An alarm--audibly--sounded; the room clanged with the racket. In other parts of the villa leadies hopped into activity, churning windmilllike at full throttle toward the upstairs bedroom. A further signal tripped an automatic coded call to leadies stationed on the grounds outside the building; they, ceasing to be immobile, sprinted toward the building, lined up at the wall by the bedroom window.

The man's death rattle had awakened fifty diverse leadies comprising his entourage, and every leady, guided by the rapid impulses from the larger units bolted to the underside of the bed, thanostropically converged on the scene of the assassination.

The machine, having released its dart, now registered the cessation of heartbeat; it thereupon again warmed its frame, sank back, became square as before. It began to roll away from the bed, its job done.

And then--minute cilialike antennae on its anterior surface detected the radio signals emitted by the large unit bolted to the underside of the bed. And it knew it would never get away.

From outside, below the window with its empty, fused-away entry hole where glass had been, a type VI leady called up at full voiceamplification, "Sir, we are aware that you're in there. Make no attempt to escape. A police agency individual is on the way; please remain where you are until he comes."

The machine rolled on its small wheels away from the bed in which the dead man lay; it detected the leadies beyond the bedroom door, waiting out in the hall, and the leadies below the window, leadies everywhere, deployed in precise and expert pattern; it reentered the room adjoining the bedroom, the first room through which it had traveled. There, pausing, as a sort of ejaculatory afterthought, it released one drop of blood which fell to the carpet--the machine swiveled, started first in one direction, then another, then at last all switches operated by the _clock_ within it shut down as the master circuit accepted the totality of the situation; all exits were barred and no motion was possible. Hence, one final-optional--phase of its circuit clicked into play.

Once more the plastic form which housed the components of the machine warmed, flowed, reshaped. This time into the conventional figure of--a portable television set, including handle, screen, v-shaped antenna.

In that form the machine settled into inertness; every active portion of its electronic anatomy closed down in finality.

Nothing remained; the end had been reached. A neurotic oscillation between two opposing impulses--the tropism toward flight, the tropism toward camming--had been settled in favor of the latter; the machine, in the darkness of the room, appeared externally to be an ordinary television receiver, as its wartime makers had intended, under such conditions as these: when, due to overly rapid defensive response on the part of the defenders, the machine, although having completed its task of assassination, could not then--as had been hoped for--escape.

There, in the darkness, the machine remained, while below the empty window the type VI leady in charge shouted its message over and over again, and, in the hall outside the dead man's bedroom, the solid phalanx of leadies stood watchful guard, prepared to bar the departure of any person or thing that might be attempted from the scene of the murder.

There it remained--until, one hour later, Webster Foote, in his official capacity, was admitted past the phalanx of leadies guarding the hall door to enter the bedroom.

He had been summoned by a frantic, half-insane vidcall from the ancient Stanton Brose; hysterically, Brose's image on the screen wavered with the kind of pseudo-Parkinsonism agitation possible only in a neurologically damaged structure, one bordering on senility.

"Webster, they killed one of my men, my best men!" Nearsobbing, Brose confronted Foote, completely out of control, the random spasms of his limbs fascinated Foote, who watched fixedly, thinking to himself, _I was right. My precog hunch. And right away_.

"Of course, Mr. Brose, I'll go personally." He held his pen poised. "The name of the Yance-man and the location of his demesne."

Brose spluttered and blubbered, "Verne Lindblom. I forget; I don't know where his demesne is. They just called me, his death rattle; it went off the second they got him. So his leadies trapped the killer, he's still there in the villa--the leadies are outside the doors and windows, so if you get there you'll find him. And this isn't the first assassination; this is the second."

"Oh?" Foote murmured, surprised that Brose knew about the death of Runcible's engineer, Robert Hig.

"Yes; they started with--" Brose broke off, his face rolling and unrolling, as if the flesh, starved, were shriveling away and then seeping back, refilling the emptiness, the hollows of the skull. "My agents on Runcible's staff reported it," he said, more controlled, now.

"Is that all you can say? Verne Lindblom was--" Brose snorted; he wiped at his nose, his eyes, dabbed at his mouth with loose, wet fingers. "Now listen, Foote; pay attention. Send a commando team of your best people to California, to the demesne of Joseph Adams so they don't get him next."

"Why Adams?" Foote knew, but wanted to hear what Brose had to say. The participants of the special project--the existence of which he knew, the nature of which he did not--were being taken out, one by one; Brose saw the pattern, so did Foote. With his pen, Foote made the note out: _c-team for A's dem. Now._

"Don't inquire of me," Brose said, in his deadly ancient voice, "'why' anything. Just do it."

Correctly, stiffly, Foote said, "Immediately. I'll come to the Lindblom demesne; a commando team, my best, to support Yance-man Adams. We will be with Adams from now on, unless, of course, he has already been destroyed. Did he, like Lindblom--"

"They all," Brose quavered, "have death rattles. So Adams is still alive, but he won't be unless you get there right away; we're not set up--my people are not prepared--any more to protect themselves. We thought it went out when the war ended; I know their leadies clash over boundaries, but nothing like this, like the war--it's the war all over again!"

Webster Foote agreed, rang off, dispatched a commando team of four men from his substation in the Los Angeles area; then ascending to the roof of his corporation's building, followed by two of his specially trained leadies who lugged heavy cases of detection equipment.

On the roof a high velocity inter-hem heavy-duty old wartime military flapple waited, already chugging, started by remote from Foote's office; he and his two specially trained leadies boarded it and, a moment later, he was on his way across the Atlantic.

By vidphone he contacted the Yance-man Agency in New York City and from it learned the location of the dead man's demesne. It lay in Pennsylvania. By vidphone to his own GHQ in London he asked for and obtained--presented visually to the screen for him directly to examine--the folio on Yance-man Verne Lindblom, to refresh his memory. No doubt about it; Lindblom had not been merely _a_ builder, one of many, but _the_ builder of the Yance-organization. The man had had absolute come-and-go use of Eisenbludt's facilities in Moscow

this, of course, Foote had ascertained in the original investigation of the "special project" of which Lindblom had been a vital part. The investigation, he thought tartly, which had failed to turn up any useful thing.

Except that Brose's despair and babyish concern, extended to anticipate the sequential next-step death of Joseph Adams, confirmed that the assassinations so far, Hig's and then Lindblom's, were the result of the involvement of both men in the special project; Foote perceived this clearly, perceived the weaving strand that passed from Hig to Lindblom and now, potentially, next to Adams--and, he reflected, may have involved a deliberately fatal assault on Arlene Davidson, last Saturday, but in a manner which at the time had seemed natural. In any case Brose had blubbered the admission that this was a sequence involving the participants of the special Agency project--Brose's project--and this meant that Hig was, obviously now, a Brose agent on Runcible's staff. So Foote's insight had been authentic; the murder of Hig had not been directed toward Runcible at, say, the instigation of Brose; the murder of Hig, as proven by the death of Yance-man Lindblom, had aimed at Brose for its ultimate target. The ruling Yance-man himself. All this now ceased to be conjecture; it had become history.