Fear That Man

him. But he couldn’t just give up and die as the witless, shrieking reporters seemed to have done behind him. Panting, red-faced, with sweat streaming over his face and burning in his eyes, he fought his way, struggling over an ever-increasing inclination.

Something boomed, scraped loudly the length of the hill. The radar module had been torn loose and dragged along the ship.

Sam moved.

At the hatch, he braced his back against the seat to the right and tried turning the wheel that would open the portal. It wasn’t easy. He was fighting the pressure of their rapid descent and the heavy wheel. Now and again, the engines kicked in, trying to avert the fast approaching doom, and their jolting did nothing to help him. He felt like a moth trying to lift the candle and take it home. His heart pounded, and his eyes filled with tears. When he thought his chest was ready to break open like a nutshell and expel the meat of his heart, he felt the thump of complete revolution, and tugged on the door. He had just enough sense to pull his hands back as the great circular doorway swung violently backward, drawn by the forces of the plunging ship, and crashed into the wall. Beyond lay the storage chamber and the floater. The ramp into the round ball-like vehicle was open. They had seen him coming and understood his purpose and were delaying their escape.

Behind, the two reporters were fighting each other to be first to the floater after Sam. As a result, neither would make it in time.

Sam was halfway across the room when the deck buckled and tossed him face-first onto the metal plating, cutting his chin. He tasted blood, felt himself slipping backward toward the hatch, losing ground. He grabbed a cargo-fastening ring in the floor, held on. Forcing his vision to clear, he saw that the entry ramp was ten yards away, beyond a slight wrinkle in the deck. Surveying the rest of the floor, he found that he could work his way to the ramp by grabbing the cargo fastening rings and dragging himself over the last thirty feet. But his muscles were so terribly sore!

There was a booming in the front of the ship, and the door between the pilot’s cabin and the passenger area sealed itself with a loud sirening. The viewplate had smashed out of — or rather into — the pilot’s chamber, probably skewering the crew with thousands of slivers of plastiglass — including the blue-eyed hostess with the trim, tan legs. Soon, similar things would be happening to the hull and the rest of the ship. If they didn’t crash first. Which was a distinct possibility.

Reaching for the next ring, he began crawling up the deck. In a surprisingly short time, speed increased with the imminent presence of death, he had reached the runneled gangplank. Hands latched onto him, dragged him into the floater. He looked up to say thanks, saw that his rescuer was a man with the legs of a horse, and slipped willingly into blackness.

IV

Nests budded.

Nests bloomed rapidly, one after another like roses in a speeded stop-action film.

A new generation came forth, the uncountable generation of an uncountable cycle of generations. The new- hatched slugs worked their jaws rapidly, smashing their gums together, looking for some manner of nourishment. Web hangings flushed about them and guarded them against scraping harshly against deck plating or over raised bolts and seams in the skin of Raceship. Almost as one organism, the thousands of pink, young slugs, rising up and standing on only half their segments, mewed piteously — asking, asking, asking. The mists of shock-absorbent webs swayed with their crawling quest, shredded and came down around them. And the mists parted as the sacrifice slugs came forth from their places of waiting, glorying that their time was finally near, finally at hand, finally and gloriously to be consummated. They drew back and threw themselves at the young slugs, opening the pores of their first segments so that appetite-arousing juices could flow out and permeate the air with a delicious, dank heaviness. The baby slugs responded, whining insanely, gnawing their horny gums into the pulpy body of the elder sacrifice slugs, gnawing and tearing at the flesh, swallowing it in great shreds, foaming over the smell of blood. And still the sacrifice slugs came joyfully, to be fulfilled in purpose.

In the Ship’s Core, the Central Being turned to the other matters bothering It:

The slugs in the navigation and tracking quarters had come upon the form of another ship moving out and away from the vessel they had shot down shortly before. If this smaller thing should escape, Raceship might be in danger of discovery by the minions of mankind that swarmed in the galaxy ahead. There was great fury among the navigators and radar crews as they worked over the instruments, their pseudopodia grasping at the controls. The smaller ship, the chief tracker discovered, was a ball of some sort. Hollow. Yes, definitely hollow. At first, they feared it might be a bomb. But it moved away from Raceship, not toward it. Still, they must get it. It had greater speed, at this low altitude, than Raceship had, but the slug-form crew lifted the mountainous ship and set out in pursuit, coasting over the surface of Chaplin I, seeking to kill…

V

“Are you all right?” a small, china-tone voice whisper-spoke to him as he swam upward through the inkiness that seemed endless, thick, and sticky. But, after all, there was light, and he homed in on the words as if they were a small beacon that would lead him out of his fuzziness into clarity — a very pleasant, gentle beacon.

“He just passed out is all,” another, gruffer, voice said.

“You have no sympathy,” china-tone snapped.

Sam opened his eyes completely and found he was looking at a tiny, elfin face. Elfin! Pointed ears… small and delicate features… tiny but well-formed body… Wings! A pair of velvet-like wings fluffed gently behind her like sheets on a line, then drew shut. Their color matched the toga that fell to an end above her round and lovely knees. He remembered Hurkos and calmed himself. This was a mutant of some sort — whether a product of Nature or of the Artificial Wombs. A delightful mutation, to be sure. She was one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen.

“Are you okay?” she asked again, tiny lips parting slightly to let the little words out.

Sam groaned, tried to sit up.

“Don’t strain yourself,” she said, grasping his shoulders in her fine, shell hands in an effort to restrain him, her sculptured fingers pressing him back.

“I’m… okay,” he said, fighting off a headache that he knew could not successfully be fought off.

“I told you,” the gruff voice said.

Sam turned to the right, looked into the wide, handsome face of the man with the gruff voice. There was a wild mane of hair framing his head, partially covering his two large ears. Memories of being dragged into the floater by a man-horse came back to him. “I guess I should thank you for saving—”

“Wasn’t anything to it,” the man-horse said, flushing slightly and grinning.

“It was my life, though…”

“Don’t praise Crazy too much,” a third voice said. It was Andrew Coro, the man he had met briefly on Horner’s Earth ranch when a Beast hunt had been initiated some months ago. Coro stepped between the girl and the man-horse. “Things like that go to his head, and he gets impossible to live with.”

“Hmmph!” Crazy snorted.

“I haven’t met your… your colleagues, Mr. Coro.”

“Of course not,” Coro said. “I’m sorry. This is Lotus, our nursemaid, comforter, and spoiled friend. She’s also a famous botanist, but she’ll have you seeing plants in your sleep if you get her talking about it. Fair warning. This is Crazy Horse,” he continued, pointing to the other mutant before the elfin girl-woman could respond. “Crazy is our muscle, as you might have guessed — and a bit, I imagine, of our brains also. And me you know, Mr. Penuel.”

“Sam. And I’m pleased to meet you two. You did a fine job for Congressman Horner. Do you have anything for a headache?”