This paper is a study of the Gray index of phantom maps. We give a new, tower theoretic, definition of the Gray index, which allows us to study the naturality properties of the Gray index in some detail. McGibbon and Roitberg have shown that if f* is surjective on rational cohomology, then the induced map on phantom sets is also surjective. We show that if f* is surjective just in dimension k, then f induces a surjection on a certain subquotient of the phantom set. If the condition...