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.