The Wonder Effect by Frederik Pohl Page B

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 issimian. 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.