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Mr. Lynx?”
    “Everything.” Rising from the couch, the woman eyed her partner. “We’ll just have to keep looking.”
    Now she and Sherevoeu had another reason to bring the young man back to the hospital: for his own protection. Did he even know that certain crazed fanatics were looking for him? When the police located him and brought him back, she would so inform him. He should be properly grateful.
    “Was there anything else?” she asked optimistically, hoping to speed her unwanted visitors on their way.
    “No, that seems to be, sadly, all you can tell us.” The woman preceded her companion in exiting the living room’s conversation area. “Thank you for your help.”
    “We who pave the way thank you,” the man added as he strode past. In so doing, he bumped into the nervous doctor. “Sorry.”
    And then they were gone. Speaking into her command bracelet, Marinsky immediately sealed every entrance to the house. A quick check revealed that the privacy sphere had evaporated along with those who had put it in place. By staying composed, she had disposed of the intruders without harm to her home, to herself, or to them. Feeling relieved and not a little pleased with herself, she was preparing to use her communicator to call urb security when a demanding itch caused her to look down at her left forearm. Where the man had bumped into her, a small red blotch had appeared on the bare skin. It was spreading rapidly. Alarmed, she activated the com unit. When she tried to speak into it she discovered that her vocal cords would not work. The paralysis proliferated with astonishing speed.
    When urb security finally arrived she was lying on the floor of her undisturbed living room, the com unit clutched tightly in frozen fingers, eyes open, her mouth parted in preparation of speaking words that had not, and now never would, emerge.
    As they sped away from the exclusive development in their rented vehicle, the nondescript visitors discussed the implications of their visit.
    “One more killing.” As she spoke, the woman’s thoughts turned from the physician they had just left to their quarry.
    “It does not matter.” Her companion was programming the small skimmer to take them to the modest downtown hotel that they had made their center of operations since arriving on Goldin IV. “The Death comes to us all sooner or later.”
    “May it be sooner.” The woman responded automatically in the litany of the Order. “Do you think he is still somewhere in the city?”
    “We can only hope.” Switching to automatic, the skimmer joined a line of vehicles heading for the city. “If so, we must find him before the local authorities do. We have few associates here.”
    “The physician knew nothing of his true nature.” Sitting back in her seat, the woman pondered the scenery whizzing past outside, scenery that, like everything else, would be obliterated by the same clean slate that would come to dominate all of existence. Though she knew she was personally unlikely to witness that coming, she could anticipate and envision it in her imagination. That was the wonderful thing about nothingness, she knew. It was clean. Pure. So unlike the teeming, festering cosmos of today. It was coming. It was inevitable.
    Only one individual might possibly, by means and methods not understood, somehow slow that process. He might do so only because he possessed knowledge of what was coming. Infinitesimal as the possibility of the Forthcoming being diverted or halted might be, it still existed. By dealing with him the Order would ensure that even that minuscule possibility was erased.
    It was little enough to do. If others died in the course of seeking him, it meant nothing. If she and her companion died, it meant nothing.
    They would find the only one who, besides the members of the Order, knew the full truth of what was coming, and they would kill him. If possible, she wanted to speak to him first, to find out everything that he knew and if