Intermission Time

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.

Warnock 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.