It was two weeks before he returned. When he did, he was gaunt and grim and dirty as he had been the night Meta had first seen him in The Avatar.
"Darling, why did you run away?" she asked, holding him close in her arms.
"I came back because I love you," he answered tiredly. "But I came back, too, because I love Mars more, Meta. I had to go away and think what I was to do."
"It's all right now," she soothed. "You understand that the odds against your rebels are just too heavy. You have a life on Earth to live."
"Yes," he said in a low voice. "But there'll be no concerts this season, Meta."
"Cornel, you can't cancel now! The schedule's all arranged."
"I shall cancel," he said firmly. "You want me to live on Earth, so you must let me learn about Earth. I intend to spend this winter studying psychosociology and terrestrial law—and composing."
Her brow cleared.
"If you'll continue your composing, it's all right," she said. "Next season's concerts can be the greatest ever. I'll pay off the promoters, darling."
So it was done. That season the admirers of Cornel Lorensse's music had to content themselves with recordings. Cornel himself spent his time quietly at Nuyork University and at the house in Jersi.
As she had said, the 2013 concert season was Cornel's greatest, right from the start. In part it was due to Meta's own efforts, for she spent tremendous sums of money and utilized her own famous personality to great advantage in promotional work.
Across the nation, across the the world, the tour swept, snowballing constantly. Christmas of 2013, and Cornel Lorensse introduced a great new hymn, From the Polar Caps. New Year's Day, 2014, and The Years to Come was introduced by radio and television at a thousand parties.
There had been some quibbling at the beginning of the season, because the business directors of the tour had wanted to combine the drawing power of Cornel's name with that of well-known concert orchestras. Cornel insisted on using his own orchestra, built up carefully during his year of study. As the season progressed, it became apparent that Cornel's name alone was enough of a drawing card.
February, March, 2014, and every network had bought into the schedule. When Cornel Lorensse's weekly concerts were on the air, there was nothing else on radio or television, anywhere in the world, except on the non-affiliated local stations. April passed triumphantly, and the final concert was scheduled for May 15 in Rome.
The D'Annunzio Colosseum, built in 1971, was filled to capacity. Careful staging was necessary, to care for all the cameras and microphones of the various television and radio networks.
The program was not a long one: Debussy's Clair de Lune, Lorensse's Swift Phobos, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, Waco's Variations on a Theme by Altdown—and the words "To be announced." It was a familiar phrase, and it always meant the introduction of a new composition by Cornel Lorensse.
The concert went smoothly before—how many listeners? Fifty million? A hundred million? Two hundred million? On the great, brightly lighted stage Cornel played the concert grand with superb mastery and bowed to the applause, a pale, solemn figure in black.
When he had acknowledged the acclamation after the Waco piece, the audience waited in hushed silence for his announcement of the final number on the program.
"The composition I am about to play is the culmination of my musical career," Cornel said quietly into the microphones. "It is a product of my studies, not only of music, but of psychosociology and law.
"In hypnoschool last year, I studied the effects of music on the human mind. It is a new field, and many of you are aware of it only through the fact that certain kinds of music are forbidden by law as dangerous to peace on Earth.
"I have tried to go into it much more deeply than that."
He smiled bitterly.
"Most of you know that I am a Martian, one of the so-called Martian rebels," he said. "I think much of the appeal of my music to you has been its Martian quality. To the people of Earth, most of whom have never seen Mars, it has pictured my planet.
"My latest composition will do so even more graphically, for it has been composed on a deliberate psychological foundation. This song will show Mars to you. It will show you my people, and what my people want.
"I may add that I have studied the law carefully, and I can assure you that this composition is not military in nature.
"Ladies and gentlemen of Earth, accompanied by the orchestra I shall now play The Martianne."
In the control rooms of the auditorium and of relay points throughout the world, censors, vaguely alarmed by Cornel's words, hovered with their fingers on cutoff keys. Then they relaxed. Cornel had told the truth. There was nothing of a military nature in the opening bars of The Martianne.
It was a theme handled, but less competently, in some of his other compositions. The woodwinds began on a soft, sad note, gradually rising in power, like the thin winds that moaned across the Martian desert sands. Into this, almost inaudibly at first, crept the clear piano notes that marked the cautious, wondering intrusion of humanity on an alien world.
The drums beat the construction of the domes, the horns blared the landing of the spaceships, the violins cried the hopes of the men and women who went to Mars to find a new life. It was a picture in music, so skilfully drawn that when the first discordance crept in, every listener could identify it instantly as the age-old greed of man seeking to subvert frontier freedoms to his own selfish ends.
When the blare of trumpets and the ruffle of drums thundered into the final militant theme of The Martianne, every listener knew it bespoke the valiant fight of men for freedom against an oppressor.
Every listener knew what he heard was music that had been prohibited on Earth for a decade—yet they listened. The censors, shocked, galvanized, started to act, to cut off the broadcast—and could not. The powerful music had crept insidiously into their minds, and their fingers were paralyzed above the keys while The Martianne flamed triumphant through the air of Earth.
When the final note had died away, Cornel stood up at his piano and said into the microphones:
"That is the music of Mars. Remember it, people of Earth."
It was a brief trial. Cornel was admittedly guilty of violating the law against inciting the public to military action, but because of Meta's influence and the temper of the people, he was not sentenced to prison. He was deported to Mars, freed to return to his own people.
Spurred by the Mars Corporation, the Earth government acted quickly. The Martianne was the most dangerous of any music the psychosociologists had banned. Its performance was prohibited on pain of death, possession of a tape of it was punishable by fine and imprisonment.
But too many tapes had been home-recorded on the night of Cornel's last concert. Too many people remembered the basic strains, the theme of The Martianne. Laws could not confine it. It was hummed, at first secretly, then openly and defiantly.
And too many people had hung on every televised instant of Cornel's trial and had heard him say, simply and earnestly, why he had violated the laws designed to protect the peace of Earth, why he had willingly endangered his life.
"It is right that men should have peace," said Cornel on the witness stand, "but first, it is right that they should have freedom."
At first secretly, then openly and defiantly, the Friends of Mars grew into an organization that poured the contributions of the people of Earth into ships and guns for the free people of Mars.