The Krell did not use buttons for the end of a world.
Morbius stood with one hand flat against the wall and nothing moved. No lever came down. No klaxon sounded anywhere in that place.
The machine had already been told, and it was only confirming it to him.
Kirk saw the change in the gauge first. The needle went to zero, and then past it, and not lower. Elsewhere. Lines of light began to move through the transparent wall in a pattern he had not seen before and did not like at all.
"Twenty-three hours and fifty-one minutes," said Morbius.
"Reverse it."
"No."
"Doctor, there is a mountain of knowledge under this floor and you are the only man alive who can read any of it."
"Yes," said Morbius. "That is the argument. I made it to Adams for eleven weeks and five people died while I was making it."
Kirk had nothing to put against that.
"The machine is withdrawing from your ship," Morbius said.
The communicator sounded in Kirk's hand at the same instant.
"Scott to Captain Kirk."
"Kirk."
"We have orbit." There was so much relief in it that it came out sounding like anger. "Full control. Whatever had hold of us is gone."
"Transporter?"
"Coming back now. I've a clean lock on every one of you."
Kirk thought about a young man in a shuttlecraft saying that the atmosphere was rather beautiful.
"Stand by." He closed the channel. "You are coming with us."
Morbius looked toward the door. "No."
"Doctor," said McCoy, and he said it almost pleasantly, "I have a tranquillizer in this case that will put you on that floor in about four seconds, and I have used it on men a good deal larger than you, and I am not going to enjoy it any less for having asked first."
Morbius almost smiled. "And then carry me."
"Yes."
"You may try."
Kirk did not care for that sentence at all.
Morbius turned back to the wall.
"Captain," said Spock, and Kirk saw it on the tricorder: the load reading around Morbius's own neural pattern was climbing, and it was not climbing outward toward the house or the ridge or the ship.
It was going inward.
McCoy understood at the same moment. "Don't."
Morbius turned to him. "You are a physician."
"Yes."
"Then you know."
"No."
"I have connected myself to the destruct sequence."
McCoy's face changed. "You can disconnect."
"Not without reversing the commitment."
"Then reverse it," said Kirk.
"No." Morbius looked at the wall where his hand had been. "Captain, I knew what the connection would do to me before I made it. I have spent twenty years learning what this installation does to a mind that goes too far into it, and I went in with my eyes open, and I am not coming back out. That was not an accident and it is not a thing you can argue me out of now."
Kirk took one step. "Edward."
That stopped him, and Kirk lowered the weapon.
"Don't make your daughter lose you to the same machine that took everybody else."
Morbius closed his eyes, and for a moment Kirk believed he had reached him.
"She lost me a long time ago."
"No," said a voice from the doorway.
Alta was standing in it, with Robby behind her.
Kirk swore under his breath. "How did you get down here?"
She looked back at the android.
"He carried me."
"The route was safe," said Robby.
"Of course it was," said McCoy.
Morbius looked at his daughter and everything that had been in his face went out of it.
"Alta."
She came into the chamber. Robby stayed at the door.
Kirk started forward and Spock put a hand on his arm. It was not restraint. It was advice. Kirk stopped where he was.
Alta stood in front of her father.
"You are destroying the planet."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because it cannot be allowed to do this again."
"To anyone."
"To anyone."
She looked around the chamber, at the light going down through the wall into machinery older than her species.
"My whole life is here."
"I know."
"Mother is here."
He closed his eyes. "Yes."
"My house."
"Yes."
"The lake."
His voice went. "Yes."
"You always decide," she said.
He looked at her, and there was nothing left in him to defend it with.
"Yes."
She nodded once. It was not agreement. It was recognition.
"This time you are right."
That hurt him more than anything she had said yet.
"I am sorry," said Morbius.
Her expression started to change, and he shook his head.
"No. That is not enough, and I will not ask you to make it enough."
She stood very still.
"I loved you," she said.
"I know."
"I love you."
"I know."
"That did not make what I did love."
Her eyes filled.
Morbius looked across at Robby, and then back. "Your mother told me something before she died."
Alta waited.
"She said not to make being loved a thing you had to escape."
Her breath caught.
"I did," he said.
She did not rescue him from the sentence, and Kirk, watching from four meters away, thought: good.
"You turned off the shield."
"Yes."
"Because you wanted someone to find you."
"Yes."
"I know why now."
Alta looked at him for a long time.
"I didn't hate you."
"I know."
"I wanted more."
"I know."
"I wanted people."
"Yes."
"I wanted to leave and still be allowed to love you."
And that was the wound. Not the leaving. The fact that he had made love feel conditional on staying.
He reached toward her and stopped.
Alta saw him stop. Then she took his hand herself.
Only a moment.
"You nearly killed me."
"Yes."
"The tiger."
"Yes."
"You killed all of them."
"Yes."
She swallowed. "I don't know what to do with that."
"You are not required to do anything." He opened his eyes. "Not for me."
They stood holding hands in the control room of a dead civilization while the world began the first slow movements toward its own end.
"There is one thing," he said.
She waited.
"The life you chose." His mouth trembled. "Choose it."
She began to cry.
Morbius looked over at Kirk. "Captain. Take her."
"I was going to."
"I know." A faint smile. "Of course you were."
Kirk looked at the wall. "How long do you have?"
Morbius looked at McCoy, and McCoy answered for him.
"Minutes."
Alta turned sharply. "No."
Her father tightened his hand on hers. "That part is mine."
"No."
"Alta."
"No."
And for the first time in all their years together, Edward Morbius did not tell his daughter what to do.
He waited.
She cried, and then she leaned forward and put her forehead against his chest, and he held her, and he did not hold her tightly.
Robby looked away. Spock did not. McCoy did.
Morbius whispered something, and only Alta heard it. Later she would not tell anyone what it had been, and Kirk never asked her.
* *
The machine began taking him three minutes later, and it was not violent about it.
His legs went first. Robby moved and Morbius lifted one hand.
"No."
Robby stopped.
He sat down on the floor with Alta beside him. McCoy scanned him and found neural activity collapsing inward along the path the machine had opened.
"There is nothing I can do."
"I know."
Morbius looked over at the android. "I altered you."
"Yes."
"I had no right."
Robby considered the statement with some care. "No."
Morbius almost laughed. "Julia would have liked that answer."
"Yes."
"Can it be removed?" Robby asked it quietly.
Morbius understood what he meant. "The prohibition."
"Yes."
He looked toward the wall. "No. Not by me. Not now."
Robby said nothing.
Morbius turned his head to Spock. "Perhaps someone better will decide whether it should be."
Spock inclined his head.
"Perhaps Robby will."
Morbius stared at him, and then at the android standing by the door, and that was the last lesson he was ever taught. A choice cannot be given back by handing ownership of it to a kinder owner.
"Yes," he said.
His breathing slowed. Alta held his hand.
"Father."
He looked at her. "I'm here."
She cried harder, because those words had belonged to her mother once, and now they belonged to her.
"Altaira."
"Yes."
It took him some while to assemble it, and nobody in that chamber hurried him.
"I love you," said Morbius. "I loved your mother. I want you to have both of those and not have to go looking for them afterward, because I have not said either one often enough and there is no more time to correct it."
Alta could not answer.
"And I am sorry." His hand moved in hers, once. "Not for the planet. For the whole of it. I am sorry, Alta."
"I know."
"That is not the same as forgiving me."
"No," she said. "It isn't."
"Good," said Edward Morbius, and he said it with something very close to pride, and that was the last thing he ever said to anybody.
He closed his eyes.
The gauge beside the great machine stayed at zero.
His breathing stopped.
Nothing attacked. Nothing moved. The machine did not defend him.
For the first time in twenty years, Edward Morbius died, and the universe was allowed to go on.
* *
Kirk gave them sixty seconds.
Then the first warning came up, and it was not a sound. It was a line of Krell notation that appeared across every wall in the chamber at once.
Spock read it. "Captain. The planetary sequence has passed the first irreversible threshold."
Kirk opened the communicator. "Kirk to Enterprise. Five to beam up."
Alta's eyes went to him. "Five?"
Kirk looked at the doorway. "Unless he objects."
Robby looked at Alta, and then at the room where he had waited longer than the whole of human history.
"I do not object."
The transporter took them.
Morbius remained on the floor, and the machine remained beneath him, and the planet began its last day.
