"Starfleet has asked me more than once why I went down there myself," Kirk said to the recorder, "with a science officer and a surgeon and a civilian, and no security detail worth the name."
He thought about that for a while before he answered it.
"Because a man who has been alone for twenty years does not talk to armed strangers. I would make the same decision again. I want that in the record, whatever else goes into it."
* * *
The transporter set them down on red-brown stone under a sky that burned green.
For several seconds Kirk did nothing but look. From orbit the planet had looked peaceful. On the surface it looked more peaceful and a good deal less comforting. Low mountains stood off beyond the plateau, softened by distance and by the color of the light. Wind moved through sparse growth rooted in the seams between shelves of stone. No roads. No utility lines. No cut timber, no foundations, no rubbish tip, nothing to say that forty-two human beings had ever come here to work.
Spock had his tricorder open before the transporter effect had finished letting go of him.
McCoy's eyes went to him. "We just got here."
"That is generally when one begins to examine an unfamiliar environment."
"I thought we might look around first."
"I am looking around."
Ostrow had already walked several meters from the beam-down coordinates. He stopped himself, came back, and looked mildly irritated that anybody had seen him do it. Kirk understood the impulse better than the Vulcan would have liked. Six years of records and four pages of symbols, and now the man was standing on the thing itself, with the dust of it on his boots.
"Anything?" Kirk asked.
"Atmosphere within expected parameters," Spock said. "No harmful radiation. The interference we detected from orbit is still present, though less pronounced at this location." He turned a slow half circle with the tricorder. "We are three point one kilometers from the structure, Captain. Six hundred meters outside the perimeter Doctor Morbius described."
"And still nothing there to be outside of."
"Nothing whatever."
So they stood where a defensive field would have ended, if one had existed, waiting to be collected like freight. Kirk had asked for it himself and would ask for it again, and it still left four men standing in the open with three kilometers of another man's plateau between them and the only door on the planet.
"The house?"
Spock pointed across the plateau, and Kirk found it at once.
It sat half hidden behind a low rise, larger than the orbital scan had made it, and unmistakably human in its proportions. Broad roofline. Straight walls. After the ridges and the wind-cut stone it looked less like a building than like an argument.
McCoy followed his gaze. "Somebody went to a lot of trouble."
Before Kirk could answer, a sound came across the plateau behind them. Not machinery, exactly. Tires on stone.
Something was coming from the direction of the house.
Kirk put one hand near his phaser and waited. Whatever was coming had been sent by a man who had spent an hour trying to keep them off this planet, and there was nothing to be gained by meeting it with a weapon already out.
The vehicle came over the rise and slowed. The figure at its controls was humanoid and very tall. Gray clothing. A broad, almost immobile face.
Something turned over in Kirk's memory.
The vehicle stopped ten meters off, and the figure stepped out, and for a moment Kirk was not on Altair IV at all. He was in a corridor cut through rock on a frozen world a long way from here, watching something step out of the dark that had been standing there since before there were cities on Earth.
The resemblance was not exact. This face was different, the build finer, the proportions altered. It was there in the way the thing moved, an economy so complete that nothing was wasted and nothing hurried, and in the stillness when it stopped, a stillness no living body ever manages.
McCoy had been watching him instead of the android. "Jim?"
Kirk said nothing.
The android came toward them and stopped at a courteous distance. "Captain James Kirk?"
The English was flawless.
"Yes."
"I am Robby. Doctor Morbius has asked me to bring you to the residence."
Beside him, Kirk felt rather than saw Ostrow go completely motionless.
Spock had his tricorder aimed at their host. Robby turned his head and looked at it, and then at Spock.
"Your instrument will not damage me."
Spock's eyebrow rose. "That was not my intention."
"I know."
McCoy looked from one of them to the other. "Well. That's reassuring."
Robby turned his head toward him and said nothing at all.
"Does it know who we are?" McCoy asked.
"I know the captain," Robby said. "I was present when he spoke with Doctor Morbius. The rest of you I do not know."
"Well, I'm Doctor McCoy, and that's more manners than I got from the last three star bases."
Robby appeared to accept this without comment.
Ostrow had not taken his eyes off him, and Kirk understood why. There was one line in Adams's last transmissions about an intact android recovered on this planet, and a recording of a voice learning to say good afternoon, and six years of a Vulcan's life had been built on less. The thing in the recording was standing on the plateau in front of him, wearing gray, waiting with its hands at its sides. Kirk had watched this man argue with the Vulcan Science Academy, face down an academician who had called his life's work an obsession, and answer a starship captain's challenge without a flicker. Now he stood on the plateau of Altair IV and appeared, for the first time since Kirk had known him, entirely unable to speak.
Robby waited. He seemed prepared to wait a long time.
"You are the android of the Bellerophon transmissions," Ostrow said at last.
"I do not know what was transmitted."
"Captain Adams reported recovering you. There is a recording of you speaking, made twenty years ago. I have listened to it several hundred times." Ostrow's voice was perfectly level, which Kirk had learned to recognize as the Vulcan equivalent of a shout. "Of what manufacture are you?"
"I do not understand the question as you intend it."
Ostrow took a step closer. "Who constructed you?"
The smallest pause came before the answer, no longer than a breath, and Kirk would have missed it entirely if he had not been listening for exactly that kind of thing.
"I was constructed here."
"By whom?"
Robby looked toward the house. "Doctor Morbius is waiting."
Kirk noted the answer that had not been given, and from the set of Ostrow's shoulders, so had Ostrow. Robby turned back to the vehicle as though the conversation had reached its natural end, which in a sense it had.
McCoy fell in beside Kirk on the way across. "You want to tell me what that was about? You went somewhere just now."
"Later, Bones."
The vehicle took them across the plateau without hurrying, Robby driving with the same economy he brought to everything else. Kirk sat behind him and watched the set of those shoulders and told himself what he would have told any officer who brought it to him: that resemblance proves nothing, that people find patterns because they go looking for them, that Spock had said as much to him in almost those words inside the last year.
It did not help as much as it should have.
The house grew as they came up on it. It was not elegant the way alien architecture is often called elegant, which is usually a trick of unfamiliar purpose. It was human. Broad windows facing the view. A long terrace. Low walls laid out to make a courtyard of the ground in front. Even the entrance had been set to take the prevailing wind on its shoulder instead of its face, the way a man builds when he means to be there through a great many winters.
"This is the structure we detected from orbit," Spock said.
Robby brought the vehicle onto a smooth approach. "Yes."
"When was it constructed?"
"The residence was established after the Bellerophon's arrival."
Spock glanced at Kirk. It was an answer. It was not enough of one, and Robby gave no sign of intending to improve it.
Morbius was waiting for them outside.
Kirk knew the voice before he was sure of the man. Edward Morbius was older than the personnel image in the Starfleet file, white at the temples, the face thinner and a good deal more severe, and he wore dark clothing that belonged to no service and no fashion Kirk could place. He stood at the head of his own steps the way men stand when they have decided in advance how much of themselves they intend to give away.
"Captain."
"Doctor Morbius."
They shook hands. The grip was firm and brief. Morbius acknowledged Spock and McCoy in turn, correctly and without warmth, and then his eyes went to Ostrow and stayed there.
"Doctor Ostrow."
Ostrow inclined his head. "Doctor Morbius."
Something moved behind the older man's face. "You are the archaeologist."
"Xenoarchaeologist."
"Yes," Morbius said. "Of course."
Kirk filed that with the rest. Nobody had told Morbius a xenoarchaeologist was coming. Nobody had told him anything except that a starship had entered his system, and he had not asked for a crew list. He had looked down four strangers on his own steps and gone straight to the only one whose presence needed explaining.
"You have come a long way," Morbius said, in the voice of a man observing that it would rain later. "Come inside."
He stood aside from his own doorway, and Kirk went up the steps past him and into the house that should not have been there.
