We followed him on the screen as he ran down the stairs to the basement. A sound from the front of the building attracted our attention and we switched back. Two sentinels had not been caught off guard. They had spotted him entering Administrates and were following closely.
We switched back to the fugitive, and just in time. He had dragged himself almost all the way under the bottom ramp of the stairs. Soon he had disappeared entirely. Now the sentinals were looking about in a confused way.
I heard Srtes beside me sigh heavily as he rose to his feet. "Do you realize," he asked no one in particular, "that he is already half-way through? All our calculations pointed to the odds being heavily against his reaching this far."
"The sentinels will find him in a few minutes," one of the councilors said reassuringly.
"Of course they will!" Srtes replied angrily. "But he was not supposed to be able to get this far."
The alien stayed beneath the ramp only until his pursuers ran past. Immediately after, he reappeared and strode without hesitation toward the nearest air vent. The screen stuck when he gripped its spokes and tried to turn it, but he exerted his strength and it gave slowly. He pulled it from its frame and let it rest on the floor.
Pushing his feet through the vent opening, still clutching the screen, he let himself down. Soon his feet came to rest on the inside ledge of the air tunnel and he balanced there as he screwed the screen back into place. He had vanished by the time the sentinels came running back.
"By the great hound of Hagras!" a councilor exclaimed. "Is there no end to the creature's ingenuity?"
None of us paid any attention to him; we were too busy watching the scene below. Only Srtes spoke. "Will the fools have brains enough to look for him down there?" he muttered. The excitement of the chase had obviously gripped him also. He clicked on a control button that split the screen into two scenes, and we were able to watch the activity above, as well as in the tunnels below.