The Lotus Caves

by John Christopher

  It was a question that was never asked, one from which the mind rebelled. Marty thought of Paul, wondering what he was doing now. Out of the rehabilitation center, maybe, walking in fields somewhere, smelling flowers, feeling the wind against his face. He stared at the changeless scene in front of him.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “There’s nothing to see out here.”

  • • •

  They jump-floated back to the entrance and went in. It was a cramped maze of catwalks and constructions, familiar from the feature film and yet utterly strange. It had been left, when it was abandoned for the Bubble, which was put up on the new and better site on the other side of the range, as a relic, a museum, and he had had the idea that it would look like the pictures of museums on Earth, with everything properly set out and labeled. Instead there was clutter, the clutter, almost, of a place that ­people had just left and would soon be coming back to.

  Anything of value, of course, had been taken—anything that could be used. But what remained was much more than the bare bones, the basic structures. In a garbage sack hanging from its wall hook there were empty cans and cartons, left from the preparation of the last meal eaten here. The tomato sauce and solitary bean at the bottom of one of the cans had frozen and thawed again each fourteen-day cycle over more than half a century but, since there were no bacteria, had not changed in all that time. On the floor Marty saw a chewing-gum wrapper and a plastic button. Steve was picking something up from one corner. He said through the radio: “What’s that?”

  Steve’s voice buzzed back at him. “A camera. Why would they leave that? I get it. It’s broken. Smashed, in fact. Not only the lens; the casing as well.”

  “That bit in the film,” Marty said, “where Anquetil saved Stenberg when he slipped down that fissure—didn’t he drop his camera? I suppose they brought it back, and then realized it was beyond mending.”

  Steve turned the camera over in his hands. “Could be. Something has certainly hit it hard at some time.”

  “The drop was more than fifty yards.”

  Steve said: “You know all that stuff, don’t you?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  Steve nodded. “Like I know the cabin route between the apartment and school. I wouldn’t say it stirs the imagination.”

  Marty left him and climbed a catwalk to the top chamber, the observatory. The telescope they had used was still there. He looked through the eyepiece without moving it and saw, as he had guessed would be the case, that it was trained on the distant Earth. Latitude around 40° North; at the moment the hazy coastline of Japan but that was the latitude of part of the United States, too. Someone perhaps taking a last look at home before the move-out.

  Leaving First Station as it was had not been merely a sentimental gesture. Even then the priorities of lunar life had been clear. No waste, no needless effort. A lot of the structures could have been dismantled and shifted, but the energy consumption would have been too high. The telescope . . . probably that would have been taken except that the Genevascope had come in around that time and rendered old-fashioned optical instruments obsolete.

  The sleeping quarters were below ground level. Light switches and fittings were in place and undamaged but there was no power. Marty could hear Steve moving around somewhere but could not see him. He activated his suit-lamp, broadening the beam to diffuse the light. There were the bunks, a table, shelves. No books—they would have been taken—but some pinups on the walls. Girls mostly, but some of landscapes—a slanting meadow with belled cows beneath a dazzling slope of snow, a seacoast with twisted ocher rocks and a fantastic gray overhanging wave. And on one of the shelves a photograph wallet which, opened, showed on one side a woman, smiling under a big summer hat, on the other a big black dog with a boy beside him. The boy was about three, dressed in shorts and shirts out of a historical film. He wondered why the photograph had been abandoned and realized it was probably because it had belonged to one of the men who lay outside under the cairn. Seventy years ago. The boy would be an old man now, if he were still alive.

  He lay on one of the bunks, staring at the ceiling which pressed close down on him. It was no worse than sleeping in a crawler bunk but that was for a few nights, a week maybe. Three years had been the shortest time any of the early colonists had spent here.

  The bunk was of metal, enclosing broad strips of intertwined plastic, much less resilient than the kind they used now. It had been bolted to the wall and there was a small gap, no more than half an inch, at the side. He twisted around, getting up, and the beam from his suit-lamp lit it for a moment and showed something there. He peered and could distinguish it better. A thin book? He pulled the side of the bunk but it was immovable. It was impossible to get at it with his spacesuited fingers; even without the awkwardness of mittens the gap would have been too small. It could not be anything important, anyway. He left the bunk, abandoning it, and then found himself drawn back. He studied the crack more closely. If one could get something long and thin, it might be possible to hook it out.

  The bunks had angle irons reinforcing their corners, strips of steel some eight by three quarter inches. He got one off, using the screwdriver attachment of the multi-tool on his belt. Then he began the fishing operation. It was not easy. Once he thought he had got the book, only to have it slip even farther down. He almost abandoned the idea—the strip of metal was awkward to use and he felt himself sweating inside the suit. It would be good to get back in the crawler and rub a cleansing pad over himself. He decided he would make one more effort, and when that failed gave himself an absolutely final one. It was two attempts after that before he managed to get the steel firmly under the object, and lifted it clear.

  It was a notebook, the leaves paper and not plastic. He fumbled it open and saw that it was in the nature of a log or journal. There was an entry:

  “Day 402. Crawler duty with Barney. Nothing to report. At least he doesn’t talk all the time like Mike. Got back to find that stupid argument about the weight of a seagull still going on. Everyone talking, even Lew in it now. They could settle it in a few minutes by sending a signal back requesting information, but I suppose they think that would cause alarm or something. And they don’t want to settle it anyway. If they did, there would be nothing to argue about. My weight today 167 lbs.—minus one. Due for a haircut, but can’t be bothered to fix it with Barney.”

  He flipped the pages and read a couple more entries, which seemed as dull and trivial as the first. He thought of leaving the journal here, where it belonged, and then decided Steve might like to look at it. He wedged it into his suit-pouch, and started up the ladder.

  Steve’s radio came through to him as he reached ground level: “. . . you’ve got to. Marty?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’ve been down below.”

  “Anything there?”

  “Nothing much. You find anything?”

  “Only lumber.”

  “We could give it a rest for now. I could do with a rub-down.”

  Steve nodded, awkwardly in the suit. “A drink, too. Let’s go.”

  They left the station and headed for the nearby crawler. Steve went through the airlocks first, and Marty waited impatiently for him to be clear. Then it was his turn. He tugged his suit open, with relief, as soon as the inner door closed. Steve was already at the food locker, getting a couple of drink capsules. He handed Marty one, and snapped open the top of the other. He drank deeply and said: “That’s good.”

  He did not look happy, though. While Marty drank his, more slowly, he stared out of the front observation port at the dome of the station.

  “We made it,” he said. His voice was flat. “All the way from nowhere to nowhere. Was it worth it, do you think?”

  5

  The Impossible Flower

  THEY WERE BOTH DEPRESSED AND BORED. They sat in the crawler, Steve in the driving seat and Marty on
the edge of the bunk, and tried to think of something to do. Through the window Marty could see First Station, the object of their adventure. He did not know what he had been hoping for but whatever it was he had not found it. It had been absurd to think there could be anything worth finding. The only difference between the Bubble and First Station was that the latter was smaller, more cramped, more primitive. It was ­inevitable that this should be so: the Moon with its harshness and changelessness imposed these conditions on anyone who came to live here.

  He felt a wave of misery and nostalgia. It would be wonderful to push open the door of the apartment and see his mother smile in welcome, smell her cooking from the kitchen. She would be worrying about him, he realized, and felt more miserable still. They had been crazy to do it.

  He said: “You seen enough?”

  Steve shrugged. “Guess so.”

  “Shall we start back? We might as well.”

  “I suppose. We ought to let the batteries charge first.”

  This was true. The batteries had run down during their passage through the foothills; not excessively but it was standard procedure to charge up to full before going back into shadow areas. Marty got up and examined the dial. The reading was 82. It would take the photoelectric cells about an hour, he calculated, to bring it up to 100. He thought of suggesting a game of chess but that was something else in which Steve lost interest after the first few minutes. He remembered the journal he had found and pulled it out of the pouch of his discarded spacesuit.

  Steve asked: “What’s that?”

  “A book I found in there.”

  “Interesting?”

  The writing was very neat and even, a meticulous and dull record of routine events. Weight recorded day by day, converted to Earth poundages. It was depressing to read it; just a further confirmation of the hopelessness of expecting anything exciting to happen here. Marty threw it across to Steve.

  “Have a look if you want to. I think I’ll set up a problem.”

  It was a mate-in-four which he had been puzzling over for some time. He thought he saw a way in but it proved a blind alley. The white knight, he was sure, was the key to the solution. He checked over its possible moves with increasing exasperation.

  Steve said: “I wonder who wrote this.”

  “Could have been anyone. Does it matter?”

  “There’s an odd piece here. Listen. ‘Crawler patrol with Mike. Twenty-four hours.’ They must have been still working on the Earth day for patrols then. He goes on: ‘It was during his bunk period that I saw it. Or thought I saw it. We came through difficult high ground at 217-092, and I put her through a cleft between two peaks. Then there was high rock on the left, fissured in places. I was concentrating on the terrain immediately ahead because the going was still very tricky, and so I only caught a glimpse. Because everything is so static and unchanging here, any kind of movement attracts attention. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and looked around. It had been visible through one of the side fissures and we were almost past it. I thought I saw it, and I thought I recognized it.’”

  “What was it?” Marty asked. “One of your Moon-birds?”

  Steve went on reading: “‘I woke Mike and told him. He thought it was a stunt—that I was getting back at him for that stupid business on my birthday. I didn’t tell him what I thought it was at first—only that there had been movement, and I was applying the rule of alerting the second crew member in the event of any unusual occurrence. We backtracked to the fissure, but there was nothing to be seen. I decided to circle around and get on higher ground on the other side. The going was very tough and within half an hour we broke a track and had to go outside and repair it. Mike was fed up by this time. We finally got to a position from which we should have been looking down on the place where I had seen it, and there was still nothing. That was when Mike started pressing me on just what I had seen. What kind of movement? Falling rocks, maybe? Rocks do fall from time to time. Or volcanic activity. In the end I told him it was nothing like that. What it had looked like was a flower.’”

  Marty said: “A flower? But that’s crazy. And anyway, he said he saw it through an opening in high ground. You wouldn’t have even seen anything small at that distance, let alone see it move. And flowers don’t move, unless the wind blows them. He’s not trying to say there was a wind on the Moon, is he?”

  “Listen,” Steve said. “He goes on: ‘Mike laughed. He thought I was joking. He asked what kind of flower—the kind he would have liked would have been a cauliflower, done with a really rich cheese sauce. Then he started to get mad again, saying a joke was a joke but this was carrying it too far—he was missing sack time. Later still, when he realized I was serious, I could see he was becoming anxious. There’s always been this talk about people going off their heads here though no one has: we were ­double-checked for stability before being accepted for the expedition. I wanted to enter it in the log, but he talked me out of that. It had been a trick of the light, a minor hallucination. He said “minor” but he was still anxious. I didn’t press things about the log—I could tell already that it was no use—and told him to go back to sleep and I would take the crawler in. He wouldn’t do that: said he was awake now and didn’t need any more sleep. He was nervous on the way back. He talked a lot, as he always does, but it was all jerky, forcing things. He said no more about what I had seen, and did not refer to it when we got back to the station.’”

  Steve stopped reading. Marty said: “Go on. What happened after that?”

  “I’m skimming through. There’s a lot of routine stuff. Bits where he comes back to it, though. Like this: ‘If I did see a flower, it must have been yards across, on a stalk four or five times as long. Considered like that, it does seem nonsense. But the more I think about it, the more certain it grows in my mind. Maybe not a flower—how could it be, on the airless, waterless Moon?—but something that was capable of resembling a flower. Not a hallucination. I wish I had insisted on it going in the log, but I suppose in a way he was right. I think he may have said something to Lew, who has been paying more attention to me lately, asking me questions. When I came into the bunk room yesterday I had the feeling that the subject of conversation had been changed suddenly—there was a pause for a moment and then two of them started talking at once.’”

  He stopped, turned over a page, and then more.

  “Nothing more about it. Just routine stuff again. And that’s the end. Wait a minute, though. There’s this last entry: ‘Lew told me this morning that I’m not to go back on patrol work tomorrow as scheduled. He was embarrassed about it, and did his best to be nice. Said we were all subject to nervous strain here, he too, and he had to work out what was best for the expedition as a whole. I did not argue; there would have been no point. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I know I did see something, and something that moved. And it looked like a gigantic flower. I’d been hoping to get back to that region and explore it properly, while whoever was with me was asleep. I suppose Lew guessed this, or maybe thought I was unbalanced and a risk on that account. The thing is, we have more than another year to stick out before we go back. That’s a long time to have people looking sideways at you. Whereas if I can establish that there really is something there, bring back proof . . . I’m on duty with Mike and Benny next. They’ve got this craze for playing cribbage. I can get out without them noticing, and the crawler’s ready and stocked. I’ll come back with proof. They won’t be able to deny it then.’”

  Steve looked up. “That’s the end.”

  Marty said: “That journal . . . it must have been written by Andrew Thurgood. The one who’s listed as ‘not recovered.’”

  “Well, obviously,” Steve said. “Didn’t you realize?”

  “They didn’t say anything in the books about flowers or anything—only about him taking a crawler without authorization and not coming back.”

  “I suppose Lew
in Mclnnes didn’t put it in his log, either. The accounts do say Thurgood was behaving queerly.”

  “A giant flower.” Marty shook his head. “I suppose he went on looking for it till it was too late to get back. He wouldn’t want to admit the others had been right.”

  “If they were right.”

  “What else? He must have been mad.”

  “He doesn’t sound mad. Everything’s very matter-­of-fact apart from the flower bit. And where he’s considering the possibility of it being a hallucination—­that doesn’t read like someone who’s out of his mind.”

  “All right. Maybe he found the flower. A Moon-flower. Maybe he climbed up it and found a land full of Moon-giants. He didn’t come back, did he? Even if he got lost, he could have radioed for help. But he didn’t call them at all. Would a sane man let himself die rather than admit he was wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Steve said. “We could check, though.”

  “How do you mean, check? Check what? It was more than seventy years ago.”

  “The grid hasn’t changed.” He leafed back through the pages of the journal, looking for something. “I thought so: he gives the positional ­co-ordinates. 217-092. We can go and have a look.”

  “Have a look for what? The flower?”

  “Maybe. Or Thurgood’s crawler. He’s bound to have headed back there.”

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?” Marty said.

  “Joking? No. Maybe something went wrong with his radio—those early sets were always going on the blink.”

  “I’m talking about us. You weren’t serious about going up there to look for him?”

  “Why not?”

  Marty took a deep breath. “Because I reckon it’s time we headed back for the Bubble. We’re in ­trouble enough as it is, and my guess is that the longer we stay away the worse it’s going to be.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Steve said. He was very calm and assured. “Or you could say that since we already are in deep trouble it can hardly be much worse.”