The next morning, Cornel had disappeared. Meta was frantic. Every available agency was pressed into service, but Nuyork was a city of fifteen million people and Cornel had vanished. 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 th............