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.