The Lotus Caves (7 page)

The tunnel emerged onto a ledge. They were near the top of a second cave, much bigger than the first, and there was an arch at the far end which provided a glimpse of a third. This cave was well over a hundred feet across, and they were perched at the top of a sixty- or seventy-degree slope, at least fifty feet above the floor. Walls and ceiling were covered with the moss but here it glowed with a steadier, whiter light. Down below . . .

Marty supposed you could call them trees, though they resembled no tree he had ever seen in books or on television. A tangle of trunks and stems and branches, ending in a riot of leaves of different shapes and colors. All brilliant—and all in motion! The trunks swayed, branches lifted and tossed, leaves shook as though in a gale. Yet up here the air was still. Perhaps not down there? He saw, though, that the movements were not uniform, not in any one direction. Two of the larger trees, as he watched, leaned in toward each other, their branches touching and mingling. And leaves from both detached themselves, lifted fluttering into the air, danced and spun in a wide fanning movement before settling down again.

He said: “The leaves . . . they went back onto the branches.”

Steve said: “I know. Watch that!”

He pointed toward the far side of the cave, where there were no trees but a fuzzy greenish-­purple stuff covered the ground. Part swelled up from the rest, became a prominence and then a ball that rose and hovered, bobbing, a dozen feet in the air. Others appeared and behaved in similar ways. After a few minutes it was possible to count five of them, dancing as the leaves had done, over and under and around each other, faster and faster until they seemed to blur into one.

“What are they?”

“I don't know. Look, they're changing.”

The balls had ceased to spin and were sinking back toward the ground. One of them, though, did not. Instead it changed shape, becoming what looked like a pair of wings with no connecting body. The wings beat and it soared up until it was almost on a level with the ledge. Automatically Marty drew back, but it did not approach them. It flapped its way several times around the cave, then swooped down to the spot from which it had come. Purple-green ran into purple-green. There was a lump, a dissolving mound, finally the same flat surface there had been in the beginning.

They watched, fascinated but uncomprehending, for a long time. There was always something happening, some movement or eruption, brilliant and meaningless. Then Steve said he was hungry.

“You could try eating the moss,” Marty suggested.

“I don't fancy it. It's probably poisonous, anyway. Let's go back to the crawler and get some food. We can come here again afterward.”

He led the way up the tunnel, reeling in the rope. When they reached the bottom of the slope, Marty said: “Better not take a strain on it unless you have to. I tied it to the crawler. We don't know how firmly anchored it is. We might pull it down on us.”

“Good point. We should be able to jump it fairly easily.”

He did not make it the first time, but Marty did. He stood at the top and gave Steve a hand to get up. The crawler was in the same place, but something else was different. There was no snake-like coil. The black trunk ran straight up from floor to ceiling, where the glowing moss closed tightly around it. So the spheroid must be outside.

Marty pointed to it. “Do you know what I think?”

Steve said it for him: “Thurgood's flower! It was in bud before. Now it's up there somewhere—probably opened out.”

“But what for?” Marty asked. “To attract inter-planetary bees?”

“It's probably not a flower really. It could be absorbing sunlight. Plants live on solar energy. A chlorophyll conversion, or something similar. I wonder . . . could this all be part of one organism, one plant? And yet they're all separate—the leaves, the fuzz-balls, the bird-thing . . .”

Marty was looking past the black column at the moss-covered outcropping of rock he had noticed the first time he emerged from the crawler. He saw now how regular in shape it was, and that it did not actually join on to the wall. On the Moon's surface rocks sometimes had shapes that from a distance, in a certain light, could look artificial. It was probably no more than that, but he felt a new prickle of uneasiness. Thurgood's flower . . . which seventy years ago he had lost his life searching for.

He walked across the cave, and Steve followed him. The shape was more regular as they drew near, not less. A shape that beneath the blurring mask of moss was familiar. Standing by one corner, Marty reached down and pulled out a tuft. Light gleamed on metal, a section of crawler track.

They stared in silence for a few moments. Steve said at last: “So he found it, after all. He must have fallen through, the way we did.”

“And then?”

Steve said slowly: “I suppose he's still inside. We were very lucky not to break our necks.”

Flesh did not decay in the lifeless vacuum of the surface, but there was air here and life. A skeleton, hunched over the controls—the only skeleton the Moon had ever known. Marty turned away, feeling sick. And frightened, because if Thurgood had not died in the crash then he had died later, more slowly and agonizingly, when his food gave out. They might be envying him yet. As they went back to their crawler, he said: “Do you think we ought to ration ourselves on supplies?”

Steve said gloomily: “I suppose so. Not that it's going to make much difference. It isn't as though anyone is likely to come looking for us. Even if the radio is still working, we can't transmit through rock.”

They went into the crawler. The air felt musty and thin after the thick, sweet-smelling air of the cave. Marty kept his eyes away from the mossy wreck, but he was very much aware of it. He could not help wondering how long it would be before their own crawler looked like that.

7

A Face in a Dream

T
HEY HAD BROUGHT A STEEL spike and a hammer from the crawler, and Marty hammered the spike into the ledge to provide a holding point for the rope. When that was done and checked and the rope firmly secured, he watched Steve edge his way down the slope into the second cave. The trees swayed and waved as before, and he had a feeling that their branches were clutching upward toward the descending figure. He remembered the leaf that had brushed his cheek, and was afraid. Being plants they were mindless, of course, but that did not mean they could not be a menace. There were plants on Earth that could trap and eat insects, and Earth plants did not have this fantastic ability to move.

But he had not opposed Steve's suggestion that they should explore the rest of the cave system. It was plainly something that had to be done. There was no hope of finding a way out from the top cave. Even if it were possible to locate the spot through which the crawler had crashed, they could not get at it. It was up in the roof of the cave, completely out of reach. They had to explore—the alternative was to sit and wait until their food supplies ran out, until they starved to death.

Steve was below treetop level. Marty watched as a nearby branch curled toward him, seemed to touch and stroke him, then drew back. Steve scrambled down the last few yards, and cast the rope free. He called up: “Everything O.K. Come on down.”

Marty went down backward, bracing himself at each step, hanging onto the rope. He did not look around at the trees, but soon could hear the swishing of their branches through the heavy air. He told himself that since Steve had got down safely there was nothing to worry about. Except that the trees might be waiting to get both of them within reach before attacking them? That was silly, of course, because it implied thinking and trees could not think. All the same, his hair bristled.

He dropped the last few feet, and stood beside Steve. The branches tossed and twisted above their heads but did not come near them. The leaf touching him, the branch that stroked against Steve—they had probably been accidents. They must have been since plants could not see, either. But he still felt uneasy. Steve was examining the trunk of one of the trees. He said: “It's very smooth. Not bark, I think.” He moved to unclip his belt-knife. “I wonder if it will cut easily.”

Marty said: “No!” Steve looked at him. “I wouldn't do that, if I were you.”

Steve looked up thoughtfully at the moving branches. “No, perhaps not. Let's head for that arch which seems to open into the next cave.”

It was an eerie sensation walking under the threshing branches of the trees, and Marty was ­anxious to get to more open ground. When they reached it, though, he paused. This was the expanse of greenish-­purple fuzz from which the flying balls and the flapping wings had emerged. He put out a tentative foot and found it different from the moss: softer, more deeply resilient. It even seemed to pulsate slightly, but that could have been an illusion. There was no sign of the surface swelling up, but he had the feeling it might happen at any moment. Steve led the way across, walking toward the arch, and Marty followed him.

They heard it first when they were almost across the fuzz, but so faint and distant that this, too, could have been something in the mind. He stopped. Steve said: “You hear that? It can't be.”

They listened, straining their ears. More like the ghost of music than music itself, thin and far away. Marty said: “It's coming from somewhere ahead.”

“I know.”

It was more clearly audible as they went under the arch into the next cave. Something like an organ, Marty thought. And strangely familiar . . . Steve halted again. He said, in shocked disbelief: “I know that tune!”

Marty said: “I think I do, but I can't place it.”

“It's one of those late twentieth-century things. A comic opera.” He whistled a few bars in accompaniment. “But that's crazy, isn't it? It can't be real.”

There had been a downward slope in both of the first two caves which was accentuated in this one. Most of the floor was covered with the fuzz, but strange-looking plants grew in places. There was a thicket of cactus-like things, spiked and eccentrically branched, in different shades of blue, and in another place a cluster of small bushes, almost perfectly spherical, gray streaked with splashes of brighter colors.

The rock wall on the right showed an uninterrupted glow of moss. On the left, though, and at the bottom there were openings. It was from one of these that the music must be coming. Several of the openings were above floor level, one of them halfway up to the roof. But they were not inaccessible. Looking closely, Marty saw that there were plants there as well. It was difficult to decide whether they were bushes or trees: what was important about them was that their branches, gnarled and twisted, rose up against the rock face, forming a natural ladder by which one could climb to the galleries.

Steve said: “I think the music is coming from the second one along.”

He moved in that direction. Marty said: “Wait a minute.”

“What for?”

“Those trees growing up the side of the cave toward the holes—they're almost like ladders.”

“Well, yes. We can climb up quite easily.”

“But they
only
grow under the holes, as though they're there just to act as stairways.”

“True,” Steve said. “I hadn't realized that.”

“For us to climb up?”

“I see what you mean. There may be other things here as well as plants. Moon-men? Giant spiders? More likely to be humanoid, if they climb ladders.”

“That doesn't explain why the ladder trees should be there and only there.”

“The Moon-men could have planted them and trained them. Maybe they're great gardeners.”

“And the music? Earth music?”

“They probably listen in on our radio.”

Steve put one foot on the lowest crook of the tree. Marty said: “If there are Moon-men up there . . . they may not be friendly.”

“That's also true,” Steve said. “In which case we're unlucky. But I don't suppose we can go on dodging them indefinitely. We might as well find out the worst.”

He climbed the tree and Marty followed him. The surface was rougher than that of the trees in the other cave, but seemed to be worn smooth in places—places, he realized, which were at roughly the right intervals to have been made by climbing feet. The music was louder. It changed, in mid-bar almost, to another tune which was vaguely familiar. He came up to the tunnel mouth and could hear it very plainly. Some kind of march.

This tunnel was much smaller. It was possible to walk in it but there was not a lot of room on either side, and at times it was necessary to stoop. The rock surface, as everywhere, was covered with the luminous moss. They walked through a tunnel of flickering light toward the sound of music. Then they were around a corner, and the new cave lay ahead.

It took Marty a moment or two to realize what was wrong. He had been expecting to see plants and trees similar to the ones they had already encountered, or perhaps even more exotic. There were trees and plants here, but they were wildly out of keeping with the others, or with anything he could have imagined. To start with, there was grass; lush green, calf high, extending almost to the tunnel mouth. He walked into it, bent down and held it in his hands. The only grass he had ever touched had been that in the park back in the Bubble, close-mown to a quarter of an inch. This was wild, riotous, luxuriant. He picked a blade and smelt a different scent, the smell of grass itself.

Steve had gone past him in the direction of the trees. He stood under one of them, and called: “Marty . . .”

The leaves were a darker green than the grass, the trunk gray-brown, rugose, branches twisted as though by the slow stresses of long years of growth and weather. Among the leaves there were pink and white blossoms, and round green fruit flushed with red.

Steve said in a dazed voice: “It's an apple tree.”

Marty joined him. He said: “I know. One of the first things I remember in kindergarten was that apple in the picture book.”

“But apple trees don't have flower and fruit on at the same time.”

“Not on Earth. These are Moon-apples.”

“It's an illusion,” Steve said. “It has to be.”

One of the branches hung down, with half a dozen fruit seeming to bow it low. Steve lifted one, weighing it in his open palm.

“It seems real enough.” He plucked it off. “And smells good.”

He lifted it to his mouth. Marty said: “Do you think you should?”

“Why not?”

“I was thinking of what you said about the moss: that even if one could eat it it would probably be poisonous. Isn't that true of these? We don't know anything about their chemical structure.”

Steve turned the apple over in his hand. It was not quite round; flattened at the stem end, slightly pointed at the other. Apple shape, in fact. Marty could smell it, distinct and individual like the grass.

“It looks all right,” he said.

Marty could feel his own half-abated hunger pangs stirring. He said, trying to convince himself as much as Steve: “It's taking a big chance.”

Steve said: “What difference does it make? We've got provisions in the crawler for six weeks maybe, if we ration ourselves tightly. After that, we starve. We have to take a chance on it sometime.”

“We might learn more during the month,” Marty said. “Maybe . . .”

His words trailed off. He had been intending to say they could use the time in trying to escape, but even as he framed the proposition he saw how futile it was. They were trapped inside a mountain which in turn was surrounded by the lifeless vacuum of the Moon. There was no hope at all of getting the crawler out. There was almost as little prospect of finding a way out on foot, which in any case would mean using spacesuits. They could carry a couple of cylinders of air at a pinch and a little food concentrate. Somebody had once spent eight hours in a spacesuit and survived, but he had been in a hospital for weeks afterward. And in eight hours on foot you would be doing well to cover twenty-five miles. The range of the suit radios was well under a mile.

Steve said: “Well, here goes,” and bit into the fruit.

“What's it like?” Marty asked.

“Sensational.”

He went on eating. Marty picked one himself and bit into it. Juice spurted against his chin. At home he had eaten apple-flavor puddings, of the same mushy consistency as most food in the Bubble. That taste had done nothing to prepare him for this—the sweetness, tartness, indefinable something. And the texture, of juiciness combined with firmness.

He finished it and, after hesitating, dropped the core in the grass. From earliest childhood he had been trained in the lunar discipline of no-waste, no-mess, but here there was neither a recovery nor a garbage receptacle. He wondered what the organic cycle was in the caves. Were there bacteria to break things down so that they could be reabsorbed? He shook his head. It was like worrying about a footnote in a book written entirely in gibberish.

Steve was eating his second apple. Marty was about to do the same thing when he saw something else. It was a little way down from the apple tree, and not a tree so much as a large plant. The overlapping bases of big glossy leaves formed a false trunk from which a head emerged; and the head in turn carried perhaps a dozen clusters of long, slightly curving yellow fruits.

He went to look, and Steve came after him.

“Apples,” Steve said, “and now bananas. It gets crazier and crazier, doesn't it? As though things had been laid on for us, prepared in advance.”

Marty stretched up and took two bananas off one of the clusters. He threw one to Steve.

“Catch. Or do you want to wait and see how the apples go down?”

He broke the skin and peeled it and bit off an end. Here again the real thing was vastly different from the artificial flavorings he was used to. Steve, eating the other one, said: “You can almost live off bananas, can't you? They have protein, don't they? In that book I was trying to write I had one of my pirates marooned on a Pacific island and living on bananas and coconuts, and what fish he could get out of the lagoon. Do you think we could be living inside someone's book?” He looked around. “If so, he fills in a pretty solid background.”

They moved on. They were in an orchard, but one made up of many and diverse trees. There were pears, the fruit a deep golden color, the skin seeming on the point of bursting with juice. They saw peaches, pomegranates and, scenting the air for a great distance, half a dozen trees with oranges nestling among dark green leaves. In an open patch pineapples grew side by side with strawberries, and farther on they found a thicket of raspberry canes. There were yet other trees with fruits they did not recognize at all. They ate as they went, until they were full.

Marty said: “I don't think I can manage any more.”

“There's always tomorrow.”

“Unless the Moon-men run us in for trespass and theft. I've been thinking—have you seen any insects?”

“No.”

“Ought there not to be some?”

“Why?”

“Well, these are plants and they have flowers and fruit. I was thinking of pollination.”

“Plants on Earth have to have insects because they're all fixed in the ground. This organism has moving parts: remember the leaves and the fuzz-balls.”

“Not in this cave.”

“I suppose they could come in here when they were wanted. The leaves moved from one cave to another.”

“Do you think it is all part of one organism, using the flower for energy?”

“I don't know. It could be.”

“And the Moon-men?”

“We still haven't found them.”

“I've been thinking,” Marty said. “If we could get news of this place back to our folks. We could all abandon the Bubble. People could live here.”