The Non-Statistical Man (23 page)

John told him then about the wild plan to stow away aboard the starship and return to Earth to conduct a campaign against the Project.

“You couldn’t have gone without our knowing,” said Wamock, “but we wouldn’t have stopped you. You would never have seen Lora again.”

“Did Papa Sosnic know this?”

“Papa knows a great many things which we wonder about. Yes, I think he probably understood this very well. He knew how it would be; Papa Sosnic has done you a great service.”

It was three days before he received word that Lora was coming. When the news came it seemed as if it were about someone he had known long ago in childhood, someone who would be changed by the long years between, and whom he would scarcely know. He wondered what they would say to each other when they met.

Lora’s Control-Colony was through the jungle in the opposite direction from the spaceport; it was at the port that it was arranged for him to meet her.

They saw each other across the storm-darkened terminal lobby where the rain smell made it hard to get a full breath of air. He didn’t run toward her as he had thought he would. She
was
like some long ago acquaintance of childhood, and he wanted time to absorb the fact of her presence.

He had never seen her as she was dressed now. Her clothing was rough, a green tinged leather that confirmed her as part of the jungle itself. Her face was changed, too; it was thinner and had taken on a brownness.

But her eyes were the same. He felt a warmth of gladness rising within
him
as he came close enough to see that light in her eyes. It was more alive than ever before, he thought.

Then she was near him, touching him, her hand upon his arm. And he still had not found the thing to say.

Her eyes glistened now. “I shouldn’t have come,” she

iso

said. “But I had to; I had to take this chance I thought would never come. The chance to see you once again.”

“I told you I’d never let you go,” he said.

Deep inside him he had really believed this moment would never come, he thought. He had long ago lost the capacity for believing in miracles.

He put his arms about the miracle of Lora and held her close, but it was like,enfolding an impatient bird.

“I shouldn’t have come at all,” she said. “It was a trick, but I knew it was the only chance I’d ever have to see you.”

“What are you talking about?” He drew her close again. “You’re here now, and this is forever.”

“I’m not staying, John; I let them believe I’d take the tests but I won’t. I don’t even want to know that I might be eligible for Alpha Colony.”

His muscles turned rigid, as if time had stopped, and he was cold and hollow inside. He pressed her closer and touched his lips to her ear. “Hush,” he whispered. “Tomorrow we can talk.”

But they didn’t mention it again, neither on the morrow or the next day. Lora stayed with Doris, and John wasn’t sure at all how that would be. He still burned with the too-recent memory of her calling his meeting with Lora disgusting and stupid.

But Doris had changed in the past few weeks, he thought, without his being aware of it. Perhaps it was Bronson. The scientist came often to see them—or Doris —and John supposed this was highly irregular, since it was no doubt a contaminating factor in the eyes of the Project directors.

The change in Doris was evident when John brought Lora to her. The two exchanged glances, as if they had some lone secret that united them against the world. John tried to understand the sad, friendly smiles they offered each other.

Papa Sosnic beamed and kissed her on both cheeks when John brought Lora to see him. She had traded temporarily the crude clothing of the Control-Colony for the exquisite fabrics furnished the Alpha group. Lean and bronze against the white material of her dress, she was quite the loveliest woman in the whole Colony, John knew —and Papa said so.

She loved everything about the house. When they were
alone again, she sank down in the soft luxury of a big chair. Through the window she could see the broad, peaceful landscape and the Grecian splendor of the statuary and the men and women playing beside it.

With spread fingers, she held out the skirt of the dress. “I dreamed of something like this when I was a little girl,” she said. “And I never did get it.”

“You’ve got it now,” said John, “for always.”

She glanced through the windows and beyond to the dome that held back the sun and the wind and the stars. She shook her head slowly. “No—I never did like living behind bars; here they are even in the sky!”

He took her about the Colony on the following days, but he had the sick feeling within him that he was losing. He had the feeling of trying to protect a house of sand with his arms, while the waves washed it away despite all he could do.

Lora was delighted with the fantastic gadgetry that served them in the houses, that conveyed their meals from the central, automatic kitchens serving the whole Colony. She was enraptured with the peace of the forest glens through which he led her by the hand. And she stood before the classic statuary groups by the hour while he explained the stories they told.

But she was like a child excited by a visit to a strange and fabulous house. All her delight did not mean that she had accepted it as her own; and this he could not make her believe—that it was her house as well as his own.

Wamock would not give them many more days, he knew; soon they would ask her to take the examinations given to all Colonists of the experimental groups.

In the meantime, there was the concert festival for which Papa Sosnic had arranged the presentation of John’s composition. He had no heart for it, but John agreed to play it in spite of its badness because Papa Sosnic wanted it.

Time and Alpha Colony grew increasingly unreal. He tried to see things from Lora’s viewpoint. He stared at the sky through the protecting dome and wondered why Lora had to see in it prison bars.

Was it any more so than the walls of a house? he asked himself. Why was it so wrong to accept protection and peace and luxury that gave time to devote to his music?

On Earth, he and Doris had been musicians, but they had worked hard at it—as hard as if they were bricklayers— and he’d had no time for composition.

He tried to explain this to Lora the day of..the concert, but she merely laughed. “It would be better if you were a bricklayer by day and a musician by night,” she said.

She seemed to live by a whole set of rules and standards of which he was not even aware. And she refused him the secret of the mystery of her reasoning.

He was going to lose her, he thought, and there was nothing he could do. In a day or two, they would ask her to take the tests and she would refuse. She would return to the jungle. He could go with her if he wished—and die slowly there in her presence. Why did she prefer jungle death to the life that was possible here? he wondered for the thousandth time.

On the evening of the concert she was more beautiful than ever, as if to tantalize him with that which he was about to lose. But the thought baffled him more than ever, for she would lose it, too. In the jungle she would don the green leather jacket and trousers. Never would she look like this again.

The concert was to be held in the central auditorium of the Colony, where all large performances were conducted. John noted distastefully that his name was the very last on the program. A tribute, no doubt, to the neophyte, who could be expected to present something worth only the attention of those who had not already left or yawned themselves to sleep, he thought angrily.

He sat near the front with Lora and Doris, and with Papa Sosnic and Dr. Bronson, whose frequent presence was becoming an increasing source of wonder in the Colony. Until his own number was called, John would sit with the audience.

The program carried a number of names he knew. Names long absent from the roster of artists on Earth, but which had once been great in the halls where John and Doris had played.

The first was one of these, Faber Wagnalls, whose work John had studied intently in the early years. He found himself leaning forward eagerly in spite of his own depression, anxious to hear the new work of this man whom he had not even met since coming to the Colony.

Wagnalls was much older now, and gray, different from the pictures John had seen. He sat at the piano on the spotlighted stage and began playing.

John closed his eyes and listened with all his being. The first notes were strange. It was a new man playing, he thought—not the Wagnalls who had written so long ago upon Earth. John listened to the theme, echoing it in his own mind.

Slowly, it seemed to him as if a cold wind had begun to blow upon his naked body. The music—it was not the great Faber Wagnalls at all. It was a simpering, effeminate tune that pranced and dawdled by turns, and had no loveliness or grace in a single note.

The applause was obviously out of sympathy rather than praise, and John joined in it when Wagnalls was through. But he wondered if it were really merciful to let the old master make such a fool of himself.

He glanced at Doris who returned his look, her nostrils thin and defiant. She knew, he thought, but she wasn’t admitting that there was any bad in Alpha Colony.

Lora caught his eye and grinned maliciously; he wondered exactly why.

The next performance was a group of string instruments. It was mediocre, not as poor as Wagnalls’ performance. John began to wonder when he would hear some of the fine work for which Alpha Colony had been created. Beside what he had heard so far his own would not show so badly, even if it was noisy and brash.

He continued to wonder as the program advanced. He grew sick inside as the parade of inept performers and trivial compositions followed one after the other.

And when his sickness bordered on panic—as if he had suddenly perceived the falsity and trickery of life itself—then he understood.

He understood an infinity of things he had never understood before. He understood himself and Doris, and he understood Lora. He understood why she looked up at the great dome and saw bars in the sky. He understood that the applause for Wagnalls was genuine not in pity.

Dimly, in the midst of panic and understanding, he heard his own name called. He stood up and moved automatically to the platform and sat before the piano.

Then he began to play. And with his playing there came clarity and a new reality. He knew what he had to do.

He tried to tell them with the music. He looked out over the dimly lit faces of the audience. He knew they would not understand, but he told them, anyway. He told them with fury and noise that echoed the anger of betrayal. He told them with a theme of passion and struggle that shocked them.

When he was through there was a moment of silence, and then a scattering of faint applause, followed all too quickly by a scattering of the audience itself. He was left standing almost alone with his few friends as the hall cleared.

Dr. Wamock came up and took his hand. “It was strong meat for our tender people,” he said. “I don’t know anything about music, but I liked that better than the twiddling little pieces I hear so often around here.”

“You know what I have to do,” said John.

“Yes?”

“I’m going with Lora; we’ll leave for the Control-Colony in the morning.”

They gathered after the concert at Papa Sosnic’s. Papa wore an air of secret mirth as they walked towards the house under the dome-filtered starlight. Bronson seemed puzzled and half-angry, while Dr. Wamock was an interested spectator of the wholly unexpected events of a play.

Lora and John felt a deep contentment as if they could suddenly see all the way to the end of their lives, and knew they were on the right pathway.

But Doris walked alone, ignoring Bronson’s presence, as if she had been stunned and swept to the edge of grief by John’s words.

When they reached Papa Sosnic’s, she was the first to speak as she separated
him
from the rest and forced
him
against the wall. “You don’t mean what you said,” she insisted. “You don’t mean you are giving up all we have gained for a stubborn girl who is afraid to face life!”

“I love that stubborn girl,” he said softly, “and she loves me.”

“Then she can have courage enough to live here like a human being—if she has wits enough. John, you can’t do a crazy thing like this.”

The others had stopped where they stood, held by the anguish of Doris’ voice. They did not want to hear, and could not help themselves.

Lora stepped in from the next room, and heard, but Doris did not seem to care. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep you from knowing how ugly the world can be,” she said to John. “I didn’t want you to know it. When you were a child, you never knew that sometimes the food you ate was stolen, and that I went without because there was not enough for both of us. I showed you how to make yourself great; and we were great artists on Earth. We couldn’t have had more—until we found this.

“And now there’s nothing more to worry about for all the rest of our lives. We’ll be taken care of, and we can work and create to the full extent of all that’s good in us.

“But more than that: we’re not only helping ourselves, we’re helping all mankind. There’ll never be another chance again to become the kind of humans that won’t destroy themselves. If we don’t change we won’t get that chance again.

“It’s like the intermission time between the act of a great play. And we’ve got a chance to change the lines, and rewrite the show—to make sure it doesn’t end as tragedy.

“You can’t throw away your chance to help in that, John. Lora, you can’t ask that of him!”

There was so little he could say now, he thought. He was understanding Doris for the first time in his life. For the first time he saw how the world had looked to her, a place of agony and terror from which she must flee and protect him.

He remembered the day when he met Lora by the gate. She had said that some came to Human Developments because they were running away. He had thought that such a thing could never be said of Doris; yet, it was true. She had run from the struggle of life to the security of Alpha Colony. And he had thought her the strongest of them all.