Chapter 37: The Law

The Columbus launched at 0446 with Lieutenant Arden Berg flying her and one crewman aboard, and the whole of it took nine minutes from the order to the end.

Kirk listened to all nine.

"Columbus to Captain Kirk. We're clear of the bay and coming around."

"Understood. Come down on the house, not the marker. I want everybody aboard inside four minutes of your skids touching stone."

"Four minutes. Aye, sir."

Spock had his head back. McCoy had stopped talking some time ago. Out in the garden Robby had turned toward the eastern sky, and he had turned toward it, Kirk noticed afterward, before anybody on that terrace could have seen anything at all.

"Captain, we have you visual. There's a lot of green in this atmosphere. It's rather beautiful."

"Mr. Berg."

"Sir."

"Get down here."

"On the way."

And then, forty seconds later, in a tone that had changed entirely:

"Captain, I have an attitude problem."

Kirk's hand closed on the communicator. "Say again."

"She's yawing. I've got no fault on the board and the board says she's fine, and she is coming over to port and I can't hold her."

"Trim her out."

"I'm trying, sir. Thrusters are answering, they're just not doing anything."

Spock said, very quietly, "There," and Kirk turned and saw it.

High up over the eastern ridge, against a sky going from black to green, something crossed in front of the stars.

Not a shape. The absence of one. A patch of the morning where the stars were not, moving east to west with the particular unhurried confidence of a thing that has no reason to be anywhere else.

It was very large.

"Berg, hard about. Go to full impulse and get out of the atmosphere."

"Trying, sir."

"Now, Lieutenant."

"I am turning and she is not coming."

McCoy said, "Jim," and Kirk put a hand up without looking at him.

"Berg. Listen to me. Do not fight it. Cut your power and let her fall and pull out at a thousand meters. She'll take that."

There was a pause of perhaps two seconds, and in it Kirk heard a young man decide to do as he was told.

"Cutting power."

The shape over the ridge stopped.

Kirk did not know how he knew it had stopped, because there was nothing there to watch, and he knew it anyway, and he had the communicator halfway to his mouth when the sky came apart.

It was not an explosion. Not at first. The shuttle appeared for half a second as a hard white point, and then the point opened, and what came out of it was not fire but fragments, and the fragments did not go outward in the pattern a breaking thing makes. They went down. All of them. Together.

The sound reached the terrace eleven seconds later, flat and distant, like a door slammed in another house.

Nobody said anything.

"Columbus," said Kirk.

Static.

"Columbus, this is Kirk."

Uhura's voice came in instead, and it was steady, which Kirk understood afterward had cost her something. "Captain, we lost their telemetry at nine thousand meters. We have no beacon and no life signs."

"Keep listening."

"Yes, sir."

Kirk closed the channel and stood in the dark looking at a sky that had gone back to being a sky.

Forty-one minutes, now thirty-three. One shuttle gone with two men in it. No transporter. His ship coming down on a planet that had eaten a starship once before.

He turned around.

Edward Morbius was standing in the doorway of his house, and he had been standing there long enough to have seen all of it.

Alta had come out behind her father, with Robby at her shoulder, and neither of them had made a sound.

Kirk walked straight at the older man. "That was my shuttlecraft."

"I saw it."

"Two men."

"I know."

"My ship is falling and your planet has just taken the only way I had of reaching her."

"The installation is active."

"Stop it."

"I do not control it."

Kirk looked at him. That had been true yesterday. He was no longer sure it was true now.

"You're coming with us."

Morbius laughed once. "No."

Kirk drew his phaser.

"Captain," said Alta.

He did not point it. He held it down along his leg. "Doctor, I'm finished."

Morbius looked at the weapon. "You would stun me."

"If I have to."

"And carry me aboard. Captain, you have nothing to carry me aboard in."

"Yes."

"You believe that will end this."

"No." Kirk took a step closer, and that answer had surprised him. "I think taking you away from the machine may give us a chance to find out."

"You will not separate me from my work."

Alta closed her eyes, and Kirk heard Julia in the sentence although he had never heard Julia speak. The account had given her to him anyway.

Be with us.

"This stopped being work a long time ago," he said.

The ground moved. Not a tremor. A sustained vibration that came up through the stones and stayed.

Spock's communicator sounded. It was Scott, and he was strained past politeness. "Captain, we have lost another thousand kilometers."

"Hold her."

"I am holding everything."

Morbius turned toward the android. "Defend us."

Robby did not move.

"Robby," said Kirk.

The eyes were fixed on the ridge.

"Robby." Morbius's voice went up. "Protect Alta."

Nothing.

Alta went to him. "What is it?"

He looked down at her. "I cannot."

Morbius stared. "What do you mean, you cannot?"

"The instruction conflicts."

Spock came closer. "What instruction?"

"I may not deliberately harm a living, thinking being."

Kirk looked at Morbius, and there it was, standing in the open at last.

"You stated that this prohibition was inherent to his construction," said Spock.

"It is now."

"That was not my question."

Morbius said nothing.

Spock turned back. "When was the prohibition installed?"

Robby looked at Morbius, and the older man said, "Do not answer."

Kirk brought the phaser up. "Answer him."

Robby looked at Spock. "Four nights after the Bellerophon was destroyed."

Alta went absolutely still.

"By whom?" said Spock.

"Edward."

Nobody moved.

"Alta," said Morbius.

She was backing away from him. "You changed him."

"It was necessary."

"You told me he was made that way."

"I told everyone."

"Why?"

"Because there was no reason to reopen a decision taken nineteen years ago."

"There was a reason for me," said Robby.

Morbius turned, and the sentence had struck harder than shouting would have done.

"Robby."

"You did not remove it."

"I protected this household."

"You altered me."

"To prevent harm."

Robby looked toward the ridge. "That is the conflict."

"Explain," said Spock.

"I may not harm a living being."

"Yes."

"The being approaching is Edward."

Morbius's face drained.

"What?" whispered Alta.

"If I oppose it, I harm Edward."

Kirk felt the shape of the thing arrive a half second before the words finished. "And if you do nothing?"

"Other living beings will be harmed."

"And the prohibition does not rank those harms," said Spock.

"No."

"There is nothing approaching," said Morbius.

Robby's eyes went to him. "Yes."

The house lights went out.

Beyond the garden the stars disappeared in a shape. Something very large moved between the house and the sky, and Alta stepped backward into Robby, and McCoy said something under his breath that was not an oath.

Spock's tricorder showed nothing. Kirk did not need it. The air above the terrace bent. The garden path warped the way it had the first time, but this time the distortion did not pass over and go. It came forward. Stone cracked, not under weight but around absence.

Kirk raised the phaser. Robby stayed put.

"Stop it," Morbius shouted.

"I cannot."

"You were built to protect."

"No."

Morbius stopped.

"You changed me because you were afraid," said Robby, and his voice did not rise at all.

Alta turned to her father.

The invisible thing reached the outer wall of the garden, and the wall folded inward.

Kirk fired. The beam went into empty air and came out somewhere it should not have, striking the ground five meters to the left.

"Spock."

"Captain, there is no target."

"I noticed."

Morbius was backing toward the house. Alta was not.

Robby turned to Spock. "I am forbidden to harm him."

"Yes."

"If I do nothing, others end."

"Yes."

"Ending them is also harm."

"Yes."

"The instruction does not say which harm is mine."

Spock was silent.

"Spock," said Kirk.

The Vulcan's eyes stayed on the android. "Your prohibition defines action. It does not define responsibility."

Robby looked at him.

"You cannot choose an act intended to injure Doctor Morbius."

"Correct."

"You can choose an act intended to preserve another life."

Robby's head tilted by a few degrees. "Even if harm follows."

"Intent and consequence are not identical."

Morbius stared at him. "You are instructing him to evade the safeguard."

"No." Spock did not look away from Robby. "I am answering the question you failed to ask when you installed it."

And Robby stood there.

Kirk watched him do it and understood, in the three seconds he had to understand anything, that Spock had handed the android a distinction and not a decision. Somewhere behind that face a machine two hundred thousand years old was attempting to establish which of two harms belonged to him, and there was no procedure in him for that, because the man who had installed the rule had never once imagined a day when both answers would be wrong.

He did not move. He did not look away from the thing coming across the garden. He stopped, the way a sentence stops when the next word does not exist.

The outer wall came apart.

Kirk was already moving. He hit Alta at the waist and took her off the stones and down, and the two of them went over the low garden wall together with his shoulder under her head, and the distortion came through the place where she had been standing and the stone there turned into nothing at all.

Morbius screamed her name.

Kirk got up onto one knee with his arm still across her. Alta was staring past him.

Robby had not moved a centimeter.

"Robby," she said.

He turned his head toward her. Whatever was in his face, it was not anything Kirk had seen in it before.

"I could not determine which harm was mine."