It was too connected with power. These men loved their power. They loved their purpose, but what exactly was it that they did when they weren't analyzing relics?
I let them study me, looking from face to face. Then I struck upon the mastermind. The tall emaciated doctor, who in fact blackened his hair with dye, and who looked older than he was on account of his thinness. He was the brilliant one; his gaze was far more critical and suspicious than that of the others. And he monitored Gregory's responses with a cold calculation.
"Look, this is all very fancy," said this one, "this holograph, but we can get on this analysis tonight. You realize we can give you an image like this, this holograph, of the man who once had these bones?"
"Can you really do that?" I asked.
"Yes, of course-" He stopped, realizing he was talking to me. He began to make gestures all around me. So did the others. They were trying to interrupt the projection of the beam that they thought had created me.
"Simple forensic procedure," said another, boldly ignoring the continuing strangeness of all this.
"And we'll get on this security thing immediately."
Others continued to search the ceilings and the walls.
A man moved to a telephone.
"No!" Gregory said. He stared at the Bones.
". . . permeated with something, some chemical obviously; well, we .can have all of that analyzed, I mean, we'll be able to tell you-"
Gregory turned and looked at me. A clearer comprehension of him came to me.
This was a man who could only use everything that came to him; he was not passive in any meaning of that word. The frustration he felt now would fuel his rage and his invention; it would drive him to greater lengths; he was only holding firm now, biding his time. And what he learned now would enhance his cunning and his capacity to surprise.
I turned to the doctors. "Let me know the outcome of your tests, will you?" I said, being a deliberately dreadful devil.
This caused quite a flurry.
I dissolved. I did it instantly.
The heat passed out of me, and the particles swarmed, too tiny no doubt for them to see. But the men felt the change in temperature; they felt the movement of the air. They were in confusion, looking around for another projected figure, perhaps, among them, for a switch in the direction of the light beam which they thought had made me appear.
I understood something further about them. They regarded their science as omnipotent. Science was the explanation not only for me but for anything and everything. In other words, they were materialists who beheld their science as magic.
The irony of this was very funny to me. Anything I did they would perceive to be science beyond their understanding. And I had been made by those who had been convinced that magic had the power of "science," if you just knew all the right words!
I went up and up, through the ceiling and the floor above it, rising through the shiny, bustling, crowded layers of the building, until I could not see the Bones any longer. The golden glimmer was gone.
I was in the fresh and cool night sky. Find Rachel, I thought. Your test is accomplished. You know now you are free.
He can't stop you. Go now where you will.
But in truth, the experiment would only be complete if I could make myself fully solid once more.
The scarf. I had forgotten about the scarf.
I drew down closer to the building. Only now did I really see its full height and grandeur. Covered all over even to its top floors with granite, it sloped majestically as it rose, rather like an ancient place of worship. There must have been fifty floors. Numbers don't come to me automatically. We had been on the twenty-fifth floor just now.
I descended, peering into the windows as I went, looking for the private living chambers. Offices, I saw hundreds of offices. I moved easily from right to left, amazed at the rooms filled with computers, and then I saw laboratories, highly elaborate laboratories in which serious people were diligently studying tiny things beneath microscopes and measuring potions into vials, which they carefully sealed.
What was this, part of Gregory's religious rackets? Drugs for his followers? Spiritual medicines, like the Soma of the Persian sun worshipers?
But there were so many laboratories! There were men and women in sterile white suits and masks, their hair carefully covered with white caps. There were giant