“You understand now?” he asked his comrades. “The machines draw their power from the magnetic field of Vulcan itself, which is tremendous — cutting as it does across the magnetic field of the Sun. So there is a never-failing power source. The controls are properly set. Your job will be to see that they aren’t touched.”
Grag and Otho nodded silently. Simon Wright said nothing. He was watching Curt with a bitter concentration.
Newton walked toward the converter. He stood where Carlin had stood and stripped himself naked. Then he paused, looking at the tall coils of crystal that were full of golden fire. The corded muscles of his body quivered and his eyes were strange. He stepped up onto the dais between the coils.
A blaze of golden light enveloped him. He could see the others through it as through a burning veil, Otho’s pointed face full of fear and sadness and a kind of rage, huge Grag looking almost pathetically puzzled and worried in the way he leaned forward with outstretched arms, Simon hovering and watching broodingly.
Then the light curdled and thickened and they were gone. Newton felt the awful subtle strength that sprang from the glowing coils, the intricate force-fields that centered their focus in his flesh. He wanted to scream.
He had no voice. There was a moment — an eternity — of vertigo, of panic, of a dreadful change and dissolution.
And then he was free.
Blurred and strangely he could perceive the interior of the citadel, the three silent Futuremen watching, above the bright insistent shaft of light that drew him like a calling voice. He wished to rise toward it and he did, soaring upward with a marvelous swiftness that was a thing of joy and wonder even in that first confusion of the change.
He heard a name cried out and knew it for his own. He did not answer. He could not. Sight and hearing he still had though in a different way. He seemed now to absorb impressions through his whole being rather than through the limited organs of the human body.
And he was no longer human. He was a flame, a core of brilliant force, infinitely strong, infinitely free. Free! Free of all the clumsy shackles of the flesh, light and swift — eternal!
He flew upward toward the triple arch that meant delivery from the confining stone. Into the light he flashed and upward. Neither space nor time had any meaning for him now. With the strange perceptive sense that he still thought of as sight he looked toward the Beam, stabbing its searing length along the blackened land. He rushed toward it, a small bright star against the tented gloom of Vulcan’s inner sky.
As a swimmer plunges into a long— sought stream the Sun-Child that had been Curt Newton plunged into the path of the Beam. The blinding glare, the deadly heat had no terrors for him now. The alien pattern of his new being seemed to gather strength from them, to take in the surging energy and grow upon it.
Far away he saw the gap in the planet’s surface that let in the mighty Beam. He willed himself toward it, consumed with a strange hunger to be quit of the planetary walls that hid the universe.
He was part of all that now, the vastness of elemental creation. Child of the Sun, brother to the stars — he wanted to be free in open space, to look upon the naked glory to which he himself was kin.
Out along the Beam he sped, eager, joyous, and faintly as an echo out of some forgotten past he remembered the words of Kah. “He has followed the Bright Ones who do not return!”
CHAPTER IV
The Bright Ones
The firmament was filled with fire. All else was blotted out, forgotten — the farther stars, the little worlds of men. There was nothing else anywhere but the raging storming beauty of the Sun.
The little wisp of flame that had been a man hung motionless in space, absorbing through every sentient atom of his being the overmastering wonder. He had come up out of shadowed Vulcan into the full destroying light, the unmasked splendor of the burning star that was lord of all the planets.
He had risen toward it, rapidly at first, then more and more slowly as his new and untried perceptions brought home to him the magnitude of the scene. Awe overcame him and he remained poised in mid-flight, struggling with sensations not given to any creature of corporeal form.
He could feel the pressure of light. It came in a headlong rush from out of the boiling cauldron of atomic dissolution, reaching away to unguessed limits of space, and he that had been Curt Newton felt its strength pushing against him.
Particles of raw energy struck the tenuous fires of his new body, with a myriad of bright and tingling shocks. They pleased him and he fed upon them. And he found that he could hear the Sun. It was not hearing as he had known it. There was no medium here to carry sound waves. It was a more subtle thing, an inner pulsation of his own new being.
Yet he heard — the vast solemn savage roar of the never-ending tumult of destruction and rebirth, the hissing scream of world-high tongues of flame, the deep booming thunder of solar continents and seas of fire, shaped eternally out of the maelstrom and eternally sundered, only to be shaped again in different form.
He watched the wheeling of the Sun upon its axis. With a perception that sensed intensely every color of the spectrum he saw the heaving mountains, the seas and plains and storming clouds of fire, as spectral shapes of amethyst and crimson, emerald and gold, barred and streaked with every conceivable shading from palest violet to deepest angry red.
Gradually, lost in the wonder of his new life, his sense of awe abated. He began to feel a sort of power as though the last of his human fetters had fallen away, leaving him completely free. The void was his, the Sun was his. He was beyond harm or fear or death. He was alive and eternal as the stars.
He shot inward toward the Sun and the shimmering veils of the corona wrapped him in a mist of glory.
He was in no hurry. Time had ceased for him. The delicate diamond fires of these upper mists were inexpressibly beautiful. He played among them, a fleck of living golden flame, darting and wheeling like some fabled bird. He saw how the veils of the corona were whipped and shaken as though by great winds, now curling upon themselves in dense amethystine folds, now torn wide to show the sullen chromosphere below.
He dropped down through one of those sudden chasms, countless miles, with the speed of a shaft of light, and plunged into the red obscurity of the chromosphere.
It seemed to him that here was concentrated all the anger of the Sun. Torrents of raging scarlet gases swept by, twisted here and there into blood-red whirlpools the size of a continent, their edges whipped to a burning froth where they chafed against other currents, meeting sometimes head-on in a spout of savage flame as dark as cinnabar.
Elemental rage, the fury of life — the new-born Child of the Sun scudded along on the crimson tides, whirling, dancing, tossing high on the crests, probing the darkest ruby of the whirlpools. Below him still, a vague rolling sphere of fire, lay the photosphere.
He dropped down lower still, and looked upon the surface of the Sun.
Upheaval, chaos, beauty unimaginable, strangeness beyond belief. An immensity of golden flame, denser than those outer layers, writhing, surging, lifting up huge molten ranges that clawed at the crimson sky and then slid down in titanic cataclysm to be lost in a weltering plain of fire.
Cresting waves that could have swallowed worlds raced and ravaged across the face of the Sun, crashing down in wild thundering avalanches, spouting, spuming, unutterably brilliant, majestic beyond any sight given to human eyes.