"It was just a matter of time before you dropped all pretense of being thinly legal," said Walt scathingly. "Give you credit, Kingman, for conducting yourself as close to the line without stepping over for a long time. But now you can add breaking and entering to kidnaping to whatever other crimes you have committed."
Kingman smiled in a superior manner. "I might," he said suavely, "add murder. There would be no corpus delicti if both of you were fed into the duplicator."
"You can't record a human being," said Walt.
"Don't be stupid," said Kingman. "Who said anything about making a record?"
Walt admitted that this was so.
Then Kingman snapped the switch on the duplicator and the wall was re-established. Then he forced Christine to tie Walt, after which he tied Christine and then checked and added to Walt's bonds from a large roll of friction tape. He dropped them side by side in chair, and taped them thoroughly.
"You are a damned nuisance," he said. "Having to eliminate you tends to decrease my enjoyment at seeing the failure of Venus Equilateral. I'd have preferred to watch all of you suffer the hardest way. Killing you leaves fewer to gloat over, but it must be done. Once you found me, there is no other way."
"Walt," pleaded Christine, "won't the others find the same thing and follow us?"
Walt wanted to lie—wanted desperately to lie, if for no other reason than to spare Christine the mental anguish of expecting death. But Walt was not a good liar. He gave up and said: "I happen to be the guy who rigged the thermal-energy tube—and I'm the only guy who knows about the too-fast drop. All I hope for is that we'll be missed."
"We will," said Christine.