The Lotus Caves by John Christopher

Moon’s surface.
    â€œWhat made them come here?” Steve asked. “What made anyone come here?”
    It was a question that was never asked, one from which the mind rebelled. Marty thought of Paul, wondering what he was doing now. Out of the rehabilitation center, maybe, walking in fields somewhere, smelling flowers, feeling the wind against his face. He stared at the changeless scene in front of him.
    â€œLet’s go inside,” he said. “There’s nothing to see out here.”
    â€¢ • •
    They jump-floated back to the entrance and went in. It was a cramped maze of catwalks and constructions, familiar from the feature film and yet utterly strange. It had been left, when it was abandoned for the Bubble, which was put up on the new and better site on the other side of the range, as a relic, a museum, and he had had the idea that it would look like the pictures of museums on Earth, with everything properly set out and labeled. Instead there was clutter, the clutter, almost, of a place that ­people had just left and would soon be coming back to.
    Anything of value, of course, had been taken—anything that could be used. But what remained was much more than the bare bones, the basic structures. In a garbage sack hanging from its wall hook there were empty cans and cartons, left from the preparation of the last meal eaten here. The tomato sauce and solitary bean at the bottom of one of the cans had frozen and thawed again each fourteen-day cycle over more than half a century but, since there were no bacteria, had not changed in all that time. On the floor Marty saw a chewing-gum wrapper and a plastic button. Steve was picking something up from one corner. He said through the radio: “What’s that?”
    Steve’s voice buzzed back at him. “A camera. Why would they leave that? I get it. It’s broken. Smashed, in fact. Not only the lens; the casing as well.”
    â€œThat bit in the film,” Marty said, “where Anquetil saved Stenberg when he slipped down that fissure—didn’t he drop his camera? I suppose they brought it back, and then realized it was beyond mending.”
    Steve turned the camera over in his hands. “Could be. Something has certainly hit it hard at some time.”
    â€œThe drop was more than fifty yards.”
    Steve said: “You know all that stuff, don’t you?”
    â€œWell, don’t you?”
    Steve nodded. “Like I know the cabin route between the apartment and school. I wouldn’t say it stirs the imagination.”
    Marty left him and climbed a catwalk to the top chamber, the observatory. The telescope they had used was still there. He looked through the eyepiece without moving it and saw, as he had guessed would be the case, that it was trained on the distant Earth. Latitude around 40° North; at the moment the hazy coastline of Japan but that was the latitude of part of the United States, too. Someone perhaps taking a last look at home before the move-out.
    Leaving First Station as it was had not been merely a sentimental gesture. Even then the priorities of lunar life had been clear. No waste, no needless effort. A lot of the structures could have been dismantled and shifted, but the energy consumption would have been too high. The telescope . . . probably that would have been taken except that the Genevascope had come in around that time and rendered old-fashioned optical instruments obsolete.
    The sleeping quarters were below ground level. Light switches and fittings were in place and undamaged but there was no power. Marty could hear Steve moving around somewhere but could not see him. He activated his suit-lamp, broadening the beam to diffuse the light. There were the bunks, a table, shelves. No books—they would have been taken—but some pinups on the walls. Girls mostly, but some of landscapes—a slanting meadow with belled cows beneath a dazzling slope of snow, a