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

Newton’s face now and he gasped a little for each breath. “Temperature, Otho?” he asked without turning his head.
    “Only fifty degrees under the safety limit and the anti-heaters running full load,” said the android. “If we’ve miscalculated course —”
    “We haven’t,” said Captain Future. “There’s Vulcan ahead.”
    The planetoid, the strange lonely little solar satellite, had come into view as a dark dot closely pendant to the sky-filling Sun.
    Newton drove the Comet forward unrelentingly now. Every moment this close to the Sun there was peril. Let the anti-heaters stop one minute and metal would soften and fuse, flesh would blacken and die.
    Otho suddenly raised his hand to point, crying out, “Look! Sun-children!”
    They had heard of the legendary “Sun-children” from the Vulcanian natives, had once glimpsed one far off. But these two were nearer. Newton, straining his eyes against the solar glare, could barely see the things — two whirling little wisps of flame, moving fast through the blinding radiance of the corona.
    Then the two will-o-wisps of fire had disappeared in the vast glare. The eye searched for them in vain.
    “I still think,” Simon was saying, “that they’re just wisps of flaming hydrogen that are flung off the Sun and then fall back again.”
    “But the Vulcanians told of them coming down into Vulcan,” Otho objected. “How could bits of flaming gas do that?”
     
    CURT NEWTON hardly listened. He was already whipping the ship in around Vulcan in a tight spiral few spacemen would have risked. Its brake rockets thundering, it scudded low around the surface of the little world.
    The whole surface was semi-molten rock. The heat of the planetoid’s stupendous neighbor kept its outer skin half-melted. Lava sweltered in great pools, infernal lagoons framed by smoking rock hills. Fire burst up from the rocks, as though called forth by the nearby Sun.
    Grag first saw what they were looking for — a gaping round pit in the sunward side of the planetoid. Presently Captain Future had the Comet hovering on keel-jets above the yawning shaft. He eased on the power-pedal and the little ship dropped straight down into the pit.
    This shaft was the one way inside the hollow solar satellite. At the planetoid’s birth gases trapped within it had caused it to form as a hollow shell. Those gases, finally bursting out as pressure increased, had torn open this way to the outer surface.
    The ship sank steadily down the shaft. Light was around them for this side of Vulcan was toward the Sun now and a great beam entered.
    Then, finally, the shaft debouched into a vast space vaguely lighted by that beam — the interior of the hollow world.
    “Whew, I’m glad to be in here out of that solar radiance,” breathed Otho. “Now where?”
    Newton asked, “The ruins near Yellow Lake, wasn’t it?”
    “Yes,” answered the Brain’s metallic voice. “It was where the ship left Carlin and where it was to pick him up.”
    The Futuremen had been here inside Vulcan once before. Yet they felt again the wonder of this strangest world in the System as the Comet flew low over its inner surface.
    Beneath their flying ship stretched a weird landscape of fern jungles. It extended into a shrouding haze ahead, the horizon fading away in an upward curve. Over their heads now was the hazy “sky” of the planetoid’s central hollow, cut across by the tremendous, glittering sword of the giant beam of sunlight that gave light to this world.
    As their ship slanted down over the fern jungle toward their destination a feeling of gray futility came upon Curt Newton. Months had passed since Philip Carlin had disappeared here. Could the scientist have survived alone so long in his wild world?
    A city wrecked by time lay beneath them, almost swallowed by the giant ferns. Only scattered crumbling stones of massive dimensions had survived the ravages of unthinkable ages. It was like the flotsam of a lost ship,