BEST FRIEND Like most of the earliest Futurlan stories, "Best Friend" was written to fill a hole in one of the magazines I was editing. I think it was in Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie's After Worlds Collide that I had, years before, read a throwaway line about a vanished alien race whose pets had been as intelligent as modern human beings. I had wanted to explore Mat further, from the point of view of the pets: Cyril agreed, and "Best Friend" was the result Moray smoothed his whiskers with one hand as he pressed down on the accelerator and swung easily into the top speed lane. Snapping the toggle into a constant eighty-per, he lit a meat-flavored cigarette and replaced the small, darkly warm bar of metal in its socket. He hummed absently to himself, Nothing to do after you were in your right lane ? not like flying. He turned on the radio. '?by Yahnn Bastion Bock,' said the voice. Moray listened; he didn't know the name. Then there breathed into the speeding little car the sweetly chilly intervals of a flute-stop. Moray smiled. He liked a simple melody. The music ascended and descended like the fiery speck on an oscillograph field; slowed almost to stopping, and then the melody ended. Why, Moray wondered plain-lively, couldn't all music be like that? Simple and clear, without confusing by-play. The melody rose again, with a running mate in the oboe register, and like a ceremonial dance of old days they intertwined and separated, the silvery flute-song and the woody nasal of the oboe. The driver of the little car grew agitated. Suddenly, with a crash, diapasons and clarions burst into the tonal minuet and circled heavily about the principals. Moray started and snapped off the radio. Try as he would, he never could get used to the Masters' music, and he had never known one of his people who could. He stared out of the window and stroked his whiskers again, forcing his thoughts into less upsetting channels. A staccato buzz sounded from the dashboard. Moray looked at the road-signs and swung into a lower speed-lane, and then into another. He looped around a ramp intersection and drove into a side-street, pulling up before a huge apartment dwelling. Moray climbed out into the strip of fuzzy pavement that extended to the lobby of the building. He had to wait a few moments for one of the elevators to discharge its burden; then he got in and pressed the button that would take him to Floor L, where lived Birch, whom he greatly wanted to marry. The elevator door curled back and he stepped out into the foyer. He quickly glanced at himself in a long pier glass in the hall, flicked some dust from his jacket. He advanced to the door of Birch's apartment and grinned into the photo-eye until her voice invited him in. Moray cast a glance about the room as he entered. Birch was nowhere to be seen, so he sat down patiently on a low couch and picked up a magazine. It was lying opened to a story called, 'The Feline Foe.' `Fantastic,' he muttered. All about an invading planetoid from interstellar space inhabited by cat-people. He felt his skin crawl at the thought, and actually growled deep in his throat. The illustrations were terrifying real ? in natural color, printed in three-ply engravings. Each line was a tiny ridge, so that when you moved your head from side to side the figures moved and quivered, simulating life. One was of a female much like Birch, threatened by one of the felines. The caption said, ' "Now," snarled the creature, "we shall see who will be Master !" ' Moray closed the magazine and put it aside. 'Birch !' he called protestingly. In answer she came through a sliding door and smiled 'at him. 'Sorry I kept you waiting,' she said. `That's all right,' said Moray. 'I was looking at this thing.' He held up the magazine. Birch smiled again. 'Well, happy birthday !' she cried. 'I didn't forget. How does it feel to be thirteen years old?' `Awful. Joints cracking, hair coming out in patches, and all.' Moray was joking; he had never felt better, and thirteen was the prime of life to his race. 'Birch,' he said suddenly. 'Since I am of age, and you and I have been friends for a long time --' `Not just now, Moray,' she said swiftly. 'We'll miss your show. Look at the time!' `All right,' he said, leaning back and allowing her to flip on the telescreen. 'But remember, Birch ? I have something to say to you later.' She smiled at him and sat back into the circle of his arm as the screen commenced to flash with color. The view was of a stage, upon which was an elaborately robed juggler. He bowed and rapidly, to a muttering accompaniment of drums, began to toss discs into the air. Then, when he had a dozen spinning and flashing in the scarlet light, two artists stepped forward and juggled spheres of a contrasting color, and then two more with conventional Indian clubs, and yet two more with open-necked bottles of fluid. The drums rolled. 'Hup!' shouted the master-juggler, and pandemonium broke loose upon the stage, the artists changing and interchanging, hurling a wild confusion of projectiles at each others' heads, always recovering and keeping the flashing baubles in the air. 'Hup!' shouted the chief again, and as if by magic the projectiles returned to the hands of the jugglers. Balancing them on elbows and heads they bowed precariously, responding to the radioed yelps of applause from the invisible audience. `They're wonderful!' exclaimed Birch, her soft eyes sparkling. `Passably good,' agreed Moray, secretly delighted that his suggested entertainment was a success from the start. Next on the bill was a young male singer, who advanced and bowed with a flutter of soulful eyelids. His song was without words, as was usual among Moray's people. As the incredible headtones rose without breaking, he squirmed ecstatically in his seat, remembering the real pain he had felt earlier in the night, listening to the strange, confusing music of the Masters. Moray was in ecstasy, but there was a flaw in his ecstasy. Though he was listening with all his soul to the music, yet under the music some little insistent call for attention was coming through. Something very important, not repeated. He tried to brush it aside ... Birch nudged him sharply, a little light that you might have called horror in her eyes. 'Moray, your call! Didn't you hear it?' Moray snatched from a pocket the little receiving set his people always carried with them. Suddenly, and unmuffled this time, shrilled the attention-demanding musical note. Moray leaped up with haste ... But he hesitated. He was undecided ? incredibly so. 'I don't want to go,' he said slowly to Birch, astonishment at himself in every word. The horror in Birch's eyes was large now. 'Don't want to! Moray ! It's your Master!' `But it isn't ? well, fair,' he complained. 'He couldn't have found out that I was with you tonight. Maybe he does know it. And if he had the heart to investigate he would know that ?that ?' Moray swallowed convulsively. 'That you're more important to me than even he is,' he finished rapidly. `Don't say that!' she cried, agitated. 'It's like a crime! Moray you'd better go.' `All right,' he said sullenly, catching up his cape. And he had known all along that he would go. 'You stay here and finish the show. I can get to the roof alone.' Moray stepped from the apartment into a waiting elevator and shot up to the top of the building. 'I need a fast plane,' he said to an attendant. 'Master's call.' A speed-lined ship was immediately trundled out before him; he got in and the vessel leaped into the air. One hundred thousand years of forced evolution had done strange things to the canine family. Artificial mutations, rigorous selection, all the tricks and skills of the animal breeder had created a super-dog. Moray was about four feet tall, but no dwarf to his surroundings, for all the world was built to that scale. He stood on his hind legs, for the buried thigh-joint had been extruded by electronic surgery, and his five fingers were long and tapering, with beautifully formed claws capable of the finest artisanry. And Moray's face was no more canine than your face is simian. All taken in all, he would have been a peculiar but not a fantastic figure could he have walked out into a city of the Twentieth Century. He might easily have been taken for nothing stranger than a dwarf. Indeed, the hundred thousand years had done more to the Masters than to their dogs. As had been anticipated, the brain had grown and the body shrunk, and there had been a strong tendency toward increased myopia and shrinkage of the distance between the eyes. Of the thousands of sports born to the Masters who had volunteered for genetic experimentation, an indicative minority had been born with a single, unfocussable great eye over a sunken nosebridge, showing a probable future line of development. The Masters labored no longer; that was for the dog people and more often for the automatic machines. Experimental research, even, was carried on by the companion race, the Masters merely collating the tabulated results, and deducing from and theorizing upon them. Humankind was visibly growing content with less in every way. The first luxury they had relinquished had been gregariousness. For long generations men had not met for the joy of meeting. There was no such thing as an infringement on the rights of others; a sort of telepathy adjusted all disputes. Moray's plane roared over the Andes, guided by inflexible directives. A warning sounded in his half-attentive ears; with a start he took over the controls of the craft. Below him, high on the peak of an extinct volcano, he saw the square white block which housed his Master. ...
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