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!”
CHAPTER IV
The Bright Ones
The firmament was filled with fire. All else was blotted out, forgotten — the farther stars, the little worlds of men. There was nothing else anywhere but the raging storming beauty of the Sun.
The little wisp of flame that had been a man hung motionless in space, absorbing through every sentient atom of his being the overmastering wonder. He had come up out of shadowed Vulcan into the full destroying light, the unmasked splendor of the burning star that was lord of all the planets.
He had risen toward it, rapidly at first, then more and more slowly as his new and untried perceptions brought home to him the magnitude of the scene. Awe overcame him and he remained poised in mid-flight, struggling with sensations not given to any creature of corporeal form.
He could feel the pressure of light. It came in a headlong rush from out of the boiling cauldron of atomic dissolution, reaching away to unguessed limits of space, and he that had been Curt Newton felt its strength pushing against him.