The Lotus Caves (11 page)

All things were at harmony in the Plant. Sound had been unknown before Thurgood came—the caves had lived and flowered in eternal silence. From him the Plant had learned music, and out of the simple primitive chords which he provided it had fashioned complex glories. They too, in their small way, might contribute to this world, this universe, of joy and peace.

• • •

The spell lasted for some time after the raft took them away from the island. They sat on the grass, still dazed and overwhelmed. Thurgood had taken the raft and gone off across the lake. Marty found himself envying his freedom to go to the Plant rather than wait to be called. There was something gnawing at the back of his mind: something he had meant to do, a plan of action of some kind. But it could not be important. All that mattered was lying here in the warm scented air. The tree was still growing, and looking at the wall of the cave he could see that a vine-like plant had started climbing up from the base toward the roof. The orchestra-­tree was playing Strauss again. Presumably when they had the sort of rapport with the Plant that Thurgood had they would get the kind of music they wanted. It was pleasant enough even so. Everything was pleasant because the Plant wanted them to be happy.

He did not jerk out of this mood until Steve said something about going up to the orchard. Then he remembered what they had decided the previous night: to eat as little of the fruit as pos­sible. He said: “I'm not hungry just yet,” and saw Steve remember also. They went for a swim instead, and he thought of the rest of the plan. It must wait until Thurgood returned. He scanned the lake impatiently for the returning raft.

The thought of the fruit would not go out of his head. Now that the suggestion had been made he did feel hungry, really hungry. They would have been wiser, he realized, to have eaten food from the crawler during the night, despite the effort involved in getting it. He was glad that Steve was with him in this. It made it that little bit easier.

His hunger increased as the minutes went by. It was different from any hunger he had known before, sharper and more avid. He was tantalized by the recollection of how delicious the fruits were, of their taste, their ripe juiciness. The one advantage the hunger gave was that it cleared his mind of the fog of well-being. He realized that the Plant's influence on their minds was spreading and strengthening. Time was not on their side. If they were to escape they must make the attempt soon.

At last Thurgood came back. They went to him, and talked. He was even more taciturn than usual: probably, Marty thought, because he had just returned from communion with the Plant. The questions they put, about his life before the caves, were ignored, or answered laconically and unsatisfactorily. “I don't recall.” “I forget.” “Maybe it was like that—I don't know.”

Steve dropped out, shrugging his shoulders at the impossibility of getting anywhere. But they had to keep on, Marty thought. They had to find where the Plant's weaknesses were, and only Thurgood could help them. He continued, ignoring the silences and the brusque responses. A normal man would have got irritated by his persistence, but Thurgood was not normal. There was no place for irritability in a mind dominated by the bland euphoric calm which the Plant inspired.

In the end, he gave up questions as such but kept on talking, and talking about Earth. He talked about TV programs he had seen, ran through the plots of movie after movie, at one time found himself giving a résumé of a geography lesson on Malaysia. Thurgood lay on the grass, his eyes closed. Marty was not sure whether he was listening, whether he was awake even. Steve returned and made an effort at contributing, but soon gave it up again. Marty persisted. He was bored himself, desperately bored, and embarrassed by this monologue which he had to keep going without the least encouragement. Then a small spark ignited.

Marty had been talking about his parents, about his mother who as a girl had traveled all over the planet with her artist father. He said, as a casual afterword to this: “My father never moved out of one small town until he went to college. He was a New Englander. New Hampshire.”

The first bit was something he had gleaned from his mother, during their talks following the balloon episode; his father, except that one time at the reservoir, had never mentioned his past. Thurgood opened his eyes. He said, in a remote voice: “New Hampshire? I'm from Vermont.”

Marty said quickly: “What part?” Thurgood did not reply. “Were you born there?” he asked. “Did you go to school in Vermont? What was it like?”

There was no answer. It looked as though it had been merely a flicker of memory, no sooner aroused than quenched. Still he kept on, doggedly pounding away at it. He racked his mind for anything that would provide a talking point, recklessly inventing where he could not recall. He thought he was going to talk himself hoarse. His throat felt dry and the idea of an orange from the trees just up the slope was torture. But he went on and at last, very slowly, the monologue ceased to be entirely that: Thurgood was beginning to talk as well.

Steve lent a hand then, taking some of the load off him. He had thought Steve, with his imagination, would be good at this, but in fact he faltered more than Marty had done, and it was necessary to go on helping out. They prodded Thurgood into talking of anything and everything, but they found it was his childhood that gave the best response. He had been born on a farm in hill country, with fields that fitted into the lie of an old, long-inhabited land. It had been chiefly dairy farming. They had a herd of Friesians, and he remembered a tale his grandmother had told him about two of the cows: that they had been so fond of her father, his great-grandfather, that they had swum all the way from Holland when he emigrated to America. He could not have been older than four or five, and he had believed it to be true and had stared in awe at the cows, imagining their huge black and white bodies battling with the waves all the way across the vast storm-tossed ocean.

“She used to make wonderful cookies,” Thurgood said, “with blobs of chocolate all the way through. And she gave me buttermilk to drink with them, pouring it out of a big blue and white jug. She said buttermilk was the best thing you could drink.”

He paused. Marty was thinking of something to keep him going when he went on: “I'm getting hungry. Who's coming up to the orchard?”

It was essential to keep him in this mood of companionship. They must go with him and try to eat as little as possible. Marty was hungry, too—ravenously so. He took a banana, slowly peeled it and still more slowly started to eat. It was torture. The taste seemed even better than before, and he had to fight the impulse to gobble it down. He kept close to Thurgood, but not so close that the man would notice he was scarcely eating anything. They wandered through the orchard. Steve had been following the same technique, but Marty saw him eat an apple and then pull up one of the turnip-cheeses and nibble it. He threw him a look of warning, but Steve appeared not to notice it.

After they had eaten they went back to the lake, and Marty continued the campaign against Thurgood. It was less successful than earlier—the fruit could have had something to do with that—but he managed to keep the tenuous link of conversation in being. Then the light faded and Thurgood, as it did so, dropped into heavy, insensible sleep.

• • •

Marty said: “I vote the first thing we do is go up to the crawler and get something to eat. I'm starving.”

“There's plenty of time,” Steve said. “I want to rest.”

“If we rest we may go to sleep, and not wake up till it's light again. We'd better go now.”

Steve said: “It's a bit pointless, anyway.”

“What is?”

“Trying to get information out of Thurgood.”

“He's been talking quite a lot.”

“About the Earth. Not about the Plant.”

“He's remembering he's human: that's what matters.”

Steve said: “Look, if you did get him to a point where he was willing to tell us something, it would have to be at night, wouldn't it? And the moment the darkness comes, bingo he's out. So what's the good?”

“If we had him talking we might be able to keep him awake.”

“He was talking tonight, but it didn't help.”

There was no sense in arguing about it. It was their only hope and it had to be made to work. Marty said: “Anyway, are you coming up to the crawler?”

Steve yawned. “You go, if you're hungry.”

Which meant that Steve was not. He must have eaten more of the fruit than Marty had thought.

He felt more despair then than he had done since the initial discovery that they were trapped. Much of this was due to the shock of realizing how much he had been depending on Steve's help—more than that, on his leadership. There had been jealousy and rivalry underlying their friendship from the start. His suggestion of taking the crawler to First Station had been caused by that. At the back of his mind had been the feeling that Steve was cleverer and stronger than he was; stronger not just physically but in character. The incident of Steve's insistence of going to look for the Flower had borne that out. He had been looking for that strength and determination now, as the factor which could just tip the balance and help them to win through. And it was not there: obstinacy and willfulness were not strength, in a case like this the reverse of it.

He said: “You won't come, Steve?”

“No. I'm too tired.”

His voice was as final and uncompromising as over the hunt for the Flower. Marty knew he was on his own. He said: “O.K. I'll bring you something.”

Steve did not bother to reply, or maybe he was already asleep.

• • •

He went back through the caves, lighting his way with the flashlight. It was an eerie journey. The trees were as still as though frozen. They looked gray and drab; even the fruits looked gray. The moss on the walls and ceiling, where the beam of his flashlight lighted on it, was gray, too. Color and life had been drained together as the Plant's consciousness withdrew into itself in its incomprehensible meditation.

Marty felt very much alone as he made his way along the tunnel, down the ladder tree, and through the arch to the second cave. The tree-shapes, which he had only seen threshing in motion, were as fixed as everything else, and as gray, their branches turned into stiff, lifeless tentacles. He found the rope at the bottom of the slope, and hauled himself up it, the flashlight tucked in his belt and flashing at odd angles as he swung from the rope. He reached the top and headed through the next tunnel to the top cave. The crawler lay beside the curled stem and huge bud of the Flower. He went inside, picked the first can he found in the food locker, opened it and ate ravenously.

He thought about Steve. It was important to keep him from slipping any further under the influence of the Plant. He must take some ordinary food back and get him to eat it, so that he would eat less from the trees tomorrow. But if he took it in a can the can would remain as evidence and the Plant would know they were getting food from the crawler. Even if they threw it in the lake, the Plant might know of it. One could not set limits to its awareness of the minutest details.

They must leave no traces at all, and the only way he could think of doing that was taking the food out of the can here and carrying it back in his bare hands. It was something which normally would have stood condemned on many grounds, hygiene not the least, but which answered the prime need. He picked a can whose contents seemed to be the least likely to crumble, opened it, and pried them out in a single roll.

The return journey was easier in that he was now more accustomed to the petrified night world of the caves, but had the new problem of the ham-soya roll which he had to carry. Getting down the rope was the really tricky part, but he managed it using an arm and a hand. He had to stick the flashlight back in his belt while he climbed the ladder tree one-handed, but the rest was straightforward. He came down through the orchard—even the grass was stiff as his feet brushed through, stiff and gray—and found Steve fast asleep where he had left him.

Marty put the flashlight down and shook him with his free hand. Steve mumbled but stayed asleep. He shook him again, and this time Steve turned over. As he did so, his face came into the beam of light. It was that which woke him. He blinked and sat up.

Marty gave him the ham-soya roll. He obediently took a bite, made a face, but went on eating it. Marty explained why he had taken it out of the can.

Steve said: “The taste hasn't improved.”

“It doesn't matter about the taste as long as it keeps us from eating too much of the fruit.”

“What's the good?” Steve said. “Thurgood will still fall asleep the moment the light goes. There's nothing you can do about that.”

The flashlight lay on its side, throwing a beam of light that took in one branch of the tree by the lakeside. Marty reached out and switched it off, to conserve the battery. The idea came to him as he did so. It might work. It just might work. But it was a slim chance. He decided not to mention it to Steve. In his present mood of despondency he would only pour cold water on the whole thing.

11

The Pearl

T
HE DAY STARTED WELL. MARTY woke with the returning light—for the first time he saw the glow build up in the mossy roof over his head, the waters of the lake turn indigo and then blue. He watched Thurgood's slow wakening. It was more like a man emerging from a trance than from sleep, eyes opening first and seconds passing before the first movement tremored the slack immobility of his body. Marty was by him, and talking. Before night fell Thurgood had been telling an anecdote about his Dutch grandmother, and Marty picked on this. Had she really made her own cheese, in a churn?

Thurgood said: “She did. It was wonderful cheese. I never tasted anything like it anywhere else.”

Not even, Marty wondered, in the turnip-cheeses that grew in the cave? But he did not want to draw Thurgood's attention in that direction. What was so good was the animation in his voice and face. Marty said: “But by herself, and a churn?”

“Well, it was powered.” Thurgood smiled. “She was born in 1901, not in the Middle Ages. But she did it all herself—wouldn't let anyone lend a hand. She sold it, too, in the town. There were people who drove up all the way from New York to buy it. At least, I suppose they had other reasons for driving up, but that was the way it seemed to me as a boy. They were from New York, and they came specially to buy it: I knew that.”

It was fairly easy to keep him going, by a question or a comment here and there. Thurgood wanted to talk. Now that the gate was down, reminiscence came in a flood. He spoke about the farm, his parents, relatives. There was a lot about his younger brother, David.

“He was a bit like you,” he told Marty. “Not so much in looks as in his way of talking.” He smiled. “I remember a trick he had: he used to swing on my arm when he wanted something, dragging all his weight on me.”

“Did you and he fight a lot?”

“No. He was five years younger. He was always getting into trouble and I was always bailing him out. There was one time he found a wild bees' nest. It was in an old stone wall and he tried to open it up, hoping to get honey from it. He was about nine at the time. I found him bawling in the lane and swarming with bees. I grabbed him and heaved us both into the pond. We came up covered in green slime and drowned bees. But Mother still had to comb them out of his hair when I got him home.”

Then Thurgood remembered they had not yet breakfasted. He led the way, still talking, up to the orchard, and the boys followed. Again they ate as sparingly as possible. Thurgood tackled the fruit with his usual appetite, which inhibited conversation from his side. There was more to it than that, though. Marty noticed the silence, the noncommunication, falling on him again. When they returned to sit by the lake, the lethargy and reluctance were plain. Once more Marty's remarks were getting ­little or no response. All Thurgood seemed to want to do was sit and look brooding across the water.

Marty persisted, and gradually felt he was getting somewhere, starting to win him back to human memories and human feelings. The second setback was the more shattering because of this. Thurgood, almost in mid-sentence, stood up and walked to where the plant-raft floated by the shore. He made no farewell but jumped on board, and the raft took him out into the far shimmer, the haze of moss-glow and water.

The boys swam and idled while he was away. One of the tree's branches was broad and strong enough now for them to walk on. It reached out over the pool and they could dive from it. The floor of the pool was brighter than the rest of the lake and they dived down, against the buoyancy, and ran their fingers through the short silky strands that carpeted it, scattering luminosity in the water as they did so.

When Thurgood returned, the aloofness was complete. He made no attempt to discourage them from sitting by him or talking to him, but ignored them completely. Steve drifted away after a time. Marty kept on, trying to ignore the hunger pangs which were beginning to bite. He felt he was going over and over the same ground, and wondered if he were boring Thurgood as much as he was boring himself. There was no indication, though, of even that much reaction. His body was here, but his mind was still with the Plant.

A new fear began to emerge: that the Plant would summon them again to the island. If that happened they could not refuse, and Marty remembered the overwhelming effect of their last visit. It was probable that each encounter with the Plant sapped willpower that much more. It was taking all his effort to hammer away at Thurgood: Steve had given up. To stand in that dazzling light and feel that calm, all-knowing voice echoing deep inside his mind . . . the very thought of it made him weak. Apart from that there was the possibility that the deepening of the Plant's probing and understanding of their thoughts could reveal their plan to escape. If the Plant were to ask direct questions, it might be impossible not to answer truthfully.

Against this fear, and the growing hunger for the fruits which hung from the trees only a few yards away, Marty set determination, a refusal to give in. He slogged away, battering against Thurgood's adamant silence, trying one thing after another. His grandmother was a promising subject, the younger brother another. It was the latter that, on perhaps the tenth attempt, turned the key again. Marty was saying how he went fishing with his father at the reservoir in the Bubble, and asked Thurgood if he had fished in the same way.

Thurgood said: “No.” There was a pause. “My father didn't like fishing. He was an impatient man. I used to go with one of the hands. And later I took David. There was a place just across the hill where the river widened at the edge of the wood . . .”

Marty had got him going. The channel was open and he had to keep it that way. Hunger was disregarded; there was only fear that something would happen to break the continuity. As time wore by the possibility of their being called to the island lessened, but the possibility of Thurgood deciding he wanted to eat increased. There seemed to be a pattern of two trips to the orchard, after waking and not long before nightfall. He had an idea that this second one had been delayed by their talking—that Thurgood had become so engrossed in memories that he had forgotten to be hungry. But he might still choose to go, and if he did the delay would mean a much shorter time after that in which to reawaken him to humanity. He pressed on, putting up fresh questions almost before Thurgood had answered the previous ones, feverishly laying new trails for him to follow. He got him onto a long involved account of a hunting trip. Steve had caught the urgency, and was prompting with him. Then Thurgood checked, faltered, and said: “I think . . . aren't we missing supper?”

Both boys started talking at once. Watching Thurgood, Marty saw him start to say something, then hesitate. The look in his eyes . . . Was the light a fraction less bright, or was that an illusion? He grabbed the flashlight which he had kept by him, switched it on, and flashed it in Thurgood's face.

Thurgood said: “What's the idea?”

Intermittent flashes might be best. He switched the light on and off, directing it at Thurgood's eyes. Thurgood put his hand up, but the motion was one of normal reflexes and the light of the moss was now unmistakably darkening. Thurgood was protesting. Bearing him down, Marty cried: “Stay awake! Don't let go . . . You must stay awake!”

“I don't understand,” Thurgood said. “What's all this about?” He looked around in bewilderment. “It's dark. I'm awake, though. I ought to be asleep. The Plant . . .”

Marty kept the light flashing. He said urgently: “We've got to talk to you. You've been conditioned to sleep as soon as darkness falls, but you mustn't. We want your help.”

Thurgood said slowly: “Help? What sort of help?”

“To get out of the caves.”

“Why?” Marty kept the light steady on him now; the expression on his face was one of puzzlement. “Aren't you happy here? Don't you have everything you want?”

“It's not that,” Marty said. “We want to get back to our homes, our folks.”

There was no point, he realized, in talking of the horror of having to submit to the Plant. Thurgood could not be expected to see that, to understand what had happened to himself. He spoke instead of how much they were missing their friends and ­families, and Steve rallied to him, backing him up. He watched Thurgood's face in the flashlight's beam, and saw a kind of understanding, a grudging assent.

Thurgood said at last: “I don't see how you could get out, anyway.”

Steve said: “When we first met you, you said there were other places besides the top cave where the rock cover was incomplete. You can tell us where they are.”

Thurgood did not answer. In his face the understanding was replaced by a blankness all too similar to the blankness he showed on returning from the island. Marty said quickly: “In the main cave—all the tunnels are on one side. Does that mean the other side is the inside of the mountain face?”

Thurgood hesitated. “Yes. That's so.”

“And there are faults in it?”

“A couple. Small and high up.”

“What about the cave below that? That's the lowest level of all, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“Does it have faults?”

“No, not faults.”

Thurgood's tone was awkward and reluctant. Marty kept at him: “You said three or four places where the rock cover was not complete. Where are the others?”

“At the beginning . . . when the Plant was growing and developing from its seed it needed an exit channel to get rid of unwanted minerals and rocks. That was before it reached ecological balance.”

“In the bottom cave?”

Thurgood nodded. Steve said: “How big?” Marty asked at the same time: “Could a crawler get through?”

“I . . . think so. Yes, it could.”

Tensely Steve said: “Will you show us? We couldn't find it without you. Not in time.”

“I don't know.” His face gleamed in the light. He was sweating. “The Plant would not like it.”

They argued with him, in turns or together. He kept stubbornly to the same point: it was not something of which the Plant would approve. That was what mattered essentially. He understood their wanting to leave but he could not go against the Plant's wishes.

Instead of softening he seemed to become more obdurate as time went on. In the end he said, with an air of finality: “I'll talk to the Plant tomorrow. Tell it you want to leave and ask it to help. The Plant will do what's best. It only wants you to be happy.”

If Thurgood did that, Marty realized, they were finished. There were a hundred different ways the Plant could stop them—ways which probably would not need to be used because each day saw them a little less able to stand out against its influence. Steve started to say something like this but Marty knew it was no good. Thurgood could not be budged by anything which might seem to be an attack on the Plant and its benevolence. It was his inner core of humanity which was important. They had reached it and they must use it. His young brother David, whom he thought Marty resembled a little . . . his trick, which Thurgood had mentioned, of swinging on his arm when he wanted something . . .

Marty passed the flashlight to Steve. He reached for Thurgood's arm, grabbed it, let his own body fall against his. He said, looking up into his face: “Help us, Andy! Help me. I'm in a jam. Get me out of here.”

Thurgood stared at him. His face showed that he had seen the stratagem for what it was. He shook his head slightly. He was going to refuse, Marty thought despairingly. Then the expression softened. He said: “O.K. If it's what you really want.”

• • •

They made a quick check of the crawler. It was not really adequate, but the important thing was to get moving before Thurgood had a chance to change his mind. He had been silent and preoccupied during the journey up through the caves, though the boys had kept up a running fire of talk to distract him. Now he stood awkwardly inside the crawler with a strange blank look on his face.

Steve said: “Seems O.K. You going to drive?”

“No,” Marty said decisively. “You're the better driver. Set her rolling as soon as you like.”

Steve got into the driving seat. Marty said to Thurgood: “She may bump on that steep slope below the tunnel. Better hang on to one of the grips.”

The crawler was moving slowly forward, the cave ahead brightly outlined in its headlight beams. Thurgood had not moved, and Marty went to him and put his hand on the grip. He let it rest, but he was not holding tightly. As they lurched down the first slope into the tunnel he staggered and Marty had to help him keep his balance.

Steve held the crawler for a moment on the lip of the second descent. The beams cut a swath of brilliance through the air and lit up the roof of the cave at the far side. Marty felt uneasy. Their progress was neither visible nor audible from the island on the lake and all this part of the Plant was asleep, but he still wondered. There must be reflex action of some sort—to cope, for instance, with anything breaking through the top cave—and some level of stimulus to trigger it off. Walking through the caves at night had not done so, but two boys and a man walking was not the same as a crawler battering its way along.

He was relieved when Steve engaged the climbing spikes and the crawler tipped for the steeper descent. The lights now showed the drooping trees below, nearer and nearer as they reached the bottom. To the right there was a place where they were more thinly spread, with room to get between them. They thinned still more, and the flat expanse of fuzz was in front. They roared across it and under the arch. Avoiding a clump of the spherical bushes, Steve had to cut across the edge of the thicket of cactus-things. They loomed up, spiked and angular, and the right-hand track crunched over them. Ahead, at the bottom of this cave, was the opening to the one which Thurgood had said was the lowest in the system, the one through which, in the earliest stage of its existence, the Plant had excreted the materials for which it had no use.