McCoy covered Ostrow's face. Spock watched him do it, and Kirk watched Spock, and there were moments when the distance between Vulcan restraint and human grief became so small that it seemed impolite to name it.
It was McCoy who broke the silence. "I need a medical team."
Kirk opened the communicator expecting the static that had been there for the last hour, and the Enterprise answered on the first tone.
He looked at Spock.
Spock already had the tricorder up. "Transporter interference has cleared, Captain. Entirely. I am unable to say at what moment, as I was not reading for it."
"I can," said McCoy, and went on packing his instruments, and did not look at anybody while he said it. "About four minutes ago."
Nobody in the room asked him what had happened four minutes ago, because every one of them had been standing in it.
"Medical transport," said Kirk. "Doctor Ostrow. No urgency."
Uhura took a moment to understand what that meant. "Yes, sir."
The beam took him off the bed, and the room was suddenly very large.
McCoy looked at Morbius. "Get out."
Morbius stayed where he was.
McCoy took one step toward him. "I said get out."
"Doctor, I did not force him to use the machine."
"No. You spent twenty years proving to a man like him that there was something down there worth dying to understand."
"That is unfair."
McCoy laughed, and it was a terrible sound. "Good."
Morbius left.
Spock remained beside the empty bed.
"Spock."
"I am functional, Captain."
"I didn't ask."
"No."
Kirk waited. Spock was looking at the place where Ostrow had been.
"He knew the risk."
"Yes."
"He proceeded."
"Yes."
"That does not make the result logical."
"No."
Spock turned around. "Then we should use what he purchased."
McCoy closed his medkit harder than it needed. "That's Vulcan for mourning, Jim. Don't interfere with it."
Spock looked at him, and McCoy looked back, and after a moment Spock said, "Your interpretation is imprecise."
"Naturally."
"Let's go," said Kirk.
* *
They used the study, because Kirk wanted the argument above ground.
Morbius stood at the western window. Alta sat in one of the chairs with Robby near her. Rivera had been ordered back to the ship and had gone only after McCoy threatened to sedate him in front of everybody.
Kirk stood at the table and Spock put Ostrow's tricorder down beside him. The last recording was on it. Not all of it. Enough.
Morbius looked at the instrument with open dislike.
"Start with the machine," said Kirk.
"I have told you what it was intended to do."
"Tell me what it does."
"I do not accept Doctor Ostrow's conclusion."
"That wasn't my question."
"The Krell machine responds to directed cognition."
"Only directed cognition?"
"That was its design."
"A design can fail," said Spock.
Morbius turned on him. "You heard the man. He was neurologically compromised."
"He was also able to read relationships that you and he had both previously considered impossible."
"Briefly."
"Long enough."
Morbius looked away.
Kirk put both hands on the table. "Doctor. Your people began dying after your use of the educator increased."
"They were not my people."
Kirk stopped.
Morbius heard it a half second behind the rest of them, and his face changed. "That is not what I meant."
"I know exactly what you meant."
"You know nothing of what happened here."
"I know five of them were dead before Adams ordered you to stop. I know that ship lost equipment in ways that match what happened to mine this morning. I know the attacks escalated when the expedition tried to leave, and I know they stopped when everyone else was dead." Kirk straightened. "And I know this planet did nothing for nineteen years until the Enterprise arrived."
Alta was looking at her father.
"More precisely," said Spock, "the significant escalation began after Miss Morbius disabled the concealment field."
It took Kirk a second to understand that the sentence had not surprised the one man in the room it should have.
Morbius did not ask what field. He did not ask how. He turned toward his daughter with the look of a man hearing a private thing said out loud in front of strangers, and what came out of him was not a question.
"You brought them here."
It was out of him before he could stop it, and Alta stood up and stared at him.
The anger went out of Morbius's face all at once. "Alta."
"No."
"I did not mean."
"You did."
"No."
She backed away from him, and Robby moved with her, and Kirk watched Morbius's eyes follow the two of them.
The room changed. Nothing in it moved. Kirk felt it anyway.
"Spock."
The tricorder chirped and Spock looked down. "Power increase below us."
Morbius went white in front of his daughter, and there it was. Not proof for a court. Enough for a captain.
"Again," said Kirk, very quietly.
Morbius looked at him.
"Every time."
"No."
"Every time she leaves you. Every time somebody takes something away from you."
Morbius came around the table. "Stop."
"Adams took the expedition."
"Stop."
"Starfleet took Robby."
"Captain."
"Alta turned off the screen."
"Enough."
"The tiger turned on her the morning after she told you she was leaving."
The house lights flickered. Alta made a sound, and Robby stepped between her and her father, and that stopped everybody in the room.
Morbius stared at the android. "You will move."
Robby did not.
"I said move."
"I am not obstructing you."
"You are standing between me and my daughter."
"Yes."
Something went across Morbius's face. Spock's tricorder sounded again.
"Doctor," said Kirk softly. "Don't."
"What?"
"Whatever you're feeling. Don't feed it."
It was the wrong sentence and Kirk knew it before he had finished saying it. Morbius's fury turned into humiliation in front of him.
The western window exploded.
Not inward. Out. Every pane went away from the room at once and scattered across the terrace.
Alta screamed and McCoy threw himself over her. Robby stood still. A pressure wave crossed the study without any wind in it, and the books came out of the shelves and hung in the air for a fraction of a second with every spine aligned, and then dropped. Spock's tricorder gave one long impossible tone and died in his hand.
The lights came back.
Nobody moved. Morbius was staring at the empty window frame.
"Still nothing to do with you?" said Kirk.
The older man's mouth opened. No sound came out of it.
*
The Shore Leave planet came back to Kirk an hour later, not as a memory at first but as an irritation, a thing at the edge of the eye.
They were in the lower laboratory, away from Alta, because Kirk had finally insisted and Morbius had finally stopped pretending he could prevent it. Spock had Ostrow's notes spread across one of the Krell surfaces.
"Omicron Delta," said Kirk.
Spock looked up. "Captain?"
"The Shore Leave planet. We have seen a machine respond to thought before."
"The resemblance is superficial."
"How?"
"The machine in the Omicron Delta region responded to an unaltered human mind. This system cannot."
Morbius said nothing.
Spock indicated the educator architecture on the sheet. "Doctor Morbius required repeated exposure before he could interact with this installation at the present level."
Kirk looked across at the chair. "Then why build a machine that only a mind changed by another machine can use?"
"I do not know. I would suggest the educator was not only instructional. It may have been intended to prepare the operator."
"Preparation," said Morbius.
Kirk turned. The man looked older than he had that morning.
"Not preparation to operate the machine. Preparation to become part of it."
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
"What does that mean?" said Kirk.
"The Krell believed the distinction between mind and machine was temporary." The voice had changed. It was not pride now. It was closer to grief. "They had spent thousands of years removing mediation. Controls became symbolic. Symbols became gesture. Gesture became intention. The final architecture required no interface at all."
"Thought to matter."
"Thought to effect."
"Without an intervening command layer," said Spock.
Morbius nodded.
Kirk felt the cold arrive. "No filter."
Morbius looked at him, and it was Spock who answered.
"No filter."
Kirk thought about every angry thought he had ever had and not acted on. Every flash of fear. Every moment of jealousy and panic and wanting to keep a thing that was leaving. Human civilization existed in the distance between those and action, and every law and every courtesy and every held tongue lived in that gap.
The Krell had closed it.
"They thought they were leaving the animal behind," Kirk said.
Spock's eyes met his. "They were taking it with them."
Morbius sat down. It was the first time Kirk had seen him do it because his legs required it.
"My poor Krell," he said.
Nobody answered him. He was not speaking to any of them.
"A million years of reason. They had put war behind them, and hunger, and labor, and disease, and they built the last machine they would ever need, and on the night they switched it on it answered the only part of them they had never examined." His hands were open on his knees. "They could not have understood what was killing them. There would not have been time, and there was nobody left to tell."
Kirk watched him and heard it, and it stayed with him afterward, because it was the one thing the man had said on that planet that had any tenderness in it, and it was not for Adams and it was not for Julia.
My poor Krell.
Two words in it belonged to a dead civilization. The first one belonged to Edward Morbius.
* *
Robby answered the rest of it on the terrace after sunset, with Morbius not present, an arrangement Kirk had made without saying so.
"Did the Bellerophon's arrival wake the machine?"
"No."
"What did?"
Robby looked at the house. "Edward."
"His first use of the educator?"
"Not immediately."
"When?"
"After repeated use."
"Threshold," said Spock.
"Yes."
"And you," said Kirk. "You were woken after the Krell died. By one of them."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Robby took a long time about it. "To remain."
"You said that."
"To remain until someone came who could understand."
"Understand what?"
His eyes went down. "The mistake."
Kirk felt the hair come up along his arms. "Did he tell you what the mistake was?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"He was dying."
"Did he know that?"
"Yes."
"Then why not tell you?"
"I was not capable of receiving it in the form he used."
"The machine was already active," said Spock.
"Yes."
"He could communicate through it."
"Yes."
"And you could not."
"No."
Kirk looked toward the ridge. "So he left you a question."
"Yes."
"For two hundred thousand years."
"Yes."
McCoy had come out with two cups and stopped where he was. "That's cruel."
Robby turned to him. "I do not know."
McCoy put one of the cups in Kirk's hand. "Learn that answer."
Kirk almost smiled, and then looked back at the android.
"Exo III. The Krell seeded other worlds."
"Some."
"With androids."
"With many things."
"And the line that produced Ruk."
"Yes."
"Those machines chose survival when their makers ordered them destroyed."
"Yes."
"You didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
Robby looked at the house again, and when the answer came it was very carefully made.
"Because I chose not to resist."
Kirk nodded slowly. "Not because you were built differently."
"No."
Spock's eyes narrowed. "But you are now."
"Yes."
"Because of Morbius."
There was a long silence on that terrace.
"Yes."
And Kirk felt the last false piece turn over and lie flat. Morbius had lied, and not about a scientific detail. He had lied about a person. He had taken a choice away from Robby and then offered the absence of that choice to a Starfleet captain as evidence that the household was safe.
Kirk looked toward the study window, which had no glass in it.
"Tomorrow," he said, "I'm taking him off this planet."
"He'll fight you," said McCoy.
"No."
Below them, far past the reach of anything they were carrying, the great machine increased its load by a fraction.
"He won't."
And Kirk knew, even while he was saying it, that the planet might.
