of the way.
"I required an answer."
"I refused you."
"Yes."
"That generally means no."
"I understood the word."
"Then why are we here?"
Ostrow opened his eyes again. "Because you were correct to refuse me."
Kirk went still.
Ostrow was looking past him at the chair. "I believed that discipline would allow me to determine the point at which continuing became unsafe."
"And?" said Spock.
"I determined it."
"Then why did you continue?"
Ostrow looked at him for a moment.
"Because once I reached it, I no longer agreed that it was unsafe."
Spock absorbed that without any visible change, and Kirk found himself thinking of a line out of an old Institute record that Ostrow had kept because he kept nearly everything connected with his work, a line written by his mother about the difference between curiosity and appetite.
One of them permits you to stop.
"You are not going anywhere," said McCoy.
"I know."
"Good."
"I do not mean from this room."
The scanner stopped moving in McCoy's hand. "What do you mean?"
"Doctor, I believe you should prepare for intracranial vascular failure."
The chamber went silent.
"No," said McCoy.
"It has begun."
"No."
"I can feel it."
"You can feel a great many things at the moment. That does not make you my physician."
Ostrow's mouth moved. "No."
McCoy turned. "Jim. Get him to the ship."
Kirk had the communicator open. "Kirk to Enterprise. Medical emergency, lock on Doctor Ostrow."
Static answered him. He tried again and got the same.
Spock lifted his tricorder. "Transporter interference has returned."
McCoy swore with considerable specificity.
"The surface lift," said Morbius.
"How long?"
"Seven minutes."
"Too long."
"It is the only route."
McCoy looked down at Ostrow. "Then we make it enough."
Rivera came into the chamber carrying the emergency field stretcher out of the security pack, and McCoy looked surprised to see him.
Rivera shrugged with the shoulder that still worked. "You told me to stay behind cover."
"This is not cover."
"No."
They lifted him. Ostrow's hand caught Kirk's sleeve.
"Captain."
"Save it."
"I cannot." His eyes were very clear. "Not time."
*
They made the lift in four minutes. Morbius overrode three safety interlocks and one piece of Krell machinery that objected to being hurried, and Rivera and Spock carried the stretcher between them while McCoy walked alongside with a scanner in one hand and an injector in the other.
Kirk stayed up by Ostrow's head. "What did you see?"
"Jim," said McCoy.
Ostrow answered anyway. "Not see."
"Understand?"
"Partly." His eyes closed.
McCoy's fingers went to his neck. "Stay with me."
They opened again. "The machine below us is not a computer."
"That is an absurd simplification," said Morbius.
Ostrow turned his head. "No."
It was the first time Kirk had ever heard contempt in that voice. Not anger. Contempt. Morbius heard it as well.
"A computer receives instruction. That machine receives cognition."
"Directly," said Spock.
"Yes."
"From any mind?"
"No."
Morbius was looking at him, and Ostrow saw it.
"You know that."
"I know a great deal that you do not."
"You know what they intended."
"What?" said Kirk.
Morbius's face closed. Ostrow breathed through something and kept going.
"The educator was not educational."
Spock understood first. "Preparation."
"Yes."
"Preparation for what?" said Kirk.
It was Morbius who answered, and when Kirk turned to look at him the expression on the man's face was not pride. It was closer to reverence.
"To become more. The Krell had passed beyond mechanical interfaces. The educator was one stage in a progression. Command by hand. Then by thought. Then direct participation."
"In the machine."
"With it."
"No distinction," whispered Ostrow.
The lift rose, and Kirk felt the floor move under him and had the irrational sense that the planet was listening to the conversation.
"Why did they need it?"
"Because an ordinary mind could not hold the necessary relationships."
Ostrow's eyes opened. "There."
Kirk leaned down. "There what?"
"Your question. The signal."
"The cognitive limitation," said Spock.
Ostrow nodded once. "I assumed the limit was the mind."
McCoy put an injector against his neck. "You can explain your life's work after I have kept you alive long enough to regret it."
Ostrow's eyes went to him. "The limit was the dose."
McCoy's hand stopped where it was.
Ostrow turned his eyes toward Morbius. "He was not born capable."
"No one has suggested that I was."
"You allowed us to."
"Doctor."
"You went back."
Morbius said nothing at all.
"Again," said Ostrow, and his voice was going. "And again. And again."
Kirk saw it then, all of it at once. Twenty years. The impossible mathematics done without working. The effortless translation. The systems that lit before the man's fingers reached them.
"You built it."
Morbius turned on him sharply, and Kirk corrected himself.
"Not the machine. Yourself."
Ostrow closed his eyes. "Yes."
*
The lift opened onto the plateau and the sky had changed. There were clouds over the western ridge where an hour ago there had been nothing at all, and Kirk did not care for that either.
Alta was waiting with Robby. She saw the stretcher.
"What happened?"
"Ostrow used the educator."
Her face went white.
"Go inside," said Morbius.
"No."
"Alta."
"No."
Robby came closer to the stretcher, and Ostrow's eyes opened and found him.
"You."
Robby leaned down. "Yes."
"You remember more than you say."
"He is injured," said Morbius.
Ostrow ignored him entirely. "Who woke you?"
Robby made no answer, and Kirk turned around, because that question had been sitting in the back of his head since Exo III.
Robby looked toward the ridge. Then at Morbius. Then at the dying man on the stretcher.
"The last one."
Morbius went still.
"Krell," whispered Ostrow.
"Yes."
"What did he know?"
"He knew that they were dying."
"Why wake you?"
"I was not connected."
"To the machine," said Spock.
"No."
"And therefore not affected by whatever destroyed them."
"Correct."
Ostrow drew a breath that cost him something. "What did he ask you to do?"
Robby waited a moment. It might have been privacy. It might have been two hundred thousand years of retrieval.
"I was told to remain."
"Why?"
"Until another intelligence came."
"For two hundred thousand years?" said Alta.
"Yes."
"To do what?"
Robby looked at her. "Understand."
Nobody said anything, and Kirk felt a great many old questions rearrange themselves into a shape he did not like. The Krell had not left Robby behind by accident. He had not simply survived.
He had been left as a witness. Or as a warning.
"Exo III," said Ostrow.
Robby's eyes moved to him.
"The line continued elsewhere."
"Yes."
"Those machines killed."
"Yes."
"You did not."
"No."
"Why?"
"His construction is different," said Morbius, and he said it a half second too fast.
Robby looked at him, and the look lasted half a second too long, and Ostrow was still lucid enough to measure it.
"No," said Ostrow.
Morbius's face emptied.
Ostrow's eyes closed, and McCoy said, "Enough. Move him."
They carried him toward the house. Kirk stayed where he was for one second longer, and Morbius looked past him, which was answer enough for the moment.
* *
They put him in the room where Alta had been born. McCoy learned that only afterward. At the time it was the nearest room with a flat surface, power, and space enough to work in.
He put everybody out except Spock. Kirk refused to go farther than the doorway. Morbius stood across the hall. Alta sat down against the wall with Robby beside her, and for six minutes nobody said anything.
Then McCoy came out, and Kirk read the answer off him before he spoke.
"How long?"
"Not long."
Kirk went in.
Spock was standing beside the bed. Ostrow looked smaller lying down, and that annoyed Kirk out of all proportion. The man had spent six years making himself impossible to ignore. He should not have been allowed to become small at the end of it.
"Captain."
"I'm here."
"I was wrong about one thing."
"Only one?"
That brought the faintest movement to his face. "Several. One matters. The Bellerophon's arrival was not the trigger."
Kirk felt Spock turn slightly.
"What was?"
"Morbius."
From the doorway came a sound.
"Not his presence," said Ostrow. "His use."
"The educator."
"Yes."
"The incidents increased after each exposure," said Spock.
"The machine learned him as he learned it."
Morbius came into the room. "No."
Ostrow looked up at him. "Yes."
"You cannot know that."
"I do."
"You sat in that chair for less than two minutes."
"And nearly died."
Morbius stopped where he was.
"The Krell built a system for the direct conversion of mental intention into physical effect." Ostrow's voice was fading now, and Kirk said nothing, having learned long ago that interrupting a dying man is usually a form of cowardice. "They believed that conscious intention was the whole of the mind."
Spock's face went very still.
"They were wrong."
"No," whispered Morbius.
Ostrow turned his eyes to Kirk. "What is below thought, Captain?"
Kirk let the question stand. He knew. Not scientifically. Humanly.
Fear. Anger. Hunger. Jealousy. Loss. All the things civilized people spend their entire lives learning not to obey.
"They gave all of it power."
"Ostrow," said McCoy, coming closer.
The Vulcan's breath caught. He looked up at the ceiling as though he could see two and a half kilometers through it, and then back at Kirk.
"Morbius was too close to the problem."
A pause.
"Monsters, Captain."
Another.
"Monsters from the id."
Kirk leaned down. "Ostrow. The word in the margin. Containment."
The Vulcan's eyes came back from wherever they had gone, and for perhaps four seconds he was entirely present.
"Morbius read it as a noun," he said. "A thing held in. It is not a noun. It is the name they gave to the last stage of the work, and it means the holding back of what is not wanted, by the one who wants it." His breath caught and went on. "They built the machine. Then they understood that it would answer anything, and they put that word on the only part of themselves they could not build. They were asking each other to hold it."
"And did they?"
"For one night," said Ostrow. "They were not able."
His eyes lost their focus. McCoy reached him. Spock stayed put.
And Kirk stood beside the bed and heard the word stay in the room after the man who had spent six years finding it had gone out of it.
"Id," he said. "Id. Id. What is that?"
Nobody answered him. McCoy was still working, and would go on working for another forty seconds after there was any point in it.
"What is the id?"
It was Morbius who answered, from the doorway, in the flat voice of a man reading something off a wall.
"An obsolete term. Nineteenth century, or near it. One of the early psychologies divided the mind into parts and gave them names, and the id was the name for the oldest part. The part beneath thought. Appetite. Fear. Rage. Everything a civilized creature spends its life learning not to act upon." He stopped. "It has not been used seriously in three hundred years. There was no need of it. We had stopped believing that anything could get out."
The room was entirely quiet.
"And now?" said Kirk.
Morbius did not answer that one at all.
