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DIE, SHADOW!
BY ALGIS BUDRYS
He began as a hero. Eons later and a universe away, he became instead a god!
I
Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship's crazy tumbling, Greaves tensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to his feet. He wasn't dead yet. He wasn't dead and, if the slim chance paid off, he'd still be present to laugh in the government's face when the first, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across the emptiness between Earth and the Sun's second planet.
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.
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.
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.
In the capsule, the valve controlling the flow from the illogically copious supply of anesthetic snapped off cleanly. David Greaves' lungs jolted to the impact as a century's dosage of the high-pressure gas delivered its one giant hammerblow of sleep.... Of sleep like death....
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