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 shrivelled worlds.
Sweat was running down Curt 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 skyfilling 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!”