Two figures stood across the street under the white-crusted trees. He was sure that two more were stationed just at the foot of the third-floor stairwell waiting for a signal from the man who wasn’t going to give them any signal. It would be easier to go down the fire escape--and faster. He knew that he had to move fast, very fast. There was a chance that he hadn’t learned the identity of No. 999 soon enough to stop him from using vital information he had certainly been squeezing out of Martin. The other Servitors had fixed themselves to some high and important people. But No. 999 had really hit high. Ben Martin had been the Administrator of the Secret Government Research Center in Virginia for ten years. A month ago he had retired in the face of loud protest--giving illness as an excuse--and a week after that his wife had died of a heart attack. But even that wouldn’t have aroused any suspicions. It was a word about a servant Martin had recently hired--and a word from his wife before she died--which had given Hall the clue he needed, and started him on his last hunt. Martin’s wife had hired what she thought was a servant. She could scarcely have been blamed for not knowing that the servant she had engaged in good faith was not a human being, but a Servitor. Neither could she have known that a Servitor was an artificial creation no one could distinguish from a human being except by its destructive influence. And the victim was not in a position to make any such distinctions. No. 999 had wormed plenty of dangerous information out of Martin. What it intended doing with the information wasn’t Hall’s concern. No. 999 would use it to gain power, of course. He might try to get out of the country with the information and use it against the United States with the backing of some antagonistic nation. No. 999 might even be planning to blast loose at the living breathing humanity which had created it and which it hated with such unhuman virulence. One thing was certain: No. 999 was far more intelligent than any of the others had been. It had avoided detection for five years where the others had failed. It had benefited from its predecessor’s mistakes. It knew a lot more than it had known five years ago, and it had been built to be highly intelligent to start with. Hall’s only concern was to kill it. He went to the window, jerked it up and went through, under the guard rail and down the stairwell in the fire escape platform. The rust and cold iron tore at him, but he didn’t feel it. His hands broke the fall, and then he dropped on down, with bullets chipping around him at the metal. He ran for three blocks in the gray evening that was fast turning charcoal, and the lights blinking on in the few poor scattered shops hardly seemed like light at all. He ran into the alley. Wind bit at his cheeks and kicked at his hair, and pushed the smell of the sky like a fading hope into his breathing.