Master of the World

Forty thousand years ago, during Earth's Ice Age, an Asian tribe was migrating south in search of a warmer climate. One of the tribe's members, a skilled fighter, continually demanded more food, clothing, and women for himself at the expense of the other tribe members. Finally, the tribe wearied of his behaviour and drove him away to live alone in the harsh, frigid land by himself. One day he fell under a hypnotic command to turn around and journey north again. He did so until he came to the source of the command, an immense starship. This was a colonization ship of the alien Plodex. The Plodex method of conquest was to send a colonization starship, containing no adult Plodex but millions of Plodex eggs, to a world whose dominant life form was in the early stages of cultural development. The starship would land in an inhospitable area, rebuild itself into a massive complex, and broadcast a hypnotic signal to cause the planet's native life forms to come to the ship. The most intelligent creature to survive the journey to the starship would be captured and analysed. The computer would imprint the chosen life form's genetic pattern on the millions of Plodex eggs and launch them all over the planet. In this case, however, one of the starship's drive units had exploded, causing it to crash on Earth. Damaged in the crash, the starship launched all of its eggs before it had captured a specimen of the dominant native life form. Nevertheless, the starship still rebuilt itself into a colonization complex, broadcast the hypnotic signal, and captured the exile when he arrived. For days the exile's flesh, muscle, and tissue were peeled away and his bones pulverized as the complex studied him. The pain was so great that the still-living exile went insane. Only his brain was kept alive by the starship, which incorporated it into its computer matrix. But over the next thirty thousand years the brain overcame its insanity and took control of the starship's entire computer system. Finally, he constructed a new, perfect human body for himself. After ten thousand years of mastery of the starship and the knowledge it gave him, the former exile, now styling himself the Master of the World, was ready to embark on his mission of conquest.