The house made Kirk's questions worse.
It was a home. That was the thing. Not a survival shelter, not a field station kept tidy by a disciplined man, but a house somebody lived in. Books stood along one wall, real ones, bound and worn at the spines. The furniture had been set for comfort and for conversation, angled toward the long windows and the plateau beyond. There were carvings on the shelves, and instruments, and a bowl of dried seed heads put there because somebody liked the shape of them. Nothing in the room looked thrown together and then endured. Everything in it had been chosen, and kept, and dusted, for a very long time.
Edward Morbius had not merely survived Altair IV. He had settled it.
They sat at a broad table near the windows. Morbius poured something out of a stoneware jug into glasses that did not match, and did it without asking, which Kirk took for habit rather than hospitality: a man performing a sequence he had performed several thousand times for guests who had been dead twenty years. The drink was cold and faintly bitter and very good.
Robby stayed near the far wall, inside the room and outside the conversation, motionless in a way nobody else there could have managed for that long.
McCoy kept looking at him.
Eventually Robby looked back. "Is there something you require, Doctor?"
"I'm trying to decide."
"About what?"
"You."
Robby appeared to give this its full consideration. "I am here," he said.
"So I noticed."
McCoy laughed at that, alone. Morbius did not, and Kirk watched him decline to, and let the moment go by.
Then he said, "Tell me about Robby."
"There is very little to tell. He maintains the house and the grounds. He does the work that would otherwise occupy my hands, and leaves my hands free for better things."
"That's what he does. It isn't what he is."
"He is my household, Captain."
"Doctor." Kirk set his glass down. "I have read Captain Adams's logs. I know an android was recovered on this planet, because Adams said so in a transmission eleven weeks before he died, and I know your expedition had contact with him, because Adams sent Starfleet a recording of it. A machine that walks and talks and drives three kilometers across open country to collect four strangers is not a household. What is he?"
Morbius did not answer at once, and in the pause Spock spoke, politely, in the voice he used when he intended to close a door quietly and then stand in front of it.
"If I may. I scanned your servant on the plateau, Doctor, with your permission and his. The alloys of his outer casing correspond to no material in Federation records. His internal power source does not correspond to any principle of generation with which I am familiar, and I was unable to determine its output within four orders of magnitude. The workmanship is not recent." Spock folded his hands. "I mention this because any account that begins with human manufacture will be difficult for me to accept, and I would prefer not to be placed in the position of contradicting my host at his own table."
The room went quiet enough that Kirk could hear the clock at the back of the house.
He watched the older man work it out. He had seen the same arithmetic done by men at courts of inquiry, the moment a witness understands that the thing he has decided not to say has already been measured by somebody else's instrument.
"He was here before we were," Morbius said at last.
Nobody moved. Beside Kirk, Ostrow had gone so still that he might have been part of the furniture.
"He was on this planet when the Bellerophon made orbit. He was inactive when we found him. He is not human technology, and I did not build him, and if your instruments have told you that much, Mr. Spock, then they have told you as much as I intend to."
"How long was he inactive?" Kirk asked.
"Long."
"How long is long?"
"Captain, I have answered a question I was not obliged to answer at all."
"You've answered one, Doctor, and opened about nine." Kirk sat forward. "Where did you find him?"
"On this planet."
"Where on this planet?"
Morbius said nothing.
"Was he alone?"
Nothing.
"Was he intact when you found him, or did somebody put him back together?"
"He required no repair."
"Then he was in working order, switched off, sitting somewhere on a world with no cities, no roads and no ruins that three Starfleet search missions could find." Kirk let that stand. "Doctor, you can see the difficulty."
"I can see that you are a persistent man."
"I'm a thorough one. It's less charming and it lasts longer."
It was Spock who found the crack, and he did it without appearing to look for it. "Doctor Morbius. I have read the Bellerophon's transmissions in their entirety, twice. Captain Adams reported the discovery of the android, as the captain says. He reported the first contact, and the language work, and a great deal else besides." Spock paused precisely long enough. "Then he stopped. In the final eleven weeks of that expedition, in some two hundred separate transmissions, your android is not mentioned once."
The silence went on long enough to become an answer.
"Captain Adams reported what he judged it proper to report."
"Doctor, he judged it proper for three weeks and then judged otherwise," Kirk said. "Something changed. Either he learned something about that machine that he decided Starfleet should not have, or somebody persuaded him of it."
"You are constructing a narrative."
"I'm reading a gap. They're different, but they're both evidence." Kirk let that sit. "What did Adams learn?"
"You would have to ask Captain Adams."
The words landed on the table and stayed there. Nobody moved, and Kirk, who had been given some remarkably cold answers in his career, made a private note of that one.
"How many others are there?" he asked.
"There is one android on this planet."
Spock's head came around a fraction of an inch, and Kirk knew that he had heard the same thing: not there was only ever one, not I found only one, but a statement about the present tense, carefully cut to fit.
"Doctor," Spock said, "how was he reactivated?"
"He was not reactivated."
"Clarify."
"He restored himself." Morbius said it flatly, and under the flatness was something Kirk recognized, because he had felt it himself two or three times and had never enjoyed it. "Nobody switched him on, Mr. Spock. Nothing was repaired, nothing was connected, no power was supplied. He came back on his own, and everything around him came on with him, and there is not a man living who can tell you why."
"Then there is a functioning power source on this planet," Spock said, "of sufficient scale to sustain both him and whatever it is that came on with him. And it has been operating continuously for at least twenty years."
"You are drawing conclusions."
"I am stating the necessary conditions for the event you have just described."
"Then state them to Starfleet, and let Starfleet draw the conclusions, and leave me out of both."
"Doctor," Kirk said, "you are the conclusion."
McCoy had been looking at Robby through the whole of it. Now he looked at Morbius, and when he spoke it was in the mild voice that Kirk had learned, over several years, to regard as a warning.
"I've got a different question, Doctor. Not how. Why."
"I beg your pardon."
"A man alone on a planet builds a shelter, because he needs one. He builds a still, generally, for the same reason. What I want to know is what a man alone wants with a machine that's shaped like a person, and answers to a name, and stands in the corner of his sitting room all evening." McCoy tilted his head. "Somebody gave that machine a name. It doesn't sound like a name a scientist picks."
For the first time since they had come through his door, Edward Morbius had no answer ready. It lasted perhaps a second and a half, and Kirk, who had been waiting for it, was careful not to look pleased.
"You are a physician," Morbius said. "Not a philosopher."
"I'm both. It's a small ship."
Ostrow chose that moment to speak, quietly and disastrously. "Doctor Morbius. Whose design principles?"
And the wall came back up, exactly as high as before. "That is not a question I am prepared to discuss."
"It is the only question that matters."
"It is not a question I am prepared to discuss."
Kirk let it go, and filed it with the rest.
What Morbius did next surprised him, and on an hour's acquaintance Kirk had believed himself past being surprised by the man.
"You are all being very careful," Morbius said, "and you are wondering the same thing, and none of you will ask it, so I will save you the trouble." He turned in his chair. "Captain, may I borrow your sidearm?"
"No."
"Then I will ask you to hold it, and to listen." Morbius did not wait for agreement. "Robby."
The android came away from the wall. "Doctor."
"Take the captain's weapon."
Kirk's hand went to the phaser and stopped, because Robby had already crossed half the room, unhurried, and was standing in front of him with one hand open and empty, waiting, making no attempt to take anything.
"Captain," said Robby, "may I have your weapon?"
Kirk looked past him at Morbius, who was watching with an expression of absolute calm, and made a decision he was not entirely sure of, which was becoming the pattern of the afternoon. He drew the phaser and put it in the android's hand.
"Thank you."
"Now," said Morbius, "aim it at Mr. Spock."
Robby turned. The movement was smooth and exact, and the phaser came up to the level of Spock's chest and stopped there, and the muzzle did not waver by so much as the width of a hair. Spock stayed where he was. McCoy came half out of his chair and Kirk put a hand on his arm.
"Fire," said Morbius.
Nothing happened.
It was not a refusal. That was the part Kirk remembered afterward. Robby did not lower the weapon, or protest, or look to anybody for instruction. He stopped, with the phaser level and his finger where a finger should be, as fixed as a figure cast in bronze, and every second after that made the room colder.
"Fire," Morbius said again.
Robby did not move at all.
"Enough. Return the captain's weapon."
The android came out of it between one instant and the next, reversed the phaser, and offered it back grip first. Kirk took it. The casing was exactly as warm as his own hand had left it.
"He is incapable of harming a living, thinking being," Morbius said, "under any order, including mine. The prohibition is not a rule I have imposed. It is in the construction, and it cannot be argued with, and I have never found the end of it." He turned his glass a quarter turn on the table. "You will want that in your report. Put it in. It is the only assurance I can give you, and it happens to be the only one worth having."
"It's a hell of a demonstration, Doctor," McCoy said.
"It is a demonstration you would have insisted upon eventually."
"No," said McCoy. "I wouldn't have."
Kirk holstered the phaser and looked at the android standing quietly in the middle of the room, at the closed patient face of a machine that had just been ordered by the only person on its planet to kill a man, and had not.
"Robby," he said. "Did Doctor Morbius build you?"
Robby looked back at him. "Doctor Morbius is my responsibility."
It was not an answer, and Kirk let the silence say so.
