Icicles hung from the lip of the garbage can and a half-dead cat huddled against the brick wall. The animal didn’t even snarl as Hall moved beside it against the wall. The thickening shadows were blue now like the shadows of all his hunting years. Except that this particular year seemed older as Hall waited, as though it had suddenly grown incredibly ancient in a month. He knew he would never hunt again, so he thought of Donna as he waited. She at least would go on living and hunting. Like so many others, she had started to love him, never once suspecting that he couldn’t love her in return. Her cross was her excessive need for an unreal love. That kind of abnormally centered hunger was dangerous. It was the big human weakness.... He heard the pursuer who had stayed close behind him and ahead of the others, coming on stolidly. It was not even moving with the aliveness of uncertainty down the white funnel of the night. It was no more than a dumb clod carrying out orders against humanity--the orders of something that had never been human. There he was, in the alley’s mouth. He flinched suddenly, and crouched like some kind of animal, realizing that he was standing vulnerable, wide open to attack. He started to cry out as Hall swung the heavy soggy weight of the garbage can into his stomach. It struck him and he fell with a groan to his knees, fumbling stupidly in his topcoat pocket for a gun. Hall used his fist, very sharply, and only twice. He employed the simplest means and worked silently so as to avoid the red tape of apprehension, and all the pretensions of being something else that slowed up his work. Snow fell on the man’s upturned face, melting on his wide, big-pupiled eyes. Swiftly Hall ran to the other end of the alley and then over to Seventh Avenue and ducked into a drugstore to call Schor, the Security Chief. A few of the others had hired humans to stooge for them, but only a few. No. 999 was less prejudiced than the others of his kind. The stooges never knew of course. No one knew that a thousand Servitors, experimental models, had been built by the Dalsan Company six years before. No one knew that they had disappeared of their own volition, and that due to some unforeseeable miscalculation, they had been not only as intelligent as most humans, but had possessed a degree of free will, and a consuming hatred for humans. The Security Department had decided it would be better if people didn’t know. And that it would also be a good idea if people never found out. In fact, only three individuals knew now. Allen Schor the Security Chief, Donna Connell a top operative--and Hall. The scientists who had designed and built the Servitors for the Dalsan Company had known, of course. But they had committed suicide.