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

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.
    He watched, and felt the pattern of his new being tremble. His humanity was still too recent for him to look upon that unthinkable Sun-world without awe and fear.
    Two great waves, thousands of miles in height, reared up and rushed together across a hollow trough wider than all of Earth. They met and out of that sundering collision was born a prominence that burst upward in a pouring river of flame.
     
    CURT NEWTON felt himself caught in that titanic current. He fought it, finding that he could stand against it, finding a glory in his own new strength. A kind of ecstasy shot through him. He let himself go and the current took him and whirled him up, swift almost as light, past the chromosphere, past the corona, sheer into empty space. He rode it out, wild with exhilaration.
    He emerged from the prominence, swooping in a great circle, catching a fleeting glimpse of distant worlds spangled with light, and a memory came to him of his mission here and why he had left his human form to make this pilgrimage into the Sun.
    More soberly now he plunged again through the pale mists and the crimson tides and hovered over the photosphere, seeking others of his kind.
    Across unthinkable distances he searched and found no one. A terrible loneliness came upon him. He entered an area of storm where the great vortices of the sun-spots whirled and thundered in a maelstrom of electronic currents.
    He fled from them, deafened, shaken, and found himself crying out desperately, “Carlin! Carlin! Where are you?”
    Crying not with tongue or voice but with the power of his mind. And when he understood that he could speak that way he called again and again, darting this way and that across the burning oceans, heading the vast funnels of the solar storms.
    “Carlin! Carlin!”
    And someone answered. He heard the voice quite clearly in his mind or the part of his new being that was sensitive to the reception of thought.
    “Who calls, little brother?”
    Golden bright against the crimson chromosphere above, he saw winging toward him another of the Children of the Sun.
    He went to meet the stranger. Wheeling and dancing like two incredible butterflies of flame