THE LOTUS CAVES

Fantastic! Fleeing the claustrophobic artificiality of the Moon Bubble, fourteen-year-olds Marty and Steve illegally reconnoiter-the long-abandoned First Station and, following a clue in the journal of "never recovered" Andrew Thurgood, plunge their mechanical crawler into a fragrant, fertile warren of caves. Where the enveloping moss and branches, the moving, metamorphosizing leaves and under-growth are all part of one gigantic sentient Plant which has also provided, for the surviving Thurgood, a lush earth-like orchard and an orchestra tree programmed to play his favorite (now seventy-year-old) tunes. And the Plant will pamper them until, like the Odyssey's lotus-eaters, they'll relinquish all thoughts of escape. Marty's fight against euphoria, which involves arousing the lethargic, Plant-worshipping Thurgood, is quickly told — more quickly than the Lunarians-at-school episode at the beginning. Altogether it's far from the inexorable rigor of The White Mountains. . . "Whose dream is it?" the boys wonder at one point. "The one who's writting the book.