DIE, SHADOW!
BY ALGIS BUDRYS
He began as a hero. Eons later and a
universe away, he became instead a god!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I
I've come a long, long way to die alone, David Greaves thought asDefiance tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly tornapart by the explosion in her engines. On the console in front ofhim, the altimeter was one of the last few meaningful instruments,and it told him there were only a few tortured miles remaining beforethe ship he had brought this far—had spent his fortune in buildingwhen no government would yet consider risking a manned rocket on hisflight—would smash down to its doom on a planet no man had ever walked.
Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship's crazy tumbling, Greavestensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to hisfeet. He wasn't dead yet. He wasn't dead and, if the slim chance paidoff, he'd still be present to laugh in the government's face when thefirst, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across theemptiness between Earth and the Sun's second planet.
Dragging himself from handhold to handhold, his tendons cracking withthe strain, he levered himself toward the Crash Capsule, forced openits hatch and pulled himself through, while the winds of Venus tore atthe shattered hull and the scream of Defiance's passage through themurky sky rose to a savage howl.
Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knewwhat sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand mightlie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not carenow. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers ofmankind had waited until the sign-posts had gone up, the cave bearswould still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamedof might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over theUniverse.
I'll live to see my share of that, Greaves thought as he pulledthe capsule's hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that,in theory, would cushion much of the impact. Or else I'll knowI tried. He tripped the lever that would flood the capsule withDoctor Eckstrom's special anesthetic—the experimental compound thatmight—just barely, might—offer a chance.
As the hiss of the yellow-tinged, acrid gas became louder and louderin his ears, David Greaves thought again of the almost obsessivelengths to which he had gone in making sure that there would be sucha thing as the capsule. The entire project—the decision to buildthe ship, to sacrifice for it the personal fortune he had built upin his meteoric rise from obscurity to being one of the world's mostdynamic and certainly youngest industrialists—had been marked by hisfanatical persistence and dedication. But that dream had come first,and the fortune second—the sole purpose of his career, from its verybeginnings when he was only another engineer test pilot, had simplybeen to accumulate the means so Defiance could be built. But theship had been three-quarters complete when he conceived the idea forthe capsule. He could not even now remember exactly when or how he haddecided that he must have some device aboard that would protect himfrom a crash and—here was the vital thing he insisted upon—keep himalive, no matter how injured, no matter how long mi