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 

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