Spock fell into Edward Morbius. There was no better word for it afterward, and he looked for one.
A meld is ordinarily an opening made between two minds. This was not that. This was a shaft.
He touched the surface and went down through twenty years.
Julia laughing beside an excavation trench. Alta in Robby's hands, nine minutes old. Adams in the command shelter saying that five people were dead. A plate coming down toward a forehead in a chamber under a plateau.
Then deeper. The part Morbius knew about. Then the part he did not.
Spock had been trained from childhood to observe a thought without becoming it. He watched anger form. He watched it acquire language. He watched the language fail.
And below language, something older was waiting.
Mine.
It was not spoken. It was not even a word.
Julia stepping into the transporter marker. Mine.
Adams ordering the expedition home. Mine.
Starfleet ordering Robby shut down. Mine.
Alta laughing with Uhura at a communications station. Mine.
Alta saying I am going.
And then the tiger, and Spock saw the animal from two places at once: from Alta's eyes on the terrace, and from something underneath Edward Morbius that could not bear the sentence she had spoken the night before.
The machine had not invented the desire. It had only removed the distance between the desire and the result.
Spock felt the coupling. It was vast and immediate and terrible, and he reached for it.
Something reached back.
* *
On the floor of the control chamber Spock's body arched, and McCoy got a hand on his shoulder.
Kirk caught the doctor's wrist. "Don't break contact."
"I'm not trying to break it, I'm trying to keep him from snapping his own spine."
Morbius's eyes were open and seeing nothing in the room.
The gauge slammed to the end stop. Then it dropped. Halfway.
The door stopped moving.
"Spock."
No answer.
McCoy's scanner began to shriek. "Neural load is climbing."
The red stress glow along the door faded by a fraction.
"Captain," said Scott.
Kirk snatched up the communicator. "Report."
"Descent has slowed."
"How much?"
"Not enough to celebrate about."
"Hold her."
"I have been attempting that for some hours."
"Jim," said McCoy, "he cannot maintain this."
"I know."
"No. I mean seconds."
Kirk crouched down beside him. "Spock. You bought it. Now get out."
Nothing.
Morbius whispered something, and Kirk leaned in.
"What?"
"Julia."
*
Spock stood in the garden.
Not physically. Morbius knew that and so did he.
Her grave was there at the western edge, with the pale stone threaded with blue lying on top of it. Morbius had not moved that stone in thirteen years. He had repaired walls and replaced windows and rebuilt instruments and extended laboratories into rock.
The stone had stayed where a six year old put it.
Morbius was younger here. Not in the face. In the way he stood.
"What is this?"
"You brought me here," said Spock.
"No."
"Then who?"
Morbius looked toward the grave, and the answer came up from underneath both of them. Not from Julia. From memory.
The machine opened another layer, and Spock saw her death. Not as Edward Morbius remembered it. As the machine had registered him while it was happening.
Grief. Helplessness. Rage. A wordless and total demand that the universe stop.
And then nothing. No effect. No attack. No intervention of any kind.
Julia died, and the machine had heard him, and had done nothing at all.
Morbius stared at it. "Why?"
Spock understood the question and all of its parts. Why Adams. Why the Bellerophon. Why the tiger. Why not her.
The answer was not there, and that was worse than any answer would have been.
Morbius turned to him. "Did I."
He could not finish it. Spock did not help him.
"Did I want her dead?"
"No evidence supports that conclusion."
"But."
"No evidence excludes it."
Morbius recoiled, and the garden went out from under them both.
They fell deeper.
Forty faces. Spock did not know their names. Morbius did, and the machine gave them back to him one at a time.
Harris. The security officer from the eastern perimeter. Quinn's assistant. The laboratory technician. Cookie. Farman. Quinn. Adams. Thirty-five more going down inside a burning ship.
Morbius felt each of them, and not their deaths. His own relation to them at the moment they died. Fear of judgment. Resentment. Abandonment. The impossible and absolute conviction that if they left, everything that mattered would be taken away with them.
Spock heard the last conscious instruction Edward Morbius had ever given to J. J. Adams.
Go.
And underneath it, in the place without language, the other thing he had meant.
Never leave.
The contradiction had been handed to a machine with no ethics in it anywhere, and the machine had resolved the problem physically.
Morbius screamed.
Spock held him, not with hands but with discipline.
"See it."
"No."
"See it."
"I cannot."
"You are."
The Bellerophon fell again, and this time Edward Morbius knew whose hand was on it.
* *
In the chamber he screamed aloud, and the door stopped glowing, and the gauge dropped another quarter.
"Jim," said McCoy.
There was blood at Spock's nose, and then at his ear.
"Spock."
McCoy reached for him and Kirk stopped him again. "One more second."
"You don't have one."
Morbius's hands came up off the floor and took hold of Spock's wrists.
The gauge went to almost nothing.
And the entire installation went silent. Not quieter. Silent. The vibration that had been under every floor of that place for three days simply stopped.
"Captain," said Scott, "whatever you are doing, keep doing it. The ship is holding altitude."
Kirk stared at the two of them. "Spock."
The Vulcan opened his eyes, and for one second they were not his. There was too much pain in them and too much fear.
Then he tore his hands away and the meld broke and he went over backward, and McCoy caught him.
The gauge climbed. Not to full. Half.
The door trembled.
McCoy got him down onto the floor. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"No."
McCoy's mouth tightened.
Kirk went to Morbius. The man was sitting with both hands over his face.
"Doctor."
He lowered them. His eyes were ruined, and not physically. The man behind them was still entirely there, and that was the problem.
"I saw them."
Kirk made no answer.
"All of them."
"Yes."
"I did not know."
"I believe you."
Morbius looked at him, and being believed hurt him worse than any accusation had.
"I killed them."
Kirk said nothing at all to that.
Morbius's head came up, and for a moment Kirk thought the man was going to be sick.
"My poor Krell," he said. "I said that to you. Standing in that house, with all of it under my feet. My poor Krell." He looked at his own hands. "They were not mine. They were never mine. I came here forty years after I should have been born and I took a dead people for my own because there was nobody left to tell me I could not have them, and then I did to this expedition exactly what their machine did to them."
"What did he do?" said Morbius, looking past him.
"He showed you yourself," said McCoy.
Spock tried to sit up and McCoy put him back down. "For once in your life stay where I put you."
Spock did, and that frightened Kirk nearly as much as the rest of it.
Morbius looked at the gauge, and it rose a fraction. He saw it. He closed his eyes, and it fell. He opened them, and it rose. Closed. Fell.
"So can you," said Kirk.
Morbius watched him.
"The meld. You can feel the link."
He nodded, barely. "I have always had it."
"Yes."
"I thought the machine was answering what I asked it."
From the floor Spock said, "It was answering all of you."
McCoy got an injector against the Vulcan's shoulder and Spock permitted it, which told Kirk how much of him was gone.
"Captain." Spock's eyes were closed. "There is a thing you should have before I am less use to you than I am now. For twenty years Doctor Morbius has been able to reach that installation and has not once been able to command it. Not because his mind was insufficient. Because he did not know what he was holding. A man cannot consciously direct a system whose purpose he has misunderstood, and he had misunderstood it completely. He believed it was a library."
Kirk looked at Morbius.
"And now?"
"Now he knows what it is," said Spock. "I was inside him while he learned."
Morbius had gone very still, and Kirk watched something move behind the man's face that was not grief and not horror, and was worse than either, because it was arrival.
Then Edward Morbius laughed.
It came out of him loudly and all at once, in a chamber with a dead Vulcan four hundred meters above it and a starship falling out of the sky, and McCoy's head came up, and Kirk understood that he had never once heard the man make that sound in four days.
"I see it," said Morbius.
"Doctor."
"I see it. All of it. I have had my hands on it for twenty years and I have been reading the catalogue." He turned in a slow half circle with his arms a little away from his sides, looking at the walls, at the floor, at the lights going down through the transparent face of the chamber into machinery the size of a mountain range. His eyes were wet. "Captain, do you know what this is? Do you know what they made?"
"Doctor Morbius."
"Wondrous," he said.
Nobody answered him. There was nothing in that room to answer him with.
"Wondrous," said Morbius again, more quietly, and the laugh went out of him the way weather goes off a hill, and what was underneath it was a man who had just understood exactly what he had done with it.
He closed his eyes, and the needle went down, and beyond the door the distortion drew back. Kirk could not see the thing. He could see its absence going away from them.
Morbius opened his eyes.
"I can stop it," he said.
Kirk waited.
"Not hold it. Not argue with it." He turned his hand over and looked at it as though it belonged to somebody he had just been introduced to. "Stop it. Anywhere on this world. I could have done it on the first night and I did not know the question to ask."
And that was the thing, Kirk understood, standing in a room under a dying planet. The machine had always obeyed him. It had simply never been told what it was for, by a man who had spent twenty years certain he already knew.
Ostrow had died for the difference.
Morbius got to his feet.
"Where are you going?" said McCoy.
"Nowhere," said Morbius. "It is done."
Kirk came around. "What is done?"
Morbius looked through the transparent wall at the machinery going down out of sight, and when he answered he was entirely calm, which Kirk had learned to recognize as the most dangerous thing the man ever was.
"The Krell built a final denial into this installation. If the machine were ever compromised, the energy stores could be driven into the mantle. I have known the architecture of it for nine years and I have never been able to reach it." He paused. "I reached it four minutes ago."
Nobody in the chamber moved.
"How long?" said Kirk.
"Twenty-four hours."
"Stop it."
"No."
"Doctor."
"It cannot be stopped after commitment, Captain, and I committed it while your first officer was still holding the thing still. I did not consult you because you would have argued, and you would have been wrong, and we did not have the time."
Kirk stared at him. "That was not your decision to make."
"No," Morbius agreed. "It was not. It was the Krell's, and they were not able to make it, and somebody standing in this room had to."
Then he put his hand against the black wall, and the wall lit before he touched it.
