The trapped industrialist exhaled his breath, counted three and dived into the tank.
His body sank and the atoms of helium temporarily left their random state with the influx of heat, but returned quickly as the magnetic field took up the slack, vaporizing the ammonium salts. All was quiet again—
The human brain and the secondary laws of thermodynamics had combined to thwart the will of a relentless universe.
Edwin Dollard, financial genius and murderer in his time, had entered into a state of suspended animation from which only an equal intelligence could ever awaken him.
he planets and their satellites revolved in their orbits for uncounted centuries, until even the fixed stars shifted and formed new constellations. During this long almost interminable period, no man-made vessels disturbed the equilibrium between the worlds; no man-made radiations penetrated the empty spaces of the solar system. A wanderer from Procyon or Sirius, entering the neighborhood of Sol, might well have suspected he had found nine lifeless spheres pursuing a futile and purposeless course about their flaming parent.
So immutable however are the laws of celestial mechanics, once set into operation, that Dollard's ship varied not a centimeter in its elliptical path during those endless dragging years.
But organic life, by its very definition, is highly viable, highly persistent; it is capable of protracted existence in such diverse environments as the imbedded hearts of meteors or the currents of briny polar seas. It is likewise capable of infinite modifications under stress, such as glacial flow, cessation of moisture, loss of sunlight ... or, the rampant onslaught of bacterial disease.
Hardiest of all forms of life, as proved in the last days of the reptilian age, are the carnivorous mammalian orders; these members are generally the most adaptable, intelligent and ubiquitous of living types. And by their conquest of their stubborn environment, they have proven themselves equally the fiercest.