The Lotus Caves (8 page)

“Yes,” Steve said. “Bring everyone in. Blast a hole in the side of the mountain and put in an airlock so crawlers can go in and out. Smash another gap in the roof of the top cave for an observation ceiling. Build houses and laboratories and a school, not forgetting a Recreation Center. And string wires all over the place, so no one has to walk more than five yards. I should think the plants and trees are going to look a bit sick by the time you've done a tenth of all that.”

“I suppose so,” Marty said. “And we can't get news out anyway. That music's a lot nearer. It must be coming from just past the next bunch of trees.”

They walked through and stared up at it in silence. This also was a tree, Marty supposed—at least it grew out of the ground and had what could possibly be described as branches. But the branches were in the shapes of long straight pipes in one place, taut wire-like tendrils in another. Still other branches plucked at the tendrils or sawed across them. The music changed into a syrupy waltz, which involved quite a lot of activity in that direction.

“An orchestra-tree,” Steve said. “And one that plays itself. I wouldn't say I admire its taste all that much, but it's quite an achievement for a tree.”

“We are dreaming,” Marty said. “We must be. But whose dream is it? Yours or mine—or someone else's?”

“The one who's writing the book, maybe.” Steve felt with thumb and forefinger for a strand of hair at his temples, grimaced, and tugged a hair out. “I'm not dreaming.”

If you looked carefully, you could see that there were holes in the pipe-like branches, through which air was presumably sucked or blown. What would be the mechanism of that, Marty wondered? It would be interesting to climb the tree and examine it. He looked again and decided he was not sufficiently interested to try. The thought of going up among those blowing pipes and sawing strings was more than a little scarifying.

He turned away and, as he did so, had a glimpse of something farther on. It was just a blue flatness, seen through a gap between fruit trees. He went that way and called to Steve. They stood looking at it together. The trees ended, giving way to a lawn, the grass short and velvety green. And the lawn ran down to the still, blue, gleaming waters of a lake.

Steve said at last: “There had to be a reservoir of some kind. Plants can't grow without water. How did it get here in the first place, though?”

How did any of it get here, Marty thought? There were too many questions—or the same question repeated from a hundred different angles—and there had to be answers somewhere. He went across the lawn to the water's edge. At that point the grass ended and the familiar moss took over again, running out under the lake and lighting it from below. He looked automatically for fish but could see nothing. The waters were clear and empty. He dipped his fingers in. The temperature was only a degree or two less than that of the air. One could swim in it comfortably. He looked along the lake. It occupied the full width of the cave, under the arching moss-covered roof. At the end . . . he could not be sure but it looked as though cave and lake twisted away to the right.

He said: “I wonder how far these caves go. For miles, maybe.”

“Yes.” Steve's voice was abstracted. Marty turned from the water and saw that he was looking up at the roof of the cave. He said in a slightly ­puzzled voice: “Marty . . .”

“Yes?”

“Do you notice anything about the light?”

“From the moss? I don't think . . . Wait a minute. Is it dimmer than it was?”

It was happening very gradually. At first he could not be sure whether the light really was a shade less bright, or whether he had been influenced by Steve's question. But soon the darkening was unmistakable. The glow was fading from the moss-covered ceiling and walls, and the blue of the lake was deeper as its radiance drained away. The fading became more and more rapid.

Shaken, Marty said: “What do you think this is?”

It was very dark, and even as he spoke blackness came down on them. Steve said: “I don't know. Could be temporary, I suppose. I hope so.”

They waited, but there was no change in the darkness. After the first surprise, they had taken for granted the fact of being able to see their way, of being surrounded by light and color. It was frightening to be forced to realize again where they were: trapped in the bowels of this alien world. If they had stayed in the first cave they would at least have had the crawler, with lighting as long as the batteries held out. They had not even brought flashlights with them. They had not seemed necessary, but it had been careless not to take the precaution. It would be a difficult and perilous job to find their way back there now.

Steve beside him said: “I'm going to lie down. Might as well be comfortable while we wait for the lights to go up again.”

It was reassuring to hear his voice. Two were better than one. Marty said: “How long do you think?”

“There's no knowing, is there? An hour, perhaps. Or a day. Or a century.”

That last thought was chilling. Marty argued: “It can't be too long a time. The trees must have had regular days.”

“That would be true on Earth, but we don't know about Moon-trees. We don't even know if they are still there. The orchestra-tree has stopped.”

The music had faded with the light. There was only silence and blackness and their own small echoing voices. What if the caves had days a century long, and they had chanced on them as evening was merging into night? It did not seem likely, but probability had gone by the board from the moment of finding themselves in the first cave.

They talked together, in companionship against the darkness, discussing what they had found in the caves and trying yet again to find a meaning in them. They did not progress very far, over and over coming around to the same contradictions and baffle­ment. Gradually conversation lapsed, the gaps between talk lengthening. After one such gap, Marty said: “If there are Moon-men, how do they manage in the darkness? And there must be some sort of inhabitants. It doesn't make sense otherwise. Anyway, I'm sure those were footmarks on the ladder trees.”

There was no answer from Steve. After a pause, he said: “Don't you agree? I mean, the orchard has to be
for
people. Hasn't it?”

Steve still did not reply. His breathing was deep and even. Marty realized he had fallen asleep. He lay back, stretching himself on the grass. It was softer than the lawn back in the Bubble. He tried to answer his own question about the Moon-men. How
did
they manage in the dark? But perhaps they were nocturnal, and could see, like cats. In which case . . .

He sat bolt upright, and then relaxed. That was nonsense: there were no cat-men advancing on them through the blackness. One would hear them coming. Except that another thing he knew about cats, even though he had never seen one, was that they trod lightly, noiselessly stalking their prey. He started to lean over, to shake Steve and wake him, and checked himself. It would be stupid to do that. His imaginings were stupid, anyway.

All the same, his nerve endings quivered. He tried lying down, but could not rest. He found himself cramped, whatever position he adopted. It was not the fault of the ground, he knew—Steve was sleeping peacefully—but of his own tension. He checked his finger-watch again and again as the slow minutes dragged by. The darkness had lasted nearly two hours. It seemed a lot longer.

• • •

At last he slept, and had a nightmarish dream in which the caves and the Bubble were all mixed up, and Mr. Sherrin was lecturing him for having sent up a mass of balloons which turned into leaves and suddenly came down, whirling around their ears. He drifted back to consciousness as he was trying to tell Mr. Sherrin that it was all right—they would go away again—and saw that the light had returned: the moss was glowing all around as it had done before. Sleep and the dream still pressed on him and confused him, but he realized that someone was standing near, a face looking down.

“Steve!” he said. “What do you think . . . ?”

That was when he came properly awake, and sat up in shock and fear. For the face was not Steve's, but that of a bearded stranger.

8

The Fruit of the Lotus

T
HE BEARD WAS LONG AND BLOND, ungroomed. Like the hair which fell to shoulder level it was slightly curly. Where it was not bearded or moustached, the face was white, pallid in the moss's glow. Their own skins showed pale in this light, but the stranger's was paler. Emerging from his first instinctive fear, Marty tried to read expression in the face looking down into his. It was difficult to make anything of it. The look was neither friendly nor hostile, but detached.

Marty scrambled to his feet. He felt a little less vulnerable standing up. He said to the man: “Who are you? How did you get here?”

He realized as he spoke that if this were an inhabitant of the Moon he could scarcely be expected to understand English. On the other hand there was the orchestra-tree which was playing again, just switching from a familiar march to something which sounded like Johann Strauss. The man did not reply and they stared at each other in silence, wary on Marty's part, enigmatic on the man's. He was wearing shorts made out of what looked like large leaves sewn together; his body also was very white, lacking pigmentation.

Steve was still asleep. Marty reached down and shook him, and he opened his eyes.

“What . . . ?” He looked past Marty at the man, and jumped into life. He said sharply: “Who's that?”

“I don't know,” Marty said. “I asked him but he didn't answer. He probably didn't understand.”

“My name . . .” The stranger had a deep voice which spoke slowly and trailed off. “It's so long . . .”

Steve said: “I think . . . But it can't be, can it?” He shook his head, bewildered. “It is, though.” He stared at the man. “You're Andrew Thurgood. Aren't you?”

The man nodded, a small inclination of his head. Marty saw it too, now. Take away the beard and moustache and the face was familiar from that picture gallery of lunar pioneers, the men of First Station. Andrew Thurgood—the man who had not returned, whose crawler they had found in the first cave, scarcely recognizable beneath its covering of moss. How long was it? Seventy years. But this was quite a young man, not someone who, even if he had managed to survive, would have been a century old. Yet it was Thurgood.

They looked at him in awe, and Marty felt his fear returning. A ghost, maybe? The ghost of the man who had come here before them, and died here, warning them of what their own fate must be. But a ghost with a beard, wearing shorts made out of leaves? The absurdity of the notion was reassuring.

There had been a silence which Steve broke, asking: “Is there anyone here in the caves with you?”

Thurgood shook his head. Steve persisted: “I don't just mean men. Aliens, maybe. Moon-men?”

“Only the Plant.”

“The Plant? What's that?”

Thurgood shrugged. It was the most human gesture he had made so far, an expression of inadequacy. Steve waved his arm toward the cave and the things growing in it.

“Are you saying all these are parts of a single plant, even though they're so different? But how can they be?”

Thurgood was silent. Steve pointed to the orchestra-tree. “That, as well?”

Thurgood spoke again. “Yes.” He paused. “I'm sorry if I'm slow. At one time I used to talk a lot. To myself, you understand. Lately I haven't done that.”

Apprehension was wearing off a little. Not a ghost but a man stumbling over his speech, someone who could be at a loss for words.

Steve asked: “Do you know what year this is?”

Thurgood shook his head.

“It's 2068,” Steve said. He looked at Thurgood, who said nothing. “Did you have any idea how long you had been here?”

“No. I knew it was a long time.”

Marty asked: “Have you been in some sort of sleep? Suspended animation—like Rip van Winkle?”

“Not that I know of. I sleep when it's dark, wake when the light comes back.”

Steve said: “You're over a hundred years old. But you're no different from the pictures of you, except for the beard.”

Thurgood pulled his beard with his hand. “It got to this length and then it stayed. Are you from First Station?”

“No, the Bubble. First Station was abandoned more than fifty years ago. But why haven't you aged at all?”

Thurgood shrugged. “Time doesn't exist here.”

“But things do grow! Those trees, for instance. There's an apple tree that must be twenty years old.”

“Well, they're all part of the Plant, as I say. They grow from the Plant, and eventually the Plant will reabsorb them. There's no time, only change.”

“But you haven't changed.”

Thurgood wrinkled his brow. “I used to wonder about that. I suppose the Plant keeps me young. Over a hundred, you say? Maybe it's the fruit in the orchard. Don't I remember something about an apple of eternal life? Could be this is where it grew.”

Marty asked: “How did those trees get here? You didn't have seeds with you, surely?”

“I've told you. The Plant makes them.”

“But why? Just for your benefit?”

“Yes. There's no one else. Or wasn't till you came.”

“But why?”

“Well, human beings have to be nourished. Human bodies need fueling. We can't live on sunlight the way the Plant does.”

“They're copies of Earth fruit, though,” Steve said. “Apples, pears, peaches.”

“Those,” Thurgood said, “and others.”

“But how can the Plant produce things it doesn't . . .” Marty stopped, shaken. “Are you saying that you asked the Plant for them, and it grew them? That the Plant is an intelligent being?”

“Of course it is. I thought you'd realized that.”

He looked surprised at the question. Of course, Marty realized, he had had longer to get used to the idea.

He said: “And it evolved here, on the Moon? But how? The Moon never was capable of sustaining life, was it? Or are the scientists wrong about that?”

“No, not on the Moon.”

“But not on Earth, surely?”

“The Earth was too hot for life when the Plant came here.”

“Too hot! But there has been life on Earth for millions of years—hundreds of millions. Are you saying this Plant thing has been in these caves as long as that?”

Thurgood said: “Time means nothing to the Plant.”

Steve asked: “Where
did
it come from?”

From another, much older galaxy, he told them, traveling in spore form, blown by the wind of solar radiation. It had been a journey that lasted countless aeons, of a seed in search of the landing place where it could lodge and grow and flourish. Certain conditions had to be present—certain chemicals and minerals and a particular level of solar energy. Many planets, possibly thousands, were found and rejected by the seed's instinctive intelligence. At last it found what it was looking for on the smaller of the twin planets circling third in orbit around this sun. The larger planet was too hot but the smaller, more rapidly cooling, was habitable.

“Habitable?” Marty asked. “You mean there was air and water?”

“Not in that form. But there was free oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide.”

“And the Plant could turn them into air and water, without machines?”

“Plants on earth convert sunlight into energy. It's no stranger than that. Only more powerful and purposeful.”

“The Flower—” Steve said. “Does that do something similar?”

There had been, Thurgood explained, an initial period of absorption and growth. After that the Plant was fully mature and needed only solar radiation to maintain itself. This was achieved through the Flower, which uncoiled at intervals, thrust upward, and drank in the hot rays of the sun. It was a process something like photosynthesis but more efficient.

“And there's a break in the rock cover just there?” Steve asked. “I suppose there has to be, to enable the Flower to go in and out. So you saw the Flower and came looking for it and your crawler fell through, and now we've done the same.”

“Why does the Plant need the protection of rock, anyway?” Marty asked. “If it can seal itself against vacuum, why bother to hide in caves?”

There were several reasons, Thurgood said. Partly protection against meteorites, partly concealment. The Plant thought in terms not of years but of millennia. And in addition there would be an energy imbalance in maintaining a thermal equilibrium without the insulation afforded by the natural rock. The Flower might not be able to replace the energy lost that way.

“The floating leaves I saw just after we crashed,” Marty said, “plastering themselves against the roof of the cave—I suppose they were mending the seal which our crawler broke?”

Thurgood nodded. “There are three or four places where faults existed when the Plant came here, or where they have developed since. The sealing is automatic, like blood clotting in mammals.”

“It must have lost some air, though.”

“A little, but it is unimportant. The concentration is richer than is strictly needed.”

“That's something else,” Steve said. “There's oxygen here—it's a breathable atmosphere. But oxygen's a waste product as far as plants are concerned. They breathe carbon dioxide, don't they?”

Marty said: “They synthesize sugars out of carbon dioxide and water, but carbon dioxide is soluble in water.” He looked at the lake. “There could be plenty there.”

“I still don't see what it does with the oxygen,” Steve said. “If it is a waste product, then it would build up all the time. And this is supposed to have gone on for millions of years.”

Thurgood said: “The Plant evolved into a state of perfect harmony and balance. The thinking part is different from the rest, and it consumes the oxygen.”

“What about your coming here,” Marty asked, “and then us? Doesn't that interfere with the perfect balance?”

“A little, but the Plant can cope with it.”

“Look,” Steve demanded, “how do you know all this? All the stuff about the way the Plant came here, and how it's organized. Are you telling us you can talk to it?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Then what do you do? Stand in front of the banana plant and ask questions, and one of the bananas opens up and talks back?”

“You will find out,” Thurgood said, “in due course.”

“You mean it will talk to us?”

“If it wishes.”

“It knows we're here?”

“Except during meditation, the Plant is aware of everything that happens in every part of the caves.”

“Meditation?”

“That's when the light goes. The Plant withdraws into its inner self and meditates.”

“Meditates on what?” Steve asked.

“On itself.”

“That sounds pretty dull.”

“You don't understand yet,” Thurgood said. “You couldn't be expected to. The wisdom of the Plant is something human beings can't ever grasp properly.” He spoke with patience but also with conviction. “It's a different kind of thinking from ours. Men are always thinking in terms of doing things—building bridges and machines, exploring the universe. The Plant is sufficient in itself. It doesn't need to make anything or go anywhere.”

“I still think it sounds dull,” Steve said.

Thurgood looked as though he might be going to reply, but did not. After a moment, he said: “Don't know about you, but I'm hungry. Feel like a little breakfast?”

They walked up toward the fruit trees. Marty said: “You live on these, and nothing else?”

“You don't need anything else,” Thurgood said.

“I don't see how it can be a balanced diet—just fruit.”

“The Plant sees to that. I'm alive and well, aren't I?”

He certainly looked fit enough. Pale-skinned, though that might be partly an effect of the peculiar light from the moss, but otherwise he seemed perfectly healthy. And young, instead of being a tottering centenarian. He stood in front of the cluster of orange trees, examining them. He said to the boys: “Signs of heavier fruiting already. That's to make allowance for you two being here. They don't take as long to grow as fruit does back on Earth—no more than a few hours from flower to ready for eating. Catch.”

He threw a couple of oranges to them. They peeled and ate them, walking through the orchard, and picked other fruits. Thurgood had been right in saying they grew quickly: the belt of raspberry canes, which he remembered denuding on their first visit, was not only starred with white flowers but heavy with fruit, most of it ripely red. And new canes were springing from the ground; he almost thought he could see them grow.

The boys lost touch with Thurgood at some point. He was still missing when, their stomachs full, they wandered back to the lawn grass that stretched down to the lake. Steve called him: “Mr. Thurgood! Mr. Thurgood . . .”

There was no reply. Marty said: “He could be anywhere. Anywhere in the caves, that is.”

He flopped on the grass, and Steve followed suit. Steve said: “Funny he didn't say where he was going, though—or that he was going.”

“A lot of things are funny,” Marty said. “He asked if we were from First Station, and you said no, we were from the Bubble. You would think he would have been a bit curious about that, that he would have wanted to know what things were like outside. But he didn't ask a single question. He left all the questioning to us.”

“I suppose when you are a hundred years old you could lose interest in things.”

“But he's not a hundred years old—not in that sense, anyway. He said it: time doesn't mean anything here. He hasn't changed from the day he came in except to grow a beard. He's the same man he was, so why isn't he curious about all the things that have happened since then? Think of the things he doesn't know about: airsphering, brain transplants, the South American War . . .”

Steve said: “He probably needs to get used to not being by himself. It's a long time to be a Robinson Crusoe.”