spoke in a completely guarded way, as if they thought they were being monitored by enemies, and their statements were maddeningly vague. "We have to hurry." "This is going to be glorious." "This has to be loaded by four a.m." "Everything at Point 17 is perfectly in line."
I could not make something sensible or sophisticated out of what they said. I managed to discover from one slip of the tongue that the project they all shared was called Last Days.
Last Days.
All I saw alarmed me and repelled me. I suspected the chemicals in the canisters were filoviruses, or some other lethal agent only recently discovered through technology, and the entire Temple stank of murder.
I passed many empty floors, many sleeping dormitories filled with young Minders, and a huge chapel where Minders prayed silently like contemplative monks, on their knees with their hands pressed to their foreheads. The image over the altar was a great Brain. The Mind of God, I presume. It was a mere outline in gold. It was strangely uninspiring. It looked anatomical and bizarre.
I passed rooms where men slept alone, in dimness. In one room was a man covered up and bandaged, with a nurse in attendance. In other chambers, there were other sick people, swathed in sheeting, hooked to gleaming tubes connected to tiny computers. Many solitary rooms contained sleeping members of the church. Some were so luxurious as to rival Gregory's rooms. They had floors of marble tile and gilded furniture; they had sumptuous bathrooms with great square tubs.
I had many unanswered questions about what I saw in the building, and could have spent much more time.
But now I had to go on to Brooklyn. I felt I could see what was happening. Surely, Nathan was in danger.
It was two a.m. Invisible I passed into the Rebbe's house and found him sound asleep in his bed, but he woke the minute I entered the room. He knew I was there. He was at once alarmed and climbed out of the bed. I simply went very far away from the house. There was no time to search for Nathan or to look for more sympathetic members of the family.
Besides, I was growing more tired by the minute. I couldn't dare retreat to the Bones; in fact, I had no intention of ever retreating to them again, not the way that I felt now, and I feared my weakness in sleep, that I might be called back or dissolved by Gregory or even somehow by the Rebbe.
I went back into Manhattan, found a lake in the middle of Central Park not very far at all from the huge Temple of the Mind. Indeed, I could see all its lighted windows. I took form as a man, dressed myself in the finest garb I could conceive of-red velvet suit, fine linen shirt, all manner of exotic gold embellishments-and then I drank huge amounts of water from the lake. I knelt and drank it in handfuls. I was filled with water, and felt very powerful. I lay down on the grass under a tree to rest, in the open, telling my body to hold firm and to wake if there was any natural or supernatural assault on it. I told it it must answer no one's call but my own.
When I woke it was eight o'clock in the morning by the city's clocks, and I was whole, intact, with my clothes, and I was rested. Just as I supposed, I had appeared far too strange for prowling mortal men to attack, and far too puzzling to be disturbed by beggars. Whatever the case, I was strong and unharmed in my velvet suit and shining black shoes.
I had survived the hours of sleep in material form, outside the bones, and this was another triumph.
I danced for joy on the grass for a few minutes, then brushed off the clothes, dissolved with the requisite enchantments, and re-formed, velvet clad, bearded, and free of bits of grass and dirt in the living room of the Rebbe's house. I did not want the beard, but the beard and mustache came as they had before. And maybe they'd even been there when I woke. In fact, I'm sure they had. They had been there all along. They wanted to be there. Very well.
The house was modern, cramped, made of many smallish rooms.
It struck me as most remarkable how conventional this house was. It was filled with rather ordinary furniture, none of it ugly or