As they came through the door they knew they were too late.
They did what they could—hurled orgasms after both their targets, hard—but were unsurprised to miss. Too much distance, too much building and wiring in the way . . . and almost at once, the targets were enclosed in something that insulated them from the tasp.
Knowledge of the certainty of failure slowed them no more than the door had—that is, not at all: they burned the living room floor away beneath their pounding feet and hit the basement running. Walls received no more respect. But the door they finally came to was made of sterner stuff, fighting a heroic fifteen-second rear guard action before it too succumbed. So did the one at the far end of the tunnel. By the time they emerged into the underground parking garage its robot door had fully closed again.
They let it live. To go quickly through so public a door would court attention; to trick it into opening normally would take too long. Without hesitation they backed out of the garage and retraced their steps toward the single-family home they had just renovated.
Once they were back in the tunnel, and its door to the world was fused shut again behind them, she put away a weapon widget and took out a scanning widget. "Lead lining," she announced. "Not just this tunnel: half the basement. Positively Murphian."
"This whole set-up has to be a Cold War relic," he said. "Basement bomb shelter with a secret way in and out."
"Thanks," she said. "I didn't quite have enough irony to choke on. Somewhere, Joe Stalin is chuckling. I don't like this."
"We'll reacquire," he said as they reentered the house proper and sealed the tunnel behind them.
"Of course we will. But meanwhile we have two active leaks—and the second target we know nothing about."
"We know everything June knows about him," he said soothingly.
"Yes, and she thinks he's an endearingly helpless boob. Do you think a boob outfitted this house?"
The house's security measures had been impressive, for this ficton. Impressive enough to keep their preliminary site surveillance shallow, for fear of being spotted. For that reason, the priest's hole had come as a rude surprise. And the speed—no, the quickness—with which it had been used was certainly unsettling. "No," he admitted.
"This is ungood," she said. "Two competent paranoids, in a fairly sophisticated ficton, on the loose with a Time bomb in their heads."
"So let's learn all we can about target number two," he said. He waved his hand like Peter Pan scattering fairy dust, and multicolored sparkles dispersed in all directions.
Upstairs in the den, Paul's hard drive powered up. Elsewhere in the building, photos of him were identified and scanned; samples of his DNA were collected and analyzed; his belongings were inventoried. In the basement, in the room where they stood, a barely visible trail of red sparkles began to form in midair, denoting where a heat-source of human temperature had recently passed. The brighter the sparkles, the more recent the passage. The redder the sparkles, the longer the human had tarried there. She traced it down a hallway to a place faint but carmine, and used her scanning widget. "There's something good here," she said, deactivating an excellent booby-trap.
"Be careful," he said, approaching.
"Don't b—" she said, and the second booby-trap blew her through a wall. He was barely able to cancel most of the sound. A lot of upstairs came downstairs onto both of them. He fought through smoking rubble to reach her side.
She lay on her back, blinking up at him. "I am finding it very hard not to dislike Paul Throtmanian," she said, her voice gentle in the sudden silence.
"Are you all right?"
She scanned herself—and winced. "I came through fine—but love . . . I'm afraid that was the Last Straw."
He turned to stone, and it did not help enough. "You're sure."
"My whole defensive system overloaded. For good. I'm an ordinary mortal."
He flinched, but said nothing. He owned no words equal to the occasion. He dropped to his knees beside her and took her in his arms.
This was a body blow, for her and for him and for their marriage and for their mission. They had both known this day might come, for either or both of them—had spent centuries preparing themselves for it, knowing that preparation would be no help. Sure enough, it was not. Suddenly it was a very sad day . . . and nowhere near over, with utter disaster on the horizon.
They shared their heartbreak in silence for several seconds.
"I dislike Paul Throtmanian," she said then, her voice even gentler than before. "Let's go see what he was protecting."
He helped her up. Her clothing was already starting to repair itself—as if to underline the point that she no longer could. Her temper was not improved when she found that Paul's hiding place had concealed money. "Oh for God's sake," she snapped. "I thought it was something important."
He was almost as annoyed that the cash had been destroyed—it certainly could have come in handy for them, particularly just now—but he could not say so without implying criticism of her judgment. Worse, accurate criticism. Fortunately the stream of incoming data still being assimilated and analyzed throughout the house picked then to yield up a useful distraction. "Ah," he said gratefully, "there's a lead."
She held the flagged datum before her mind's eye, studied it, and nodded just as gratefully. "Good. It's a place to start, at least."
"Do we want to involve the law?" he asked.
She started to answer . . . caught herself. "You decide. My judgment is a little off tonight."
It was one of the bravest things he had ever heard her say. He saluted it by ignoring it. "I'm on the fence," he said at once. "My inclination is obviously to go for a full-court press; I'd call out an air strike on them if I could think of a cover story. But the way they bugged out of here, on a second's notice, without even stopping for the cash . . . maybe our only chance is for them to think they've gotten clear, and relax just a hair. I think the cops might simply keep those two alert."
"Tough call," she agreed. "Make it."
He juggled the universe, backstopped but all alone. As he thought, he heard a clock ticking, louder than one had ever ticked for him before. Sweat sprang out on his forehead for the first time in decades.
"More data," he said. "We know one of them; we know about the other—the one with the testosterone. We need to integrate everything we just got here with everything June knows about him."
Ignoring the ticking, they closed their eyes, joined hands, joined minds, and did as he had proposed.