Read Online The Lotus Caves by John Christopher - Free Book Online

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?”
    â€œListen,” 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?”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œNothing 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