Read Captain Future 22 - Children of the Sun (May 1950) for Free Online

intensity that even his new senses found it hard to bear.
    The patterned energy of his flame-like body was shaken by waves of awful force. He had been afraid before. Now he was beyond fear. He crept after Thardis like a child creeping to the feet of Creation. He would have stopped but Thardis led him on into the inmost solar furnace, into the living heart of the Sun.
    And he who had been Philip Carlin was there, wrapped in a silent awe, watching the mystic terrible forges beating out the unthinkable energies of the death and renascence of matter.
    Newton had no thought for Carlin now. The awful voices of creation were hammering against his senses, dazing them, numbing them. He shuddered beneath that godlike fury of sound. The stripped and fleeing atoms burst through him, filling him with an exalted pain. He too watched, lost utterly in a cosmic awe of his own.
    Atomic change exploded ceaselessly here, thundering, throbbing — hydrogen flashing through all the shifting transformations of the carbon-nitrogen cycle to final helium, the residual energy bursting blindly outward in raving power.
    Newton began to be aware of his own danger. He knew that if he stayed too long he would never go again. He was a scientist and this was the ultimate core of learning. He would remain, drunk and fascinated with the lure of knowledge, with the incredible life that could exist in this crucible of energy. He would remain forever, with the other Children of the Sun.
    Temptation whispered, “Why go back? Why not remain, a clean, eternal flame, free to learn, free to live?”
    He remembered the three who waited for him in the citadel and the promise he had made. And he forced himself with a bitter effort to speak. “Carlin! Philip Carlin!”
    The other Sun Child stirred, and asked, “Who calls?”
    And when he heard, his rapt mind woke to emotion. “Curt Newton? You here? I had almost forgotten.”
    Strange meeting of two friends no longer human, in the thundering solar fires! Newton forced himself to think only of his purpose. “I’ve come after you, Carlin! I followed you to bring you back!”
    The other’s response was a fierce, instinctive recoil. “No! I will not go back!”
    And Carlin’s thought raced eagerly. “Look — look about you! How could I leave? A million years from now, two million, when I have learned all I can... No, Curt. No scientist could leave this!”
    Newton felt the fatal force of that argument. He too felt the irresistible attraction of the undying life that had trapped men here for a million years.
    He felt it — too strongly! He knew desperately that he must succumb to it unless he left quickly. The knowledge nerved him to clutch at the one persuasion that might still sway Carlin.
    “But if you stay here all the knowledge you have gathered here will be lost forever! The secrets of the Sun, the key to the mysteries of the universe prisoned here with you, never to be known!”
    He had been right. It was the one argument that could move this man whose life had been spent in the gathering and interchange of knowledge. He felt the doubt, the turmoil, in Carlin’s shaken mind. The unwillingness and yet the strong tug of lifetime habits of mind.
    The thunders of the Sun’s heart roared about them as Newton poised waiting. And at last, reluctantly, Carlin said. “Yes. Yes, I must take back what I have learned. And yet...”
    He burst out, bitter, passionate, “And yet to leave all this!”
    “You must, Carlin!”
    Another pause. And then, “If I must go, let us go at once, Curt!”
    Newton became aware then that Thardis still hovered beside them. And Thardis told them, “Come, I will guide you.”
    They three went winging upward from the depths of the Sun — swiftly up through the golden many-tinted photosphere, past the angry crimson tides above, high, high, through the whipping veils of the corona into empty space.
     
    DAZED, his shaken senses reeling, Newton perceived across the gulf the tiny