The Lotus Caves (12 page)

The way was clear and Steve increased speed. Something occurred to Marty as he did so, for the first time. Even if they forced a way out, there was no telling where they would be. The break could be halfway up the mountain, with a drop of hundreds of yards below. He shuddered and put the thought away. There was no point in dwelling on it.

The last cave twisted slightly to the right. They were through the opening, and Marty said urgently to Thurgood: “The weak spot—where is it?”

He hung on his arm as he did so, repeating the gesture which had worked before. Thurgood said: “Down there.” He sounded dazed. “Where the cave wall recesses to the right of that outcropping.”

Steve said: “I have it.”

In a different voice, Thurgood said: “Wait!”

Steve stopped the crawler. “What is it?”

Marty saw what was happening. The moss was starting to glow outside the circle of the headlight beams, above and all around them.

“It's coming awake!” he said. “Push on fast.”

“No,” Thurgood said. He looked like a man listening to something at once far away and very close. “The Plant does not want this. The Plant wants you to stay.”

Steve had set the crawler moving again. Thurgood moved toward him, hands reaching to grab. He was stronger than they were, and there were a number of ways in which he could immobilize the crawler. Marty realized that he still held the flashlight in his right hand. He was not sure whether it was heavy enough but there was nothing else to use. As Thurgood caught hold of Steve's arm, he swung the flashlight in an arc and crashed it against the back of Thurgood's head. He tottered and Marty hit him again, a more glancing blow. This time he dropped.

Steve did not look back to see what had happened. He was occupied with the controls, increasing the speed of the crawler and pointing it at the slight recess at the end of the cave.

Something else was happening: things were growing in their path. A thicket of plant tendrils was springing up from the moss, plucking at the treads which crushed through them. Could it stop them? He thought they were slowing. Then Steve hit full power and the resistance was overcome. The wall was closer and closer. It looked solid, the glowing moss that covered it no different from that anywhere around. A few yards, a yard . . .

They hit. The dazzle turned into blackness, and there was the feeling of the crawler checking against a new resistance, but one which was dragging, not solid. It lasted only an instant, and they had burst through. There was light again, but the light of the beams illuminating the weathered, arid rocks of the Moon's surface.

Steve had brakes and spikes on. The crawler slid through stone dust for maybe sixty feet before it came to a halt. They were at the top of an alley leading steeply down to a small plateau.

They were in shadow, the sun invisible behind the western peaks. Marty did not know how long they had been in the caves, but the lunar day was near its end. He looked back up the slope, and thought he saw two or three specks float and drop. He could imagine the storm of leaves inside as the Plant repaired itself.

Steve said: “We made it.”

Marty nodded. “We made it.”

Thurgood groaned and stirred. Marty watched him recover consciousness, clutching the flashlight. Which would it be—relief at being free of the Plant's domination or anger that they had prevented his attempt to stop them? Rejoicing, or violence? Thurgood opened his eyes and climbed unsteadily to his feet.

It was neither of those. The look on his face was one which Marty had never seen before and did not want to see again. It was a look of utter desolation and loss, the expression of someone who has only one reason for living and is watching it die. He said, in a whisper: “Let me go back.”

“You're all right now,” Marty said. “They'll look after you in the Bubble. They'll do things for you.”

Thurgood said: “You don't understand. You can't begin to imagine what it was like. The wisdom, the splendor of the Plant. I could not begin to tell you.”

Steve switched on the reverse beam. It lit up the powdery slope down which they had slid; above that the rock face. There was a concavity in it which might have been the spot they had broken through, but it looked no different from anywhere else on the side of the mountain.

Steve said: “It's sealed itself. You can't go back.”

Thurgood did not answer. His face had the air of attention, of listening, which Marty had noticed when the moss started to glow. Could the Plant reach his mind out here, or was this the last flickering of an old compulsion? Thurgood unhooked one of the spacesuits, and started to climb into it.

Steve said: “No!” He looked at Marty. “We must stop him.”

If the Plant could still reach him, he could be dangerous. It would not be so easy to knock him out a second time. And there was a long journey ahead, back to the Bubble. Marty said: “Let him go if he wants to.”

It was a sign, Marty supposed, of the ascendancy he had acquired over Steve that he did not argue; but how little that mattered now. Thurgood zipped up the suit, and went through into the airlock. He said nothing to the boys. Marty wanted to thank him for helping them, but there was nothing he could say which had any meaning against the grief and longing in the man's face. There was the hiss of air, and Thurgood appeared outside, slipping and sliding as he toiled upward.

“What's the good?” Steve asked. “He can't get in.”

“We couldn't have stopped him.”

“When he finds it's hopeless . . . he might open the valves.”

And if he did, Marty thought, would it be so much more terrible than carrying that misery through a world in which every soul he had known was dead and gone? Splendor, Thurgood had said. Something they could never understand, that he could not begin to explain. It might be so. When the grain of sand entered the oyster, the oyster smothered it to protect itself; but what resulted was a pearl.

He watched as Thurgood reached the rock face, and leaned against it. He did not want to witness the man's agony and turned away. It was Steve's cry of astonishment which pulled him back.

In time to see that which looked like rock incredibly splitting, to see Thurgood forcing his way through against the outward rush of air, and to see the way closing behind him as he re-entered his ­paradise.

• • •

Steve asked: “What are we going to tell them when we get back?”

It was a big question. They had discovered something which would excite the whole of mankind: the first alien life, alien intelligence. Instead of being punished they would be made much of. The scientists would listen attentively to every word they spoke. They would be asked to pinpoint the mountain on the lunar map, perhaps even to accompany the expedition that would be launched, as soon as possible, to make a full exploration and investigation.

And then? Rock drills ripping through into the living being of the Plant? Testing laboratories set up in the lake cave, analyzing the fruits that might enable men to live forever? They would probably try to do as little damage as possible—the days of slaughtering the dodo to extinction were over—but it would make no difference. The Plant had absorbed one irritant, and could have absorbed two more. But it could not absorb scientists and their instruments, all the power and curiosity of Man. Its aeons-long life would gutter away in death.

It had tried to assimilate them to itself but only because it could not do otherwise. Afterward, when they were free, it had called Thurgood back but had not bidden him destroy these witnesses to its existence and its hiding place. For all its wisdom and age and might it was vulnerable, defenseless against evil.

Marty said: “Nothing. We went out in the crawler, took a look at First Station, explored around. That's all.”

Steve said: “They may check our supplies. We won't have used as much oxygen and food as we should.”

“We'll work it out roughly and ditch that amount. We'd better ditch Thurgood's diary, too.”

“And we're a suit short.”

“We damaged it, and left it behind somewhere.”

“Will they believe that?”

“What else can they believe? That we last saw it on a hundred-year-old man who walked into a mountain?”

Steve said, with resignation: “We're heading back into a load of trouble.”

“Yes.” Marty grinned. “It doesn't last, though. And the sooner we hit it, the sooner it's over. You drive, I'll map-read.”

The crawler started on down the slope. They reached the plateau and he looked up to see the misty globe of Earth overhead. He thought of Thurgood inside the mountain, making his way through his beloved caves to the lake and the island, and the bright pulsing light that beamed from it. When he himself was an old, old man Thurgood would still be there, unchanged, eating the fruits that never cloyed, worshiping the beauty and wisdom of the Plant.

He was glad to be free, glad to be on his way home, but there was a glimmer of something underneath the gladness. Only a hint of a feeling, but he wondered if it could be envy.

Read on for a peek at John Christopher's epic dystopian adventure novel!

T
HE PUBLIC LIBRARY WAS IN A QUIET, GLOOMY street facing the park. It was joined on to rambling dilapidated buildings which had been council offices but were currently used as a warehouse. The library itself was almost as old—a plaque coming away from the wall told of an opening ceremony in 1978—and crumbling badly. There were several large cracks in the concrete surface, once white, now a dirty gray streaked with black.

The interior was not much better. The artificial light supplementing what little filtered in on this dull April afternoon came not from lumoglobes but from antiquated fluorescent tubes. They flickered and hummed; one was dead and another spasmodically blanked and brightened. The librarian, sitting behind his desk, showed no sign of being aware of this. He was a tall, stooping man with a high, domed forehead and a limp white moustache which he continually fingered.

He was a taciturn man, not talking to borrowers except insofar as was absolutely necessary. Once, a couple of years ago, he had engaged Rob in ­conversation—that was some months after Rob's mother died. Rob had gone to the library in the first place along with her and then had continued on his own. The librarian had said how he had worked here since leaving school, nearly fifty years earlier, and had told him that in those days he had been one of six assistants. There had even been a project for moving to a new, larger building and taking on more staff. It was four decades since that had been abandoned and now he did everything himself. He was past retiring age but stayed because he wanted to. The council talked of closing the library and pulling the building down; meanwhile, they let things run on.

He talked in a half melancholy, half angry way of the virtual disappearance of reading. In his young days there had been no holovision, it was true, but there had been television. People had still read books. People had been different then; more individual, more inquiring. Rob was the only person under fifty who came to the library.

The librarian had looked at Rob with a hopefulness, a hunger almost, that Rob found alarming and embarrassing. To him the library was associated with memories of his mother. He read books because she had, though not the same sort. Both kinds were about the past, but she had liked love stories with country settings. Rob preferred adventures: excitement and the clash of swords. He had read
The Three Musketeers
and its sequels,
Twenty Years After
and
The Vicomte de Bragelonne,
half a dozen times.

He had responded awkwardly and unwillingly to the librarian's remarks and the old man, discouraged, had returned to his customary silence. On this afternoon he stamped his books and dismissed him with a nod. Rob stayed for a moment in the lobby, looking out. The sky was darker than when he had arrived, threatening heavy rain. It was a short walk to the bus stop but a much longer one at the other end; their home was some distance from the nearest route. The stadium, on the other hand, was as near, and his father's duty shift ended within an hour. He could wait and go home with him in the car.

So instead of going away from the park, he crossed it. It was a poor place. There were unkempt flower beds and battered, sickly looking trees around the edges, budding with unpromising leaves. The rest, apart from the children's playground in one corner and a number of football goal posts, was twenty-five acres of scuffed grass and mud, crossed by half a dozen pitted tarmac paths. It did provide, though, a sense of being free of buildings. From the center one could see, above the lower near skyline, the high-rise blocks that stretched out across the sprawl of Greater London to the distant Green Belt dividing this Conurb from the next.

Half a dozen young children were playing and shouting on the swings and roundabouts. A few people were also walking dogs in the park. There were more in the short road leading to the High Street, and the High Street itself was fairly full. Not just with shoppers, he realized, but with the crowd beginning to come away from the afternoon session of the Games. They seemed reasonably orderly, and there had been no real trouble for several weeks—not since the big riot in February.

Rob turned into Fellowes Road, against the stream. It was not long after that he heard a shout from in front, followed by ragged chanting.

“Greens! Greens!”

There were other confused, indistinguishable cries and he became conscious of a tremor, a change of pace, in the mob of people coming toward him. Someone broke into a run, then others. Rob looked for cover and found none. This was a street of old, terraced houses, doors opening directly on the pavement. It was not far to the intersection with Morris Road, and he made an effort to squeeze through that way. But from one moment to the next the crowd solidified, turning into a struggling, shouting battering ram of humanity that lifted and crushed and carried him away.

He remembered that the program that afternoon had been terraplaning. In this, electrocars raced around the high-banked sides of the arena, running almost to vertical directly under the stands, and were boosted by auxiliary rockets at intervals so that they took off and flew through the air. Accidents were frequent, which was one of the things that made the sport popular with spectators. And enthusiasm was roused to a point that could fan the antagonism always present between the four factions—Blacks, Whites, Greens and Reds—to fury. Greens had been dominant in terraplaning for some time. It might be that there had been an upset, or a particularly bad piece of fouling.

He had neither time nor inclination to think much about this. His face was wedged against a brown overcoat, the cloth rough and fusty smelling. Pressure was increasing and he found it difficult to breathe. He remembered that in the February riot eight people had been crushed to death, in the one just before Christmas more than twenty. He had a glimpse of a corner of a building and realized they had spilled out into the High Street. There was a crash of metal somewhere, people screaming, the bleep of horns. Pressure relaxed slightly; he could move his arms and one foot touched the ground. Then someone or something tripped him and he fell. Someone trod on his arm, someone else, ­agonizingly, in the small of his back.

Unless he did something he was finished. He could see, indistinctly, through a man's legs, a car which had been brought to a standstill. He forced a way, getting a couple more kicks before he reached it. Then he slid under—there was just enough clearance—and lay there, numb and bruised, watching the torrent of legs and feet and listening to the wild screams and shouts.

Gradually it slackened and ebbed, and at last he could crawl out and stand up. There were several people in the road lying still, others moving and moaning. Two police copters were on the scene, one parked, the second hovering some distance down the street. There were a man and woman in the car under which he had sheltered; its front wing, he saw, had been bent in by pressure. The woman opened a window and asked Rob if he was all right. Before he could do more than nod, the man had set the car in motion, and it drove away, swerving to avoid bodies and other vehicles. Several cars had been turned over and a couple were in nose-to-nose collision.

A hospital copter arced down over the nearby roofs and more were approaching. Rob went to look for his library books which had been torn from his grasp in the rush. He found one in the gutter at the corner of Fellowes Road, the other ten yards farther up. It was open and had been trodden down: there was a heel mark deeply impressed on one page and another was torn almost across. He pressed it back into shape as best he could, tucked both books under his arm, and headed for the stadium.

• • •

The stadium was nearly half a mile long and rose three hundred feet in the air, an oval of dull gold unbroken on the outside. A few people were still coming away from the nearest exit gate and cars were issuing from the below-ground parking places, but the main rush was over. Rob went to a service entrance and showed his disk to the scanner. It was a duplicate which his father had obtained for him; strictly speaking they were only on issue to staff but the rule was not taken seriously. The door hissed open and closed behind him when he had gone through. He turned right along the panel-lit corridor, heading for the main electrical section. He would not be allowed into any of the control rooms, but he could wait in a leisure room.

Before he reached it, though, he saw someone he knew. It was at the point where several corridors intersected and the man crossed just ahead of him. Rob called, and he stopped and waited for him to come up.

It was Mr. Kennealy, a friend of his father, also an electrician. He was a stocky, slow-speaking man with a broad face and very black hair. He never showed much emotion but Rob thought he had an odd look now.

“Did they tell you, then, Rob?”

“Tell me what, Mr. Kennealy? I thought I'd go home with Dad.” Mr. Kennealy was studying him and Rob became aware of his dirty and disheveled appearance. “There was a riot over toward the High Street. I had to get under a car. . . .”

“There's been an accident,” Mr. Kennealy said quietly.

“To do with . . . ?”

He did not want to finish the sentence. Apprehension made his throat dry.

“They've taken your father to the hospital, Rob. He got hold of a live wire by mistake. He was pretty badly shocked before anyone could switch off.”

“He's not . . .”

“No. But he'll be away for a while. I was wondering how to get a message to you. I think you'd ­better stay with us for the time being.”

They lived in a high rise overlooking the stadium and only a few minutes' walk away. He had been there many times with his father and liked Mrs. Kennealy, a large, red-faced woman, strong armed and heavy handed. It was much better than the thought of going back on his own to the empty apartment.

“Can I go to see him in hospital?”

“Not today. There's visiting tomorrow afternoon.” Mr. Kennealy glanced at his finger-­watch. “Come on. I'll take you back. I can clock off early for once.”

They walked over in silence: Mr. Kennealy did not say anything and Rob was not eager to talk either. He was not only shocked by what had happened but confused. His father had got hold of a live wire . . . but he had always been so careful, checking and double-checking everything. He wanted to ask Mr. Kennealy about it, but he felt that to do so would be a sort of criticism.

Two of the three lifts in the block were out of order and they had to wait some time to be taken up. Mr. Kennealy complained of this to his wife, who came out of the kitchenette as they went into the tiny hall of the apartment. Maintenance was terrible and getting worse.

“You'll have to look at the HV, too,” Mrs. Kennealy added. “It's gone wrong again. You're back early. I see you've got Rob with you. Is Jack coming up later?”

He told her briefly what had happened. She came to Rob, put an arm across his shoulders and gave him a squeeze. He was aware of looks passing between them which he could not read, and was not sure he would have wanted to.

“I've got the kettle on. Go and sit down, the pair of you, and I'll bring you some tea.”

In the sitting room the holovision set was blaring away, showing a soap opera. The figures were hazy, occasionally switching from three- to two-­dimensional, and the colors were peculiar. Mr. Kennealy cursed and, after switching off, removed the back and started tinkering. Rob watched him for a time and then went to the kitchenette. There was barely room for anyone else when Mrs. Kennealy was there.

“What is it then, Rob?” she asked.

“I was wondering if there was anything I could mend this book with. There's a page torn.”

“Books.” She shook her head. “What do you want with them, anyway? Well, I suppose it takes all sorts. There's some sticky tape somewhere. Yes, on that top shelf.”

Rob put the torn edges together and carefully taped them. Watching him, she asked him how it had got in such a state, and he told her about the riot.

“Hooligans. There's too much of it altogether,” she said. “They ought to put them in the army and send them out to China.”

The war in China had been going on as long as he could remember. Troublemakers were sometimes given the option of enlisting and going out there instead of to prison. It was all far away and unreal. She had said it perfunctorily, her mind more on making the tea. Now she gave him a tray, with teapot and cups and saucers and a plate of chocolate biscuits.

“Take this through while I wipe up,” she told him. “I'll be along in a minute.”

Mr. Kennealy was still fiddling with the inside of the HV set. Rob put the tray down on a coffee table and went over to the window. The long-­threatened rain had come and was sheeting down the chasm between this block and the next to the dark gloomy street hundreds of feet below. He stood watching it, thinking of his father and feeling miserable.