Children of the Sun

CHAPTER III Dread Metamorphosis

WONDERINGLY they went through into the central chamber of the citadel. Dirt had spilled down from above, covering a good part of the floor. Newton realized that only the upper gallery, serving as a stop for the soil to dam itself against, had saved the interior of the citadel from being heavily inundated.

He scrambled up onto that heap of rock and soil, and then stood still, gazing in puzzled wonder. He saw now the sources of that dim, eerie light. Set in deep niches on opposite faces of the curving wall were two seeming identical sets of apparatus, like nothing he had ever seen before.

The bases were of some dark metal, untouched by the passage of time. They were wide and low, separated so that their centers formed a dais. Each base bore two soaring coils of what seemed to be crystal tubing, as high as a tall man, braced in frames of platinum.

The coils pulsed and glowed with misty light — one set giving forth a gleam of purest gold, the other a darker hue of bluish green. Opposite the arch through which they had entered was a third niche, much smaller, having within it a complicated bank of instruments that might have been a control panel.

“Birthplace of the Children of the Sun”, said Otho softly. “Look, Curt — there above the niches.”

Again Captain Future read aloud, the warning messages cut deep in the ageless stone. Above the apparatus of the golden coils it said, “Let him beware who steps beyond this portal. For death is the price of eternal life!”

Above the one of somber hue, the inscription read “Death is a double doorway. On which side of it is the true life?”

Simon Wright had approached the niche that held the strange glow of sunlight and was hovering over the edge of the fallen soil there. “Curtis”, he said, “I think we have found what we sought.”

Newton joined him. He bent and picked something up, shaking it free from the dirt that half buried it. Mutely he nodded and showed the thing to Otho. It was a coverall of tough synthetic cloth, much stained and worn. On the label inside the collar was woven the name, Philip Carlin.

“He was here then, Otho. “But what happened to him? Why would he strip — wait!”

The android’s sharp eyes had perceived a mound in the soil, vaguely manlike in shape. Together he and Newton uncovered it and then looked at each other in vast relief.

“It’s only his knapsack and bedroll”, said Newton thankfully.

“And his boots.” Otho shook his head “I don’t get it at all. There’s no sign of blood on his clothes —”

Newton was looking now at the yel— crystal coils, the suggestive dais-like space between them. The thing was close to him, almost close enough to touch.

“He stripped here”, said Newton slowly. “He left his clothing and his kit behind and —” His eyes lifted to the inscription and he added very softly, “Phil Carlin went through the portal, whatever it is and wherever it leads.”

“I agree with your assumptions, Curtis”, said Simon Wright. “I suggest that you search Carlin’s effects for any data he may have left relative to this apparatus and its uses. It is obvious that he spent months in study and such a record seems inevitable.”

Simon’s lens-eyes turned toward the small niche with the cryptic bank of controls.

“See, there are many close-packed inscriptions on those walls, presumably instructions for the operation of these machines. He would surely have written down his translations for reference.”

Captain Future was already going through Carlin’s pack. “Here it is!” he said and held up a thick notebook. “Hold your light closer, Otho.”

He thumbed rapidly through the pages until he found what he was hoping and praying for — a section headed, in Carlin’s meticulous script, Translation of Formulae, Control Niche.

“Long, complicated and heavily annotated by Carlin”, he said. “It will take us the rest of the night to puzzle this out, but it’s a godsend all the same.”

He sat down in the dirt, the book open on his knees. Simon hovered close over his shoulder. The two were already absorbed in those all-important pages.

“Otho”, said Newton, “will you go up and give Grag a hand in? The natives won’t dare to follow us in here on forbidden ground.”

AND that was the last thing he said that night, except to exchange a few terse remarks with Simon on the intricacies of some formulae or equation.

Grag and Otho waited. They did not speak. From beyond the high windows came a distant sound of voices that was like a bitter dirge.

Curt Newton read on and on in Carlin’s record. And as he read the terrible suspicion that had been born in his mind took form and shape and crystallized at last into a truth as horrifying as it was inescapable.

There was more in that record than mere scientific data. There were history and hope and terror and a great dream and a conclusion so staggering that the mind reeled before it — a conclusion that brought in itself a dreadful punishment.

Or was it, after all, a punishment?

Curt Newton flung the book from him. He leaped up and found that he was trembling in every limb, his body bathed in sweat. “It’s ghastly, Simon!” he cried. “Why would they have let such an experiment go forward?”

Simon’s lens-like eyes regarded him calmly. “No knowledge can be wrong in itself — only in its application. And the men of the Old Empire did forbid the use of this apparatus when they learned its effect. Carlin quotes here the inscription he found in the ruined city that so states. Also he mentions that he himself broke the seals on the great door.”

“The fool”, whispered Newton. “The crazy fool!” He glanced at the twin sets of glowing coils and then upward at the dome.

“He changed and went out along the Beam. And the natives, horrified by what he had done, caused the landslide to seal this place.”

“But Carlin did not come back”, said the Brain.

“No”, said Newton, broodingly. “No, he didn’t. Perhaps for some reason he couldn’t.”

The android’s bright eyes were watching him. “What was it that Carlin changed into, Curt?”

Curt Newton turned and said slowly, “It’s an almost unbelievable story. Yet Carlin notes every source, here and in the ruined city.”

He paused as though trying to shape what he had learned into simpler terms.

“In the days of the Old Empire the Vulcanian scientists had a predominant interest in the Sun. In fact it appears that Vulcan was first settled as an outpost for the study of solar physics. And somewhere, in the course of those centuries-long researches into the life of the Sun, one man discovered a method of converting the ordinary matter of the human body into something resembling solar energy — a cohesive pattern of living force able to come and go at will into the very heart of the Sun.

“This was not destruction, you understand — merely conversion of a matter-pattern into an analogous functioning energy-pattern. By reversing the field the changed matter could be returned to its original form. And, since the mental and sensory centers remained functioning in the altered pattern, thought and perception remained intact though different.

“Never before had there been such a possibility of uncovering the inmost secrets of solar life — and the study of suns was vital to a transgalactic civilization. The scientists entered the conversion field and became — Children of the Sun.”

Otho caught his breath with a sharp hissing sound.

“So that’s the meaning of the inscription — and the legend! Do you mean that those little wisps of flames we saw were once men?”

Newton did not answer, looking away at the tall golden coils that seemed to pulse with the Sun’s own light. But the Brain spoke dryly.

“Curtis did not tell you quite all. The lure of the strange life in the Sun proved too much for many of the men who were changed. They did not come back. And therefore the use of the converters was forbidden and this laboratory was sealed — until Carlin came and opened it again.”

“And now he’s out there”, said Captain Future as though to himself. “Carlin changed and went out there, and then couldn’t get back.” He swung around suddenly to face them. His tanned face was set. “And I’m going after him”, he said. “I’m going to bring him back.”

OTHO cried out, “No! Curt, you’re mad! You can’t do such a thing!”

“Carlin did.”

“Yes, and maybe he’s dead or worse!” The android caught Newton’s arm. He pleaded, “Even if you went after him how could you find him? And if you did suppose you found that you couldn’t get back either? These machines are ancient and might fail.”

“For once”, said Grag emphatically, “Otho is right. Every word of it!”

“And I must agree with both of them”, said Simon Wright. “Curtis, this course of action is both madness and folly.”

Newton’s gray eyes had grown cold with a remoteness that made Otho step back away from him. His face was now flintlike in its stubborn resolution. “Carlin was our friend”, he said quietly. “He stood by us when we needed him. I have to go after him.”

“Very well, Curtis”, Simon answered. “But you are not going for friendship nor to save Philip Carlin. You are going because you yourself want to.”

NEWTON turned a sharp and startled glance upon the Brain.

“And remember”, Simon added, “if you do not return none of us can go after you.”

The stone vault was silent then. High above through the triple windows a gleam of light came dancing in, cruel and bright as a golden spear. Vulcan had turned her face sunward and the Beam was come again.

Newton said softly, “I’ll come back. I promise you. Now come here and study these controls.”

In somber surrender Simon Wright said, “Your eagerness for the unknown was bound to bring disaster some time. I think this may be the time.”

But he came to the controls. These were simple and the careful translation of the inscriptions made their operation quite clear. They found that Carlin had adjusted them with great delicacy.

He had meant to return. Yet he had not returned. Why not? Newton could not believe that a landslide of soil could be barrier to a shape of living energy that could penetrate the depths of the Sun.

Why then had Carlin not come back? What was there out in the blazing thundering fury of that Sun-world that held and trapped those who went there? Captain Future remembered the inscriptions above the niches and the somber words of Simon Wright and shuddered, somewhere deep within him.

Almost in that moment he wavered. But over his head the light of the Beam burned and brightened and he could not have stopped then, even if he had so wished.

“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!”