"Those flakes of flame?"
"Not flakes of flame," said Kellard. "They are the children of the
stars."
Halfrich went rigid, staring upward. And now Kellard knew that there
was no more hope. No hope at all.
* * * * *
The five bright things had flashed down toward the great fire-fountain.
They plunged into it, out of it, climbed swift as the eye could follow,
racing up its mighty geyser, frolicking in it joyously. The fountain
raved higher and the five sped up and whirled and danced upon its
rising plume, and Kellard thought that they were laughing.
In and out of the leaping fires they plunged, and then one of them
veered down toward the place where Halfrich and Kellard stood. There
was something so humanly purposeful in its sudden movement that
Halfrich stepped back.
"Stand still," said Kellard.
"But--" Halfrich protested.
"They won't hurt us," said Kellard, his voice flat and dull. "They're
friendly, playful, curious. Stand still."
And now all five of the flashing flames were around them, darting,
recoiling, then gliding forward again to touch their heat-armor with
questing tendrils of living force, living light.
Halfrich spoke, trying to keep his voice steady but forming the words
in a choked fashion.
"Something--in my mind--"
"They're telepathic, in a way you can't even imagine," said Kellard.
"And they're curious. They're curious about us, what we are, how we
think. They can merge minds with us, somehow." And he added, with a
last cruel impulse of dying anger, "You wanted to know. Now know."
He had time to say nothing more before the impact hit him, just as
it had that other time, the full stunning shock of unearthly minds
interlocking with his own, searching out his thoughts and memories.
Curious, yes. Like children who have found strange, ungainly creatures
and wish to know how they live. And as they entered his mind, Kellard's
mind entered theirs, fused with them, and there was again the dizzying
whirl of memories and feelings that were not his own, that his
different, more brutishly physical nature could never apprehend more
than dimly.
But that half-apprehension was staggering. He was no longer Hugh
Kellard, a man with flesh and bones who had been born on an air-drowned
heavy planet named Earth.
He was one of the children of the stars.
His memory stretched far back, for his life was almost unlimited in
time. For long and long beyond human comprehension he had lived with
his companions the strange and beautiful life of their kind.
Born of the stars, of the unimaginable forces, pressures, temperatures,
atomic conditions within the mighty suns. Born, as the end product of
an evolutionary chain almost as old as the universe itself, a grouping
of photons that grew toward consciousness, toward individuality and
volition. Their bodies were force, rather than matter, their senses had
nothing to do with sight or hearing, their movement was an effortless
flash and glide as fast as the photons of light itself.
* * * * *
With the other kind of life in the universe, the heavy slow-moving
things of matter that grew upon the comparatively cold, dark planets,
they had had nothing to do at all. They were of the suns, not the
planets, and those chill worlds of fixed, solid matter so repelled
them that they would not even approach most of them.
Star-child, star-child, at home in the bursting splendors of the
stellar fires, and able to move like light from star to star. And again
Kellard felt the agony of that ecstasy that was his in this shared
memory.
"_We things of matter, we men, who thought that space and the stars
would be ours_--"
But how could the wide universe belong to solid, heavy, physical
creatures who must painfully move in bubbles of air, who crawled
between the petty planets encased in metal tombs, who could not even
approach the glories of the great suns?
No, the ecstasy was one that men would never know except at secondhand
through this brief contact! The glorious rush together of the
star-children through the vast abysses, drinking up the energy of the
radiation about them. The audacious and dangerous coasting along the
shores of dark nebulae, racing the lumbering comets and leaving them
behind, on until you felt through all your photons the beckoning warmth
of the star you approached. Ignore the cinders called planets that
creep around it, speed faster, faster, brothers, the way has been long
but we are almost there! And now the radiation that was so weak in
the outer darks is strong and lusty-roaring, and the great prominences
reach out like arms to gather us in. The shock, the joy, of the first
plunge once more into the star. Dive deep, brothers, deep through the
outer fires into the throbbing solar furnaces where the atoms are
hammered as in forges, changing, shifting their shapes, exploding into
force.
Spin in the vortices of the great stellar tornadoes, fling off and fall
headlong and then dive laughing in again. Search for the others of your
kind, if there are none here there will be at the next star. Up again,
out of the boiling fires, and then drift quiet, dreaming, in the pearly
glow of the corona, endless afternoon of warmth and light and peace.
* * * * *
But on the sunward side of the tiny planet nearby, a plaything beckons.
Fire and light fountain up from the solid rock. There at least we can
go, for that place is washed by tides of solar life, not chilled and
dead. Speed down toward it, as the fire, the life it spouts higher out
of the repellantly fixed and solid matter. Frolic in the fountain,
through and around it as it rises higher. And what are the things that
move on the rock near it, the things that look grotesquely as though
matter had been endowed with life? Reach out with your thought-senses
and try to apprehend them. Mind, life--in matter! Try to understand how
matter thinks, how matter feels, plumb the grotesque memories of them,
the vistas of crawling things at the bottom of whelming air-oceans,
things of clay too frail to endure, yet things that in their brief
living have come here. But the mind recoils from such memories, such a
life.
Brothers, we go! First to refresh ourselves in the deepest streams of
the star, and then away across the abysses to another star we know.
There is nothing to hold us here--
And the oneness was gone from Kellard's mind, and he was no child of
light and stars, he was a man of clay, standing stupid and sick and
shaking by the falling fires of the fountain.
He looked at Halfrich. But Halfrich stood, with his head bowed, and
Kellard felt only pity.