Kirk found the next entries in the Bellerophon's science log rather than the captain's.
Adams had recorded his part of it plainly, the way a careful man records something he does not understand and expects to be questioned about later. Reading it, Kirk kept thinking of a line from his own Academy days, about how the first casualty of a discovery is usually the caution of the people who make it.
What happened on the second morning was not Adams's doing. Starfleet had the raw log, transmitted the day it was written, and never made anything of it. It appears nowhere in the board of inquiry that followed, because by the time anyone thought to read it there was no one left to ask about it.
* * *
Twenty years earlier
The light was still on when they came back.
Adams saw it before the black panel had finished withdrawing into the wall. Beyond the opening the corridor lay dark, and far down its length, exactly where they had left the artificial man the night before, a pale blue glow burned steadily in the dark.
Farman had seen it too. "That stayed on all night."
"So the surface monitors indicate," said Morbius, who sounded as though someone had handed him a gift.
Farman rested a hand near the phase pistol on his hip. "And that doesn't bother you."
"On the contrary."
"I knew you were going to say that."
Adams stepped through the doorway, and the corridor brightened ahead of him.
Yesterday that had been an interesting feature, the sort of thing that fills a paragraph in a survey report. This morning he watched it. The light did not switch on where they walked. It went ahead of them, four or five meters out, and the passage behind dimmed at the same rate, so that the party moved through the mountain inside a travelling pocket of light that arrived before they did.
The facility knew where they were. It had known yesterday, and Morbius had explained it in a sentence and gone on to more interesting things. Adams was not a scientist and could not argue with the explanation. He noticed only that it had made him no less uneasy.
He had brought fewer people down this time. Farman for security, Morbius and Julia for the science team, and Lieutenant Quinn out of engineering, who carried three portable instruments and the expression of a man who had already decided against any machinery he could not take apart.
They reached the second chamber.
Robby had not moved. He stood against the wall in his close-fitting gray, arms at his sides, eyes closed, exactly as they had left him. The light above the alcove was brighter than any other light in the room.
Julia stopped a few paces short of the force screen Farman had insisted on setting up before anyone else came through.
"Good morning, Robby."
Farman's eyes went to her. "He can't hear you."
"You don't know that."
"Neither do you."
"That," said Julia, "is why I said good morning."
Morbius was already at the recessed control beside the alcove. "There has been a change."
Adams came up beside him. "What kind?"
Morbius pointed. A thin line of light had come up around the edge of the recess, so faint that Adams had walked past it without seeing it. It had not been there the night before.
Quinn set his cases down and began taking readings, and his eyebrows drew together. "Energy level's higher than yesterday, Captain."
"How much higher?"
"Couldn't tell you. Or I could, but it'd be three different numbers and I'd be lying about two of them. My instruments don't agree with each other about what they're measuring, and that's a first in eleven years, and before you ask, yes, I calibrated them this morning, and yes, I did it twice." He moved the scanner along the wall. "The strange part, and this is the part I'd want somebody else to look at, is that I can't find a source."
Morbius kept his eyes on the work. "The facility itself."
"That's not an answer, Doctor."
"It is the obvious answer."
"No, sir, and I'll tell you why that's not an answer. The facility is several million cubic meters of machinery nobody understands, agreed. But power comes from somewhere. It is generated, it is stored, or it is transmitted. Those are the three. I have never in my life found a fourth and I have gone looking."
"Perhaps not in a form your instruments are built to recognize."
Quinn gave him the flat patient look of an engineer being told that physics was negotiable, and Adams stepped in before it could develop.
"Mr. Quinn. Can you tell me whether anyone activated this chamber after we left it?"
"No external access, sir. No signal from the ship. No surface party came back inside. I checked the transporter log twice before we beamed down."
"Then why is the power rising?"
Nobody had an answer, and the silence that followed was very complete. Sound did not carry in that place the way it should have. Adams had put it out of his mind yesterday. It came back now: their voices stopped a short way from their mouths, as though the room were listening instead of echoing.
Julia had moved closer to the alcove. "Captain."
Adams joined her. "What is it?"
"His eyes."
At first Adams saw nothing. Then one eyelid moved. Not opened. Moved, the way a sleeper's does when the dream turns.
Farman drew his pistol, and Morbius turned on him sharply. "Do not fire."
"I wasn't planning to."
"You drew the weapon."
"That's what it's for, Doctor."
Robby's right hand moved. One finger flexed, then a second, then the thumb, slowly enough to be uncomfortable to watch, as though whatever governed the hand had mislaid the order of operations and was working it out again joint by joint.
Julia took a step nearer the screen. "Robby?"
His head moved a fraction, and stopped.
Morbius checked the readings, and for once there was nothing satisfied in his voice. "We did nothing."
"That," said Quinn, "is the problem." He turned his scanner toward the wall. "Power's building all through the chamber, Captain."
"From where?"
"I have told you that twice now, and it has not improved with saying. I do not know."
Light came up beneath the floor. Lines of it spread out from Robby's alcove, running under the transparent sections in slow pulses and going away into the machinery beyond, and Adams understood what had been at him since the corridor.
Yesterday the facility had responded to them.
Today it had been waiting for them.
"Everyone behind the screen," he said. "Now."
Nobody argued, which told him something about how the others felt. They withdrew, Morbius last and closest to the barrier.
"Captain, if a reactivation sequence has begun, interrupting it could damage him."
"You've decided it's a him."
Morbius glanced at his wife. "That designation appears to have become unavoidable."
Behind the force screen, in the alcove, Robby's head came up.
This time his eyes opened.
They were dark, and for several seconds they did not move. Then they focused, and the hair came up on Adams's arms, because they did not focus on Morbius, who stood nearest, or on himself, who had spoken last.
They focused on Julia.
She drew a slow breath. "Hello."
Robby's mouth opened and no sound came. His jaw moved, stopped, moved again, and the first noise out of him was low and rough, machinery attempting an unfamiliar imitation. Then it steadied, and the sounds became words.
Adams assumed they were words. The language was fluid and dense, shifting in pitch across each phrase, full of consonants made in places a human mouth does not readily use. Robby spoke for perhaps ten seconds and stopped, waiting for a reply he plainly had every right to expect.
Morbius was already recording. "Again," he said, to no one who could understand him.
Farman kept his eyes on the alcove. "He doesn't speak English."
"No."
"Does he understand us?"
"I have no idea." Morbius said it with something close to joy.
Robby tried to move. His left foot came forward, the knee buckled, and Julia was at the edge of the screen before Adams could put a hand out. "Robby."
He caught himself against the wall. The recovery was slow and complete, and what struck Adams was not the clumsiness but the quality of it. Nothing about the movement was weak. Each one simply had to be calculated before it could be made, like a man doing arithmetic before every step down a staircase.
Robby looked at his own hand. He flexed the fingers, turned the palm upward, studied it, and spoke again in the same impossible language.
Morbius listened with a concentration Adams found faintly disturbing.
"Can you identify it?" Adams asked.
"No."
"Anything familiar in it at all?"
"No."
"You sound pleased about that."
"I am, Captain."
Farman shook his head slowly.
Robby took another step, and this one was better. Then another, better still. He reached the edge of the illuminated area and stopped, as neatly as a man stopping at a curb.
The room changed around him.
Light spread across a ceiling their lamps had never found. Consoles that had stood dark through the whole of the day before woke in sequence, bank after bank, running away into the chamber beyond until the far wall showed itself for the first time, impossibly distant.
Quinn's voice had gone quiet. "Captain."
"What now?"
"Energy levels are rising outside this chamber."
"How far outside?"
Quinn checked a second instrument, and then a third, which was how Adams knew he did not want to say it. "Everywhere I can measure, sir."
Morbius turned. "The facility is waking."
"No," Adams said. "It started waking before he did."
Morbius said nothing, because there was nothing to say to it, and the distinction stayed in the chamber with them.
They had not activated the android. They had not restored power to anything. They had not repaired so much as a panel. They had come in, walked through, touched almost nothing, and gone home to dinner.
And then the place had made its own decision.
Adams looked out past the alcove at the ranks of machinery, lit now along their whole length, going away under a ceiling he still could not see.
"Maybe it was never abandoned."
Farman followed his gaze. "Then what's it been doing?"
Adams watched Robby gather himself for another step.
"Waiting."
