They could too. But what a human wanted most, he could die from having. He could die because what a human wanted most was a pathological need. No matter what it was--if he could get all he wanted of it--it killed him. Hall thought of Martin turning from a gaunt man into what Donna had described as a huge white toad. As soon as he had suspected that No. 999 was Martin’s servant, he had investigated Martin’s background. No. 999 had simply been giving Martin what his neurotic self had always wanted most. And that was precisely what Donna had gone back to get from No. 999. As the helioplane lifted and moved off through the snow sea of the sky, Hall remembered the room he had left, the hidden apartment of Donna’s which neither he nor she would ever see again. Once ... once she had been waiting there for him. They had worked together for years but Hall had never suspected how Donna was beginning to feel about him. It was a better kind of irony that he could think about it now. The invitation to dinner--the candle light--the red Chianti wine.... That never-to-be-forgotten night with Donna was something that could only happen once with Hall, but then--it hadn’t happened. It might have but it hadn’t. Which was all that Hall could have expected, of course. It was strange that he couldn’t quite rub out the way he had expected more.... He could remember the smell of her perfume, the intimate tones of her voice calling softly to him in his loneliness. He could remember how her dark eyes seemed to come closer and ever closer, and her warm hands on his face.... He could feel her touch again now--the subdued flickering inside him like an uneasy flame. The fire that could smoulder but never leap high. There was a pain in his throat, and like a flashlight into his dark misery he saw her figure as he had seen it so many times before. That was his weakness. But he had conquered it. He took another cab from the village toward Martin’s country estate. Along a narrow road already carpeted with snow it sped, and the entire world seemed covered, and silent in the night. The only sound was the hissing of flakes that seemed to be falling clear across the land. They descended slow and sullen in a kind of quiet that seemed as endless as the sky. “No, don’t wait,” Hall said to the driver as the red tail light blinked out. He left the cab at a turn in the road about half a mile from Martin’s house, and started walking through the snow toward its squares of yellow light. He knew Martin very well from an intricate study of his life. The man had been one of the top research physicists, and yet he had never really grown up. His wife had taken care of him for years, babied him. It was inevitable that Martin should never have really learned to take care of himself. Unconsciously, therefore, he had always wanted above everything else for someone to take care of him. That was Martin’s weakness.