Help identifying story about an alien device called the Chalice giving humans healing and immortality

[Jeff]

I read this story somewhere in the late 1970s or the early 1980s. My impression is that it was a little older than that.

The story was about a mission to an asteroid or a moon in our solar system. Once there, they found an alien device they described as the Chalice. People who go through the device are said to have been "Chaliced". Being chaliced gives you greater strength, stamina, resistance to disease, accelerated healing, and virtual immortality. A type of civil war breaks out, with regular humans against the few who had been chaliced. Eventually, the chaliced destroy the machine and return to being normal humans.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

TIA,
--jeff

[Kim]

Something by Philip José Farmer perhaps? Like this short story of his http://astoundingstoriesofsuperscienc...

[Mary]

Yes, but I don't remember either the title or the author.

It opens with the main character amnesiac and playing the circus strongman IIRC. And there's a gap of a generation between his and his son's, where the chalice gets destroyed. And the state is not so much war as unrelenting persecution -- the son and a woman leave the Solar System because they can, being chaliced, take the damage inflicted by the space ship, and what drives them to destroy the chalice is witnessing how it has had horrible effects in an alien society.

[Jeff]

Mary -- yes! That's the one! I've been wanting to track it down to read it again. Now if we can only come up with an author or title. Grrrrr..... It keep eluding me.

[Jeff]

Thanks for the tip, Kim, but I don't think that's it. :-/