Fear that man

moaned like a thousand banshees. The terrific stress of the multi-mile fall would start popping rivets shortly.
        It was going to be an uphill fight-literally and figuratively. He had to grapple up the incline and reach the cargo-room hatch. Even there, it was not a certainty that he could open it under the vast pressures working against 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