Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the sign-posts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe.
I'll live to see my share of that, Greaves thought as he pulled the capsule's hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that, in theory, would cushion much of the impact. Or else I'll know I tried. He tripped the lever that would flood the capsule with Doctor Eckstrom's special anesthetic—the experimental compound that might—just barely, might—offer a chance.
As the hiss of the yellow-tinged, acrid gas became louder and louder in his ears, David Greaves thought again of the almost obsessive lengths to which he had gone in making sure that there would be such a thing as the capsule. The entire project—the decision to build the ship, to sacrifice for it the personal fortune he had built up in his meteoric rise from obscurity to being one of the world's most dynamic and certainly youngest industrialists—had been marked by his fanatical persistence and dedication. But that dream had come first, and the fortune second—the sole purpose of his career, from its very beginnings when he was only another engineer test pilot, had simply been to accumulate the means so Defiance could be built. But the ship had been three-quarters complete when he conceived the idea for the capsule. He could not even now remember exactly when or how he had decided that he must have some device aboard that would protect him from a crash and—here was the vital thing he insisted upon—keep him alive, no matter how injured, no matter how long might be necessary, until rescuers could reach him.
For him to even think in terms of rescuers—of depending on others—was totally uncharacteristic. For him to divert a major portion of his dwindling resources from work on the ship itself, and push toward the elaborate design of the capsule, was, in some lights, again uncharacteristically foolish. But he had done it, and now....
... Now the anesthetic created by the man some said was a medical genius and some said was a quack had flooded over him.
He could feel the first effect—the calm, the drowsy peace. By the time the Defiance smashed into the ground—very soon now—his metabolism would have slowed to a carefully metered rate. It would take hours for his heart to beat once. To him it would seem as if each day was only a few minutes. The jagged nerve-flashes of pain would be only a faraway slow tingle; the blink of an eye would encompass hours of actual time, and he would lie here, safe, asleep, until the hatch was opened and he was taken out into the air, where slowly the effects would wear off.
Meanwhile, there was more than enough gas compressed into the capsule's tanks to keep him perfectly relaxed for a hundred years. The valve—a simple device he had sketched out in five minutes, as if the design had been part of his mind for years—would continue to meter out the supply at the optimum rate and pressure.
It was only now—perhaps a hundred feet from impact, perhaps only a hundred hairs-breadths—that he suddenly saw the flaw in the design.
He struggled to reach the valve, in a useless reflex, for there would have been nothing he could have done, no matter how much time remained. Then he fell back, a twisted grin on his face. I've come a long, long way to trap myself, he laughed in his drowsing mind, as the ship crashed, and the capsule, torn from Defiance's side, rebounded like a cannon shell from Heaven upon the outraged soil of Venus, and the overhead clouds sprang into flamed reflection from the blast of Defiance's end.