. It was a loudspeaker, and it came from
outside.

"_GRECO. WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE. COME ON OUT!_"

I had a stabbing sensation of familiarity. "The police!" I cried.
"Greco, it's the police!"

He looked at me wearily and shook his head.

"No. More likely the F.B.I."

* * * * *

Well, that was it. I got out--I didn't wait for permission from the
Greek.

I stopped at the door, and three searchlight beams hit me right in the
eye. There were cars all around the laboratory, but I couldn't see
them, not after those lights went on.

I froze, stiff; wanting to make sure they understood (a) that I wasn't
Greco and (b) that I didn't have a gun.

They understood, all right.

But they let me out.

They put me in one of the cars, with a slim gray-eyed young man in a
snap-brimmed hat sitting politely and alertly beside me, and they let
me watch; and what happened after that wasn't funny at all.

Greco didn't come out They shouted at him over the loudspeaker and
eventually he answered--his voice little and calm, coming out of
nowhere, and all he said was, "Go away. I won't come out. I warn you,
don't try to force your way in."

But he knew they wouldn't listen, of course.

They didn't.

They tried force.

And he met it in novel ways with force of his own. The door had locked
itself behind me; they got a fence post for a battering ram, and the
post burst into flame. They found an L-beam from an old bed frame and
tried that, and they were sorry they had done it; the thing melted in
the middle, splattering them with hot drops of steel.

The polite, alert young man beside me said, not so polite any more,
"What's he doing, you? What sort of fancy tricks has he got in there?"

"Demons," I said crazily, and _that_ was a mistake, but what else was
I to do? Try to explain Maxwell's equations to a Fed?

They were trying again--there were fifteen or twenty of them, at
least. They went for the windows, and the windows dissolved and rained
cherry-red wet glass on them. They tried again through the open frames
when the glass was gone, and the frames burst into fire around them,
the blue smoke bleached white in the yellow of the flame and the white
of the searchlights. They tried singly, by stealth; and they tried in
clusters of a dozen, yelling.

* * * * *

It was hopeless--hopeless for everybody, because they couldn't get in
and the Greek could never, never