Captain Future 22 - Children of the Sun (May 1950) by Edmond Hamilton Page A

fate.
    Abruptly, from beyond the bulkhead door of the bridge-room, two voices, one deep and booming, the other lighter and touched with an odd sibilance, were raised in an outburst of argument.
    Newton turned sharply. “Stop that wrangling! You’d better get those anti-heaters going or we’ll all fry.”
    The door slid open and the remaining members of the unique quartet came in. One of them, at first glance, appeared wholly human — with a lithe lean figure and finely-cut features. And yet in his pointed white face and bright ironic eyes there lurked a disturbing strangeness.
    A man but no kin to the sons of Adam. An android, the perfect creation of scientific craft and wisdom — humanity carried to its highest power, and yet not human. He carried his difference with an air, but Curt Newton was aware that Otho was burdened with a loneliness far more keen than any he could know himself.
    The android said quietly, “Take it easy, Curt. The unit’s already functioning.”
    He glanced through the window at the glaring vista of space and shivered. “I get edgy myself, playing around the Sun this close.”
    Newton nodded. Otho was right. It was one thing to come and go between the planets, even between the stars. It was a wholly different thing to dare approach the Sun.
    The orbit of Mercury was a boundary, a limit. Any ship that went inside it was challenging the awful power of the great solar orb. Only ships equipped with the anti-heat apparatus dared enter that zone of terrible force — and then only at great peril.
    Only the fourth of the Futuremen seemed unworried. He crossed to the window, his towering metal bulk looming over them all. The same scientific genius that had created the android had shaped also this manlike metal giant, endowing him with intelligence equal to the human and with a strength far beyond anything human.
    Grag’s photoelectric eyes gazed steadily from his strange metal face, into the wild shaking glare. “I don’t know what you’re jumpy about,” he said. “The Sun doesn’t bother me a bit.” He flexed his great gleaming arms. “It feels good.”
    “Stop showing off,” said Otho sourly.
    “You’ll burn out your circuits and we’ve better things to do than trying to cram your carcass out through the disposal lock.”
    The android turned to Captain Future. “You haven’t raised Vulcan yet?”
    Newton shook his head. “Not yet.”
    Presently a faint aura of hazy force surrounded the little ship as it sped on — the anti-heater unit building up full power. The terrible heat of the Sun could reach through space only as radiant vibrations. The aura generated by the anti-heaters acted as a shield to refract and deflect most of that radiant heat.
    Newton touched a button. Still another filter-screen, this one the heaviest of all, slid across the window. Yet even through all the screens the Sun poured dazzling radiance.
    The temperature inside the ship was steadily rising. The anti-heaters could not deflect all the Sun’s radiant heat. Only a fraction got through but that was enough to make the bridge-room an oven.
    An awed silence came upon the Futuremen as they looked at the mighty star that filled almost all the firmament ahead. They had been this close to the Sun before but no previous experience could lessen the impact of it.
    You never saw the Sun until you got this close, Newton thought. Ordinary planet-dwellers thought of it as a beneficent golden thing in the sky, giving them heat and light and life. But here you saw the Sun as it really was, a throbbing seething core of cosmic force, utterly indifferent to the bits of ash that were its planets and to the motes that lived upon those ashes.
    They could, at this distance, clearly see gigantic cyclones of flame raging across the surface of the mighty orb. Into those vortices of fire all Earth could have been dropped, and from around them exploded burning geysers that could have shriveled worlds.
    Sweat was running down Curt