MASTER RACE

One moment he was piloting a fast plane over dangerous green jungles ... and the next Eddie was wide awake and peering through the gloom. Across the room Rags was whining softly and sniffing the damp night air that rolled in through the open window. The Scotty was excited, Eddie saw, and it must be something out of the ordinary for Rags' whimpering carried an undercurrent of perplexity and fear ... and the dog wasn't a coward.

The boy called softly to him, but Rags, after tossing back a swift glance of recognition, put his forefeet up on the sill and peered, muttering, out across the pastures.

Eddie slipped from his bed and padded over to the window. As he comfortingly ruffed the fur behind the Scottie's ears, he listened intently at the night. At first he heard only the ordinary country sounds—roosters crowing over at the next farm, the muffled thumping of stock shifting about in the barn and against the corral fence; the flittering and high chirping of birds in the cottonwoods and pepper trees. He took the dog in his arms and was about to go back to bed with him when he became aware of a sound that was very much out of the ordinary. A sound, Eddie decided, something like standing outside the Baptist church in Riverside when the organist was playing low, vibrant notes inside.

Eddie wondered how he could have first missed the sound, so firmly had it now become established. Where could it be coming from? It was, he guessed, about an hour till dawn, and no tractors or other farm machinery should be running. And it wasn't a radio.

A plane?

Leaning from the window he glanced upwards, then gasped in astonishment. Goose pimples of excitement tingled his skin, for there in the sky, above the oak tree on the ridge hung a pattern of sharp white lights. They were little lights, as if someone had strung together a fanciful arrangement of Christmas tree bulbs, then sent them dangling aloft beneath a kite.

Rags' mutterings became deep and angry. Finally he gave vent to a short sharp bark.

Instantly Eddie quieted the dog. Lights or not, his mother had made it plenty clear about Rags' being in the house.

Crouching on the floor, both arms about Rags, Eddie whispered words of reassurance while he stared up at the strange sparklings. The oak tree—the one with his tree house—was a scant quarter mile from where he knelt, and he wondered if its being so high on the ridge had caused it to draw some sort of lightning to itself. He'd read of that happening ... chain lightning. Or was it called Fox Fire? Eddie couldn't remember. Anyway, it looked something like that, he imagined.

But no lightning, he remembered, made a noise like a machine. Unconsciously, he'd hooked sight and sound together.

Frowning, Eddie let go of the dog. If the lights had been over the barn or garage, he'd have gone to tell his father. Or over the garden, his mother. But the tree house didn't concern them. It was his, and even if it hadn't been an hour before dawn he wouldn't have told his parents. He had things in there he shouldn't have, and it wouldn't do for either mother or father to go snooping around, even if they couldn't find his secret ladder and climb it.

He returned to the window.

Something thrashed in the highest branches of the oak. Rags began his whining again.

There was but one thing to do. He found his moccasins by the night table and pulled them on, threw a leather jacket on over his pajamas. From the wall above his desk, Eddie took down his .22, broke it, slipped in a shell, and tiptoed from the house.

The humming was stronger outside. Not louder, exactly, but more easy to feel. He crouched down, the way he'd seen commandos do in pictures, and began to run, holding the rifle at ready before him. And for once, Rags seemed content to stay at his side and not go dashing along ahead up the path. As they took the turn by the big rock a startled nightbird plunged out of the bushes and took wing. The bird's violent rush brought caution to Eddie and he slowed his run to a walk. Suppose, he thought, that someone in a helicopter or maybe a balloon was hanging over the tree house. Spies, probably. And suppose they wanted the tree house for a headquarters.

He stopped, looked back down at the house dimly outlined in the starlight. Suppose, he continued, that there were too many of them. He'd just better sneak up quiet and see what was going on.

He eased himself around another turn in the path and came again in view of the oak. The lights were still there, but they no longer looked to be mere points of brightness against an empty sky. He stopped, more puzzled than ever ... they looked like navigation lights on a ship, and a couple of them like the glow from inside a radio. And all of them were swaying gently in the night wind, twenty feet or so above the tree.

Rags went slowly ahead, two feet, three, four, then stopped ... belly almost to the dust. His teeth shone in a soundless snarl, not a muscle of his body moving. Eddie had never seen him act like this, not even when the bear had come down into the valley to raid for chickens. Rags was plainly terrified, and something of the dog's emotion communicated itself. The boy bit his lip grimly, then strained to listen, heard what the dog was hearing; someone ... something was moving about up in the oak.

Some of his fear gave way to anger. "Messin' around in my tree house!"

He gripped the rifle tightly, took two determined steps forward. The third step he never completed. He was unconscious when he pitched into the ground. And when Rags leaped after him, he too crumpled as if dead....

The Commander left his report-strewn desk and strode heavily over to the forward port. Glumly, he looked down at the frosty pitted surface of the satellite a thousand miles away, and in his imagination saw the planet that swung on the dead orb's opposite side. It was nonsense to have to hide behind a moon from such a primitive planet, waiting and waiting like a coward for reassuring information. But such prudence had ever been part of holy Law.

He sighed, turned away from the huge wall of window. Sometimes one wondered about Law, he mused darkly. One did not disobey, of course, but one could not help wondering sometimes. And occasionally one even wondered the blackest heresy of all—was it really important to kill all life everywhere for the sake of colonization.

The Commander caught sight of his reflection in a polished door panel. His own hard eyes glowered out from the reflection accusingly, so he pulled up his shoulders and put all suspicion from his mind. Would he not destroy any of his people for such thoughts? Then he must not allow himself to entertain such blasphemy. Naturally, colonization was all-important. That was Law.

Picking up the pictures taken when they had first flashed into this system, the Commander saw again the nature of the beings they were about to exterminate. That they were ignorant savages, quite unworthy of the usual precautions now being taken, was plain to see. Their atmosphere showed heavy traces of carbon combustion, a certain indication that the creatures were inefficient, for who but a savage would burn matter to obtain power? The amount of radioactivity present in their gaseous envelope was so tiny as to prove that they had little or no knowledge of atomic power. There were no frell vibrations apparent; imagine existing without an understanding of simple magnetics!

He picked up an enlargement of one portion of a land mass, put a hand magnetic lens over it. The magnification showed clusters of dwellings, linked together by lines and double lines upon the ground—certainly the ultimate proof of low-order civilization, when beings chose to live clustered together, commuting by land, when they could spread themselves out over the surface of their planet and use the roads of the sky.

The Commander made a sign in the air with his fingers and a door popped open at the end of the vast room. An aide ran toward the desk, halted, covered his face in salute.

"Sir?"

"How long has the scout been gone?"

The aide removed his hands from his eyes. "A day and a night, sir. He should be back any time, now."

"Fool!" The Commander roared out the word. "Did I ask for your guesses? I know he's due back. He is, in fact, one hour overdue." He did not know if this was or was not true, but it was good discipline policy. "Lock him away when he arrives."

The other covered his face respectfully. "Yes, sir." He turned, ran from the desk and out the door.

For a few minutes the Commander kept busy by calling the ten ray-centers of the three mile long ship, demanding to know if they were ready to beam. They were. He then spent a while ordering all unit leaders to hold their sections in readiness for inertialess drive. The unit leaders protested politely that they were. He called engine, commanded that they "look sharp." Meekly they assured him that all was well.

With only small satisfaction, the Commander rose from his desk, paced slowly over to the port again. As he gazed out at the moon's bland surface, he reflected that there was something about this nine planet system they were in that made him edgy ... made him want to keep active and alert.

And where was that thrice-blasted scout?

He decided to have him flogged when he returned. Good discipline policy.

The Scout woke from his drunken sleep and glanced at the clock on the dash of his little craft. It was very late, he saw. He would have to think of a fine excuse when he returned or they would put him in Truth and learn that all Scouts took the precious freedom of voyages to become intoxicated for a while.

Not much time! He would have to take what he could find in the vicinity. Small difference it made, though, since the beings of the planet were surely doomed.

The Scout yawned, then lifted the ship from the mountain and arrowed it down into the folds of the valley. His visor translated the immediate night into light, showing him the typically repugnant surface features of a type J planet: Foliage, sharp young geology, water flowing in natural beds. A world like a hundred others he'd visited in the name of Law.

When the floor of the valley came up he leveled off, then silently sped along in search of dwellings. Beneath him, on level stretches of land, stood odd four-legged creatures. The dominants of this world? he wondered. Probably not. The extremities of their limbs appeared to be too blunt and crude to do even the simple tooling he'd noticed during his flight in. Beasts of transport, no doubt. Boldly, he swooped low over a group, scattering them in panic.

The meadow ended with almost sheer mountain wall, and the Scout whipped his craft up its face and down the opposite side. Something flickered in his vision screen and he swung the controls. A dwelling! In a moment he was back over it, hanging motionless. Sure enough, a revolting crude shack that nestled high in the branches of one of this world's surface growths.

This was it. There was no time nor need to search further.

He locked the controls, then turned on the deadly screen that would kill all life directly beneath, save one properly shielded such as himself, and would stun all life attempting to enter the edges of the field.

Pulling on his helmet, the Scout reached to the stud at his belt and reduced his weight to but a fraction of itself. Then he opened the hatch and clambered out into the air.

His first few minutes of exploration in the tree house were disappointing. There was no life, no corpses about for him to dissect and study. But the hunting club puzzled him. Obviously tooled by machinery and scuffed from much killing, it bore what might be a word burnt into its thickened end: "SPAULDING." He realized he was in an extremely primitive section of the planet, for this weapon was, no doubt, a trade article from some more advanced portion of the globe. Too bad he'd had to land in this region. Dull.

The club he chucked into the bag over his shoulder.

A round object, made of some fairly soft material, with seams twisting over its surface next caught his eye. He took it up, shook it. It, too, bore the symbol "SPAULDING." Probably a totem word. Perhaps the sign of this particular tribe. He put it with the club. It was followed by a small package of soft white cylinders which were stuffed with crumbles of dried weed. Each cylinder bore the sign "CAMEL" as did the container, which also showed a beast, somewhat like those he had buzzed.

And beyond that there was nothing.

A simple people indeed, he pondered. He was about to leave when he noticed the stack of artifacts in one corner. The Scout bent to examine them. They seemed to be composed of the same material as the white of the "CAMEL" cylinders, but thicker and bound together in long wide flat construction. There were bright colors on the outside of each, and just as he discovered that the individual leaves of material could be separated and turned, the alarm bell sounded twice in his helmet. Life had blundered into the outer edges of his field.

Hastily, the Scout put a score of his latest finds into his sack and left the tree house. And without bothering to search for the life that had triggered his alarm (Law specified a Scout was to flee in such an instance) he adjusted his weight and rose up to his waiting ship.

Minutes later he had passed the world's satellite and was in view of his parent craft.

The Commander's first action was to order the Scout flogged before his comrades as an example of what awaited those who became lax in the performance of important duties. His second was to assemble the Council of Experts. When the eight old men had taken their places about the table, the Commander saluted them in the name of Law, then summoned his aide. "Is Decontamination through?"

"It is, sir."

"Then have the findings brought in."

The officer ran from the room and returned in a moment with the Scout's bulging sack. Gently he placed it in the center of the round table before the council. After saluting he took his leave again.

"Gentlemen," began the Commander, "we are met again to pass judgment on a corrupt, life-harboring planet. By the authority vested in me through the line of my father I charge you with the voice of Law." And so on, and on, with the ancient words of the ritual. The eight old experts hardly listened. They had sat through countless identical sessions during the hundreds of years of their lives. Theirs was but to view the oddities that would presently be arranged before them, make mental records of their descriptions, and offer one or two tentative guesses as to the nature of the articles. But in any event, the action that followed would be the same. The creatures responsible for the articles would shortly be snuffed out ... in the glorious and awful name of Law.

So they hardly listened.

When the Commander had finished with the rites of the occasion he unsnapped the bag and after peering within it, gingerly brought out the Scout's first find. Only now did the old men appear to take much notice. A few even leaned forward slightly. All eyes centered on what their Commander held.

"A phallic object?" asked the youngest.

"No. A lever," said the eldest.

"For killing," added the next.

"But it was made by machine," put in a fourth.

For a moment they were silent. The Commander placed the "machine-made killing-lever" on the table. It described a short little half-roll, bringing the printing into view.

"A religious design," said the youngest. "Obviously pagan."

"But rather well worked."

No one found anything further to say, so the Commander brought forth from the bag the next object. A mild flurry of interest ensued when it was discovered that this soft globular thing bore the same "religious design." But the sages would not venture an opinion as to the thing's purpose, so the Commander took out the package of white cylinders.

Only the next to the eldest made any comment. He claimed that he had seen such articles in his youth, brought out from a system of three worlds that swung above a nova. The white things there, he reminisced, were units of value ... useful in bartering. They were designed to be spent quickly, lest the stuffing fall out. The other experts agreed that these were no doubt also monies.

The Commander had been listening with but half an ear. Privately, he had long considered the experts to be but a muttering pack of senile dolts ... dead weight, useless cargo on the ship. They worked not, neither did they breed. But Law demanded their presence. The Law, he mused, seemed strange at times.

He discovered the Council was waiting for him. Frowning to cover his embarrassment, he took out the last of the Scout's finds. For a moment all of them were struck by the bright colors on the flat surface. The one old man reached out a trembling hand. "Records," he murmured incredulously. "Records such as our own race is said to have once made, long, long ago before Law." Reverently, he examined the cover, then with remarkable agility for one so decrepit he jumped to his feet and flung the thing from him. His face twitched with horror.

The others shocked and disbelieving, fell to examining the rest of the new articles. In a moment, cries of alarm filled the council room. Chairs were upset, dignity forgotten. Only the eldest retained his composure, although with difficulty, for he could hardly manage to control the palsied shaking of his hands. The astonished Commander leaned over his shoulder and watched as the ancient turned the pages.

What he saw made the blood drum in his ears, made his vision swim, and only faintly did he hear the old one's croaking words. "Praise to Law, which we so carelessly accepted, for Law has saved us from the fiendish denizens of this planet. Had we attempted to exterminate them, their space armadas would have taken instant revenge. For they are obviously mightier than we." He put down the bright record of space craft vaster than the one which they occupied and took up another. On its cover was depicted a world being blasted into flaming wreckage, and within was shown the pictorial history of a space fleet, engaged in repelling an alien invasion, and who followed up their successful repulse by annihilating the entire system of the aliens.

Five more of the record books did they examine before the Commander's stunned mind at last reeled beneath the hideous concepts and he could look no more. Dumbly, he managed to reach the phones and order the ship thrown into emergency drive to some far and lost point in space and dimension.

And as he waited for the shuddering wrench that signalled interdimensional shift, he tried to forget the horrors they had so narrowly escaped: Creatures who could make themselves invisible, who had mastered space travel, who worked in magic more powerful than that of Law's, who could whiff out entire solar systems, who could survive incredible mishaps and hardships. Creatures who were no less than Gods!

A wave of fear tore at the Commander as the glittering moon faded away. Eternal nothingness of grey enclosed the ship....

The sun was up when Eddie recovered consciousness. Stiff and cold, he sat and looked around sleepily a moment before remembering. Then, as he saw Rags sitting before him, tail wagging happily, it all began to come back: Last night, sometime; humming lights above the tree house, someone moving about up there, himself sneaking up to see, then ... nothing. He must have tripped and knocked himself out, somehow. Eddie snatched up the .22 and aimed it at the tree. "Whoever's up there," he said, getting to his feet, "had better come on out!"

Nothing happened.

Eddie bent down cautiously, his eyes still fixed on the tree house, picked up a rock and hurled it through the shanty's open door. A bird fluttered from the gnarled oak, sailed across the morning meadow chirping angrily.

"This is your last chance. Come on out, or I'm comin' up and get you!" The bird's being there made him quite sure that everything was all right, so after a moment he pulled the knotted rope from its concealment in a cleft of the tree and went up hand over hand.

A strange odor lingered inside the shack. Something like ... Eddie sniffed, frowned ... something like a freshly blown fuse, but outside of that nothing seemed amiss at first. Then he discovered his softball and bat were missing. He found he didn't care too much. The season was over anyway; and besides, hunting and riding and fishing were more fun.

He looked further.

The cigarettes! He hoped the thief wouldn't snitch on him to dad. But that didn't make too much sense, he realized. The thief ... a tramp, probably, was far away by now, maybe at this very minute trying to trade the ball and bat for a meal or a drink.

And those humming lights? Even now he wasn't too sure he'd seen them. Stars, probably. The Little Dipper, or maybe fireflies, or lightning. Sure.

He turned to go. The sun told him it was almost seven o'clock. Mother would be furious if she found him out in the morning without having dressed properly, or eaten.

It was then he saw that something else was missing, but because it was so late he didn't stop to worry. "Mandrake The Magician," "The Invisible Boys," "Buck Rogers," "Bat Man" ... they were all old comic books. He'd finished with them months ago.

Eddie clambered down the rope, and seconds later he and Rags were joyfully racing along the trail that led to home.

It was a beautiful morning.