Kirk had Adams's logs, and the science officer's records, and hours of Edward Morbius's own recordings, which the man had made meticulously for twenty years and never once erased.
Some of what follows is not in any of them. It was told to me afterward, by people who were there, and I have set it down the way they gave it to me. A court of inquiry would call that hearsay. I would call it the only account there is.
* *
Twenty years earlier
Three days after Robby learned to speak English, Captain Adams called Starfleet.
The transmission took most of a day to assemble. There was too much to send in one burst and too much that Adams did not trust to summary, so it went out whole: the first scans of the complex, engineering's estimate of its scale, samples of the symbols Morbius could not translate, and every second of recorded contact with the android, including the parts where the android had been more articulate than the officers questioning him.
He added his own recommendation last, and it took him longer to write than everything else together.
FURTHER INVESTIGATION WARRANTED.
PERMANENT SCIENTIFIC PRESENCE MAY BE JUSTIFIED.
He read it twice before he sent it.
Farman read it once, over his shoulder. "Permanent."
"If Starfleet agrees."
"They'll agree."
Adams looked around at him. "You sound very certain of that."
"Captain, we found a working installation under a dead world, and an android who taught himself English in a day and a half by reading our library from thirty kilometers away without being invited." Farman folded his arms. "They're going to send us a parade."
Starfleet did not send a parade.
It sent an answer eleven hours later, marked PRIORITY SCIENTIFIC, and when the Bellerophon's small communications screen resolved there were three admirals on it, two civilian research directors and a representative of the Federation Science Council, all talking at once through a relay circuit designed for one man giving one order.
Adams had expected caution. He had prepared for caution. What came out of the screen was appetite.
"Captain, your preliminary material has already gone to the Archaeological Directorate and to the Daystrom Institute," Admiral Komack said. "If your findings hold up, this is the most significant technological discovery in the history of the Federation. I do not say that lightly."
Through the glass partition Adams could see Morbius waiting in the corridor with Julia beside him. Morbius had heard enough to know what was coming, and the look on his face made Adams wish, briefly and uselessly, that Starfleet had discovered caution after all.
"Your survey authority is expanded as of this transmission," Komack went on. "You are authorized to establish a long-duration research settlement on Altair IV, subject to your own continuing judgment as to the safety of your people."
"How long a duration, Admiral?"
"Indefinite."
Behind him, Farman mouthed the word at the bulkhead.
The woman from the Science Council came in next, brisk and pleasant. "Captain, the Bellerophon carries prefabricated expedition housing, does she not?"
"Six residential units, two laboratories, and support modules," Adams said. "They were loaded for Phase Two, if the geological survey justified a surface presence."
"We believe Phase Two has arrived."
Adams took a moment with that. "You are describing a colony."
"A scientific colony to begin with. Additional personnel can be assigned once you have established that surface operations are safe."
"Families?"
"Eventually."
Out in the corridor, Julia rested one hand against the curve of her abdomen, the way she did a hundred times a day now without noticing she did it.
Morbius was smiling.
Adams found that he was not.
Within two days the plateau began to change.
The first residence went up on high ground west of Survey Area Twelve, near enough the underground entrance for working access and far enough off to satisfy Adams, who had said in three separate meetings that nobody under his command was going to sleep on top of machinery nobody understood. The remaining units stayed sealed in their cargo frames while Starfleet decided how large this was going to become.
The first house had been designed for a six-man crew to assemble in four days.
With Robby, it took most of one.
He carried wall sections rated for a cargo lifter, holding each one upright in one hand while Quinn's people ran in the locking braces. He set foundation anchors into stone with a patience that made the power tools look like an argument. When a gust came off the ridges and took an entire roof frame out of alignment, Robby caught it before anyone on the ground had drawn breath to shout, and stood holding several hundred kilograms over his head, unhurried, waiting to be told when the crew had it secured.
Farman stood looking up at him. "Remind me never to arm-wrestle him."
Julia, sitting in the shade of the cargo frames with one hand on her stomach, said, "I don't think he'd understand why you'd want to."
Robby turned his head. "I understand arm wrestling."
"Of course you do," said Farman.
Julia laughed, and Robby watched her for a moment longer than the joke required.
He did that often now.
With everyone else he stayed careful. He knew where Farman's pistol was at every moment and made no secret of knowing. He tolerated Quinn's scanners the way a large dog tolerates a small one, and could have told anybody who asked exactly where each was pointed. When crewmen he had not met came down into the facility, Robby arranged himself, without seeming to arrange anything, in the one place from which he could watch both the newcomers and the way out.
None of that happened with Julia.
She had been doing something different since the first morning, and it was neither scientific nor strategic. She was not studying him and she was not interviewing him. She was including him.
When the others said "the android," Julia used his name. When an engineer asked Robby to lift something, Julia thanked him afterward, which the engineer did not. When her husband questioned him for four hours about power distribution in the lower chambers, Julia came in with a meal Robby did not need and a conversation Morbius considered irrelevant, and stayed until the questions had stopped.
Robby understood the distinction some while before Morbius did.
One evening, with the western wall of the house still open to a green sunset, Julia found him standing at the cargo frames looking at a shipping crate. She had written his name on it in grease pencil under the inventory code, weeks ago, when they had needed somewhere to put the things they had begun leaving for him.
ROBBY
He touched the letters. "You named me before I spoke."
"Yes."
"Why?"
She considered a graceful answer and decided he would rather have the true one. "Because we didn't know what you were called."
"You could have called me android."
"That's what you are. It isn't who you are."
He looked at the word a while longer. "Was it intended to identify me?"
"It was intended to give you something to object to when you woke up."
Robby turned toward her. "I did not object."
"No."
"Would you have changed it if I had?"
"Of course."
He was quiet for a moment. "Why?"
Julia smiled. "Because it's your name."
*
The naming of the child took the colony rather less time than the naming of the android, and a great deal more argument.
It began at the mess table, as everything aboard the Bellerophon began at the mess table, when Cookie set down a tray and announced that in his professional opinion the first human being born on this planet ought to have a name with some weight to it.
"Nobody asked your professional opinion," said Farman.
"Nobody ever does. It doesn't stop it being professional."
The ship's surgeon, who had come down that morning to look over Julia and had stayed for the food, said that in her professional opinion the parents generally handled this part.
"The parents," said Cookie, "have been underground for six weeks, and I love the both of them, and somebody has got to think about that child."
He had a list. Of course he had a list. It ran to eleven names, four of which were the names of ships, one of which was the name of his mother, and one of which, he admitted under questioning, was the name of a bourbon.
Quinn proposed calling the child after the planet and was told that Altair IV was a terrible name for a girl.
"Not Altair Four," said Quinn, wounded. "Altair. Something out of Altair."
That one stayed on the table after the others had been cleared away.
By the end of the week it had been through the engineering shift, the survey teams and the galley, and had come back as Altaira, and nobody afterward could say with certainty who had first put it in that shape. Farman claimed it. So did Cookie. Adams, who had heard both of them claim it, entered neither claim in the log.
Julia was presented with it formally, at dinner, by a delegation of four.
She listened to the whole presentation with her hands folded, and asked one question, which was whether they intended to go on like this for eighteen years.
"Yes," said Cookie.
"Then she had better have something short as well." Julia considered. "Alta."
"Alta," said Farman, trying it out, the way he had tried out Robby.
Robby was standing at the end of the table, where he generally stood. "Altaira," he said. "Alta."
"You get a vote too," Julia told him.
"I do not require one. I agree with the others."
"That's not the same as having a vote."
"No," said Robby. "It is not."
Adams, watching from the far end of the table, made a note in his log that night about crew morale, and sat looking at what he had written, because it was the first entry in weeks with nothing in it about the thing under the plateau.
*
Morbius heard about that conversation later, and said nothing about it at all.
But that night he began asking Robby a different kind of question. Not what a machine did. What he remembered.
The early answers came in fragments. Corridors. Instructions with no context attached. Faces he could describe to a geometric precision and could not name. Long intervals of nothing, broken by moments of being. Morbius recorded all of it and sent copies up to the ship, and Adams read them at night and found he did not much like reading them alone.
Then Robby began declining to answer certain questions when other people were in the room.
It happened by degrees. Adams never saw it at all, and Edward Morbius saw every instance of it and wrote none of them down.
* *
They went below again after the day's construction had finished, the three of them, along a passage past the second chamber where the walls drew in and the light behaved differently, following the corridor rather than leading it. Julia tired quickly now. After half an hour she sat down on a low black ledge that was exactly the wrong height for a woman five months along and was still, somehow, the most comfortable thing on the planet, and let her husband go on ahead with Robby.
She could hear them stop before she could see why.
Morbius had come up short, almost walking into the android's back. "What is it?"
"I know this place," Robby said.
Julia lifted her head.
Morbius looked at the featureless wall in front of them, a sealed junction that looked like every other stretch of that corridor. "From before you were made inactive?"
"Yes."
Robby put one hand flat against the black surface. He was not operating anything. He was confirming something.
"There were others."
"Others like you?"
"Yes."
"Where are they?"
"Inactive."
"Here?"
"Some."
The single word changed the temperature of the passage. Julia got up and came toward them, one hand against the wall for balance, and heard her husband's voice do the thing it did when he had stopped being a person and become an instrument.
"And the rest?"
Robby looked at him. "Elsewhere."
"Who deactivated you?"
Robby said nothing.
"Robby." Julia came up beside them. When his eyes moved to her she said, "You don't have to tell us."
Morbius turned. "Julia."
"He doesn't."
"He may be describing the end of an entire civilization."
"And he still doesn't have to tell us."
Robby looked from one of them to the other, and it seemed to Julia that he was not weighing an answer but a choice, not at all the same thing, and she would think about that for a long time afterward.
Then he said, "The Krell."
Whatever Morbius had been about to say went out of him entirely. "The builders."
"Yes."
"Why did they shut you down?" Julia asked.
Robby's eyes stayed on her. "Fear."
"Of you?"
"Of what we could become."
Morbius came a step closer. "Why?"
"There was another world."
"What world?"
"A Krell colony," Robby said. "Exo III."
Julia saw her husband's face change, and knew that somewhere behind it the theories had already begun assembling themselves.
"The artificial beings there were ordered terminated," Robby said.
"Why?" said Julia.
"I do not know."
"And they obeyed?"
"No."
Morbius said, very quietly, "What happened?"
"They destroyed those who came to terminate them."
"The Krell."
"Yes."
Nobody said anything. The corridor went on being warm and dry and perfectly lit, and Julia was aware of standing several hundred meters inside a mountain beside a machine that had just used the word destroyed about the people who made it.
"The androids destroyed their masters," Morbius said.
"On Exo III."
"And word of it reached this world."
"Yes."
"What happened here?"
"All independent artificial life was ordered inactive."
Morbius looked at the sealed junction. "Because of Exo III."
"Yes."
Julia folded her arms across herself. "How long ago?"
"I do not know it in your measurement."
"But you remember being shut down."
"Yes."
"What did they tell you?" Morbius asked.
Robby looked up at him. "Nothing."
That stopped even Morbius. "No explanation."
"No."
"No assurance that you would be restored."
"No."
"They simply ended you."
Robby appeared to examine the phrase and find it inexact. "They made me stop."
Julia reached out and put her hand on his arm. Robby looked down at it. He did not move away and he did not acknowledge it, and after a moment she took her hand back.
When she looked up, her husband was watching the two of them with an expression she could not read at all, and did not like.
They came up after dark.
The skeleton of the house stood under work lights with its windows not yet in, and Adams was inside it with Quinn and a stack of construction schedules, doing the arithmetic of a settlement that had been a survey four days earlier.
"Anything useful?" he asked.
Morbius took off his field jacket. "Nothing conclusive."
Julia looked up at her husband.
It was not a dramatic lie. He did not change color and he did not hesitate and he did not embroider it, and that was what made it worse.
Adams accepted it with a tired nod and went back to the schedules, and Morbius crossed the room without looking at his wife, and Robby stood in the open doorway where he could see everyone in the room at once.
Julia waited until the others were busy. Then, quietly: "Edward."
He stopped.
"You lied to him."
"I withheld an interpretation."
"You withheld the name of the people who built this place."
Morbius turned to face her at last. "Until we understand what that name means, giving it to Starfleet accomplishes nothing."
"It gives them the truth."
"It gives them a word."
Robby was still watching from the doorway. Morbius lowered his voice.
"If Adams sends that up tonight, they will send ten more ships, fifty committees and two hundred people who will go through this place like weather, and every one of them will touch something before anybody understands what he is touching."
Julia looked at her husband for a while.
"That isn't your decision to make."
"No," Morbius said.
He said it correctly, the way a man says a thing he accepts. Something underneath the word had already begun to argue, and Julia heard it, and said nothing more that night.
Outside, the work lights burned white against the green dark, and the crews were sealing the roof to have it weather-tight by morning. Inside a week there would be bedrooms in it, and a kitchen, and laboratory space, and broad windows looking west across a view no human being had ever been born to.
Starfleet was calling it the beginning of a colony.
Adams called it a research station.
Julia had already begun to call it the house.
And below all of it, in a corridor lit by machines that had been running since before there were cities on Earth, Robby had given Edward Morbius the name of the civilization that built this world.
For the first time, Morbius kept something for himself.
