Then, clothes and all, he vanished.
Nocher went like smoke before the wind, roiling and turning. When he vanished, he left a vague outline of a human body behind him which looked like a hole in space, like a ghost outlined against a gray sky. Then this vanished too. Of Nocher's bulk, not even a wisp was left.
John Holder was aware of thundering elation somewhere deep down inside of him. There was horror too, but the elation was greater. He stared at the empty spot where the commissar had been standing a moment before.
Sounds came from his lips but he had no conscious knowledge that he was uttering them. They were noises that had existed long before language had come into being. Their meaning was pure horror. As they came from his lips, Holder felt every muscle in his stomach begin to tighten into a knot.
There was absolutely no question in his mind that he was responsible for Nocher's disappearance. Out of his dreams, out of his hate for the commissars and all they represented, this ability had been created. A million to one chance had come true! This ability was something he did inside himself. It needed no outside equipment to function, no generators to feed energy to it, no crystals to control its frequency. It was its own generator and its own frequency control! And it was all in his own mind! It was new, it was totally different from anything any scientist had ever envisioned before.
In this moment, staring at the spot where Nocher had been, John Holder felt as if the concrete floor on which he was standing had no more real substance to it than empty space. All that existed was mind, energy, and the dance of the atoms. He also knew that everything he had thought he had known about science was drivel, the mouthings of an idiot. The string of degrees after his name, which had so impressed the Red and had led to his capture by a nation hungry for scientists and willing to go to any lengths to get them, became meaningless, fodder for the amazement of fools.
The only important reality in the Universe was mind. Everything else was subservient to this reality. Mind was flooding through him now as glowing shafts of light.
"Nocher?" the loudspeaker in the ceiling rasped.
The sound jarred John Holder back to his surroundings. He turned startled eyes upward. From the ceiling, the bland eye of the television camera regarded him in silent accusation. He swore beneath his breath. How much had they seen?
The television system, which spied in every nook and corner of the huge installation, had been Nocher's idea, his way of making absolutely certain that he knew everything that was going on among the captive scientists working here.