The Krell control chamber had no controls. That was the first thing Kirk understood about it. The second was that Morbius had known it all along.
They came into a room shaped like a hemisphere laid on its side, with the far wall transparent to machinery that went down farther than the eye could follow it. Columns of light moved through the depths. Great structures turned without any sound at all. Somewhere below them, power enough to move a world went through conduits wider than the Enterprise.
At the center of the chamber stood one instrument.
A gauge.
Kirk almost laughed. After everything, the Krell had left a needle.
It was buried at the high end of its scale.
Spock went to it. "What does it measure?"
Morbius said nothing.
"Doctor."
"Cognitive load."
"Whose?" said Spock.
Morbius stared at the needle, and nobody in the chamber required the answer.
The room shook. The gauge moved higher. Morbius's face tightened, and the needle went with it.
Kirk saw it. Spock saw it. McCoy saw it. And Morbius saw all three of them see it.
"No."
Kirk walked toward him. "Doctor."
"No."
"You know now."
"I know nothing."
"Look at the gauge."
"It responds to the installation."
"It responds to you."
"No."
"Your anger moves it."
Morbius's anger rose, and the needle climbed with it and then stopped, and Morbius stared at the thing.
Kirk left it there. He did not have to.
The chamber gave a deep sound, and somewhere a long way off something struck metal.
"Captain," said Scott over the communicator, "we just lost another six hundred kilometers."
Morbius closed his eyes, and the needle fell. Only slightly.
"Captain," said Spock.
"I see it."
Morbius opened his eyes and the needle rose. "No."
"Edward," said Kirk.
The older man looked at him. Kirk had never used his first name.
"You killed them."
"No."
"Adams."
"No."
"Farman."
"No."
"Quinn."
"Stop."
"The forty."
"I said stop."
The needle slammed against the end of its range and the chamber lights flared.
Kirk stood still. "The tiger."
Morbius's face came apart. "Stop."
"Alta."
The word changed everything in the room. The needle went past the printed scale, and Morbius screamed, and it was not at Kirk. It was at the gauge.
"No."
Spock came up beside him. "Doctor."
"No."
"Your conscious denial is irrelevant."
Morbius turned on him. "You know nothing about my mind."
"I know the machine is responding to it."
"That proves nothing."
"The machine was built to respond to cognition."
"Directed cognition."
"That distinction," said Spock, "is the error."
Morbius backed away from him, and his hand came down against the wall, and the wall lit under it, and the gauge jumped. He snatched the hand back as though the stone had burned him.
"Not consciously," said Kirk.
That stopped the man where he stood.
Kirk lowered his voice. "That's the whole of it, isn't it. You never ordered any of it. You never said kill Adams. You never said destroy the Bellerophon. You never told that animal to go for your daughter."
Morbius was crying now, silently, and did not appear to know it.
"But something in you did. Something underneath the part that makes the speeches. The part that wanted the world to stop taking things away from you."
Morbius hit him.
Kirk let him. The gauge drove higher. McCoy started forward and Kirk put one hand up without turning around.
"No."
He wiped the blood off the corner of his mouth and looked at the needle.
"There."
Morbius looked at it too. It had answered the blow. His knees went under him, and Spock caught his arm, and he tore himself free of it.
"The Krell would have known."
"They did not," said Spock.
"They were greater than we are."
"Intellectually, perhaps."
"They had conquered disease. Labor. Scarcity."
"And not themselves." Spock's voice did not change. "They assumed that greater intelligence produces greater self-knowledge."
Kirk thought about Ostrow on a stretcher saying that the limit was not the mind, it was the dose. The machine had not made Edward Morbius wise. It had made more of him available. All of him.
The chamber shook again, and a new sound came from the corridor behind them. Not machinery. Impact. Once, and then again.
Something was at the door.
"Jim," said McCoy.
Spock raised the tricorder and got nothing.
"You have to stop it," said Kirk.
"I cannot."
"You can."
"No."
"You started it."
"I did not."
The door bent inward. Krell material built to last through geological time moved three centimeters out of true.
McCoy stepped back. "That isn't supposed to happen, is it."
"No," whispered Morbius.
It bent again, and a red glow came up along one edge, and it was not heat from the far side. It was stress. The material itself had begun to fail.
"Captain, twenty minutes," said Scott.
"Spock."
The Vulcan was not looking at the door. He was looking at Morbius.
"Captain, there may be one method."
"No," said McCoy.
Kirk turned on him. "You don't even know what he's going to say."
"I know him."
Spock ignored both of them. "A mind meld."
Morbius stared.
"No," said Kirk.
"Captain."
"No."
"The machine is coupled to Doctor Morbius at a level below conscious control."
"I heard Ostrow."
"A meld may permit me to impose conscious attention upon that coupling."
"May."
"Yes."
"Or it may connect you to whatever is doing that to the door," said McCoy.
"Yes."
"Or transfer it."
"Possibly."
"Or kill you."
"That possibility is also present."
Kirk turned away from both of them and looked at the gauge, and then at the man standing under it.
"Why would it work now, when nobody could stop this twenty years ago?"
"It would have done nothing for the Bellerophon," said Spock.
Kirk looked up at him.
"They did not know what they were fighting. Captain Adams believed he was confronting an external phenomenon. Doctor Morbius had not identified himself as the operator. There was no telepath present and no reason whatever to send for one." Spock paused. "The Bellerophon did not die for want of a Vulcan, Captain. It died because nobody understood the question."
The door gave another centimeter.
Spock looked at the empty place in the chamber where a third scientist should have been standing.
"Doctor Ostrow purchased that understanding."
McCoy's face tightened.
"With six years and his life."
Kirk hated him for making the argument in that shape, and Spock knew it, and that was why he had done it.
"No."
"Captain."
"If it transfers to you."
"I will terminate the meld."
"You don't know that you can."
"No."
"If it kills you."
"Then the alternative has also killed the Enterprise."
"That's your arithmetic?"
"Yes."
Kirk looked at the door. Eighteen minutes. He looked at Morbius, who had stopped denying it. That did not mean he had accepted anything. It meant there was nothing left in the man strong enough to build the next denial out of.
"One condition," Kirk said. "If you feel it taking you, you break contact."
"Agreed."
"That isn't a condition," said McCoy. "That's a prayer."
"It's what we have."
Spock stepped toward Morbius, and Morbius backed up.
"No."
Kirk blocked him. "You don't get to refuse the last chance there is."
"It is my mind."
"Yes." Kirk held his eyes. "And there are four hundred and thirty people over our heads being pulled out of the sky by it."
Morbius looked at Spock. Then at the door. The thing on the other side struck again and the whole chamber rang like a struck bell.
Morbius sat down on the floor.
"Do it."
Spock knelt in front of him.
"Spock," said McCoy quietly.
The Vulcan did not look away from the man in front of him. "I know, Doctor."
His fingers came up, two at the temple and one along the cheek. The door began to glow.
"My mind to your mind."
Morbius flinched.
"My thoughts to your thoughts."
The gauge moved.
And the great machine heard both of them.
