by Diane Duane
‘Twenty-five degrees right rudder,” Bass said. “Half a knot.”
“Five hundred yards, sir.”
“Very good. Rudder back.”
A crewman was working the wheel that popped the forward hatch. Captain LoBuono waited for him to get out of the way, then went up the ladder to get a look at the day and the mooring.
There was a brisk wind blowing: it had already mostly dried the sail and the superstructure. LoBuono leaned on the sail’s “balcony rail” and gazed down at the dock to the starboard of slip sixteen as Minneapolis sidled gently into it. The dock was stacked with plastic-wrapped crates and packages on dollies, ready to be hauled up onto the superstructure and passed down the hatches. Very slowly, very gently, the boat nudged sideways into the dock.
Bump.
And then, abrupt and terrifying, came the screaming hoot of collision alarms. The whole ship shook, abruptly, and shook again. “What the—” LoBuono started to mutter, and didn’t bother finishing, as he dove down the ladder again.
By the time he reached the bridge, Lorritson was already running out of the back of it, toward the source of the alarms. “Hull breach!” someone yelled at the Captain as he raced past them.
“Bass!” LoBuono yelled at the back of his Ex, running in front of him.
“Not me, Captain!” Bass yelled back. They kept running.
Ahead of them they could hear the most dreaded sound of boat men, the thundering rush of uncontrolled water. They could also hear a slightly more reassuring sound, that of watertight compartments with automatic doors, dogging themselves closed. First Bass, then Captain LoBuono came to the final door, the one down at the far end of the weapons room, and found it closed as well. Behind it, they knew, lay the door with the “DANGER—RADIATION” sign. They looked at each other as they stood there.
LoBuono grabbed a mike that hung nearby and thumbed its “on” button. “Bridge! Everybody accounted for?”
“All accounted for, sir,” said the Crew Chief’s voice. “No one’s back there.”
“Get someone out in the water and have them see what the damage is!”
“I’ve got a man out there now, Captain,” the Crew Chief said. “One moment—” There was an unintelligible squawking of secondhand radio conversation. Then the Crew Chief said, “We’ve got a breach about a foot and a half by two and a half, from the looks of it. Deck crew are getting a temp-patch on it. We can pump out the aft compartment in a few minutes.”
“Go,” LoBuono said.
He looked at his Ex. Lorritson opened his mouth, and the Captain said, “Sorry, Bass. The currents in the Narrows are one thing, but I know you’d never make a goof like that in dock.” He made a slightly sour smile. “Put it down to nerves.”
Lorritson nodded. “It’s been—difficult,” he said.
“All around—”
“Patch is in place,” the Crew Chief said. “Pump’s started.”
They heard the throb from the in-hull pump motors starting. For a few minutes more they hummed unobtrusively. Then LoBuono heard the coughing noise that meant they were running out of anything to pump.
“Right,” he said, and turned to Lorritson. “Got your dosimeter?”
Bass patted his pocket, where the little radiation-sensitive patch hung.
“If it turns any interesting colors, get your butt out of here,” the Captain said. He turned the wheel to undo the door.
Clunk! went the latch. LoBuono pulled; the door swung slightly open. He peered around its edge.
His dosimeter, one of the new ones with a sound chip in it which essentially made it a small geiger counter, ticked gently to itself—a slow watch-tick, serious enough but hardly fatal. “Let’s keep it short,” the Captain said, stepping through and looking around cautiously.
There was nothing to be seen but wet floor, wet walls, wet ceiling, and the silvery-gray metal crate in the middle of it all, as wet as everything else. Slowly LoBuono walked around it. The front was fine. The sides were fine.
The rear of it, though, had an oblong hole about a foot and a half wide and two and a half feet long punched through it. The bent rags and tags of metal around the hole in the crate were all curved outward. LoBuono’s dosimeter began to tick more enthusiastically, as did Lorritson’s when he came up beside the captain and peered through the hole in the crate. There was nothing inside.
They looked at the hole in the hull, now sealed with pink plastic fast-patch. It very closely matched the one in the crate, both in size and in the direction of impact—from inside, punching toward the outside. Whatever had been in the crate, it had waited until the most opportune moment and then had left under its own power…
Lorritson looked at the hole in the hull, reached out to touch it, thought better, and let the hand drop. “I guess we’d better call the lost and found.”
Captain LoBuono shook his head. “The lost part we seem to have handled,” he said sourly. “We’ll be in enough trouble for that very shortly, I would imagine. As for the found part—are you sure you would want to?”
Lorritson shook his head like a man unsure of the right answer. “Come on,” LoBuono said, “let’s get on the horn to the brass. We might as well start the trouble ourselves as wait for it to come to us.”
But as they walked to the Bridge, LoBuono found himself wondering again, against his own orders, just what might have been in that box… and he shuddered.
ONE
HE had been in many strange and terrible places, in his time. He had been off Earth, on other planets, to other galaxies, even. He had faced threats terrible enough to make all Earth shudder, and had come away from them alive. All in all, he didn’t have a bad record so far.
But right now, Peter Parker stood outside the doors of the 48th Street midtown branch of the First Manhattan Bank and cursed at the way his palms were sweating.
Behind him, the city made its accustomed roar. People on the sidewalk rushed past, going about their business, no one noticing the young man standing there paralyzed by his own unease—he refused to call it “fear.” I’m a super hero, he thought. Why am I standing here twitching?
No answers came. Peter scuffed one sneaker on the sidewalk, staring at the chrome and plate glass of the bank. He had never been entirely comfortable with the term “super hero,” at least not as applied to himself. Some of the other people he consorted with in his line of business—mutants or other humans unusually gifted with extraordinary powers—seemed to him really to merit description with the word “hero”: many of them exhibited a level of courage or nobility which inspired him and sometimes shamed him. In his own case, “super” couldn’t be argued with. But the way he often felt while out on his rounds—frustrated, enraged, sometimes terrified—struck him as less than heroic. This kind of thing… this is different. Harder, in a way. This is just life.
The people on the sidewalk just kept streaming past him. It was lunchtime, and they had more important things to pay attention to than a reluctant super hero, had they even recognized one in his street clothes. Peter let out a long sigh, squared his shoulders, and walked into the bank.
He made his way through the soulless cheerfulness of the front of the bank, filled with gaudy posters shouting about mortgages and favorable interest rates, and went to the customer service counter. For all the attention anyone paid him for the first five minutes, he might as well have stayed outside. The young woman who finally came over to him did so with the air of someone engaged in much more crucial matters than serving a customer. “Yes?” she said, and popped her bubble gum.
“Mr. Woolmington, please?” Peter said.
“He’s out to lunch.”
This chimed well with some of Peter’s private opinions about the man, but he was hardly going to say as much in public. “Can you tell me when he’ll be back?”
“Dunno,” said the young woman behind the counter. “This afternoon sometime.” She turned away.
“Can you take a message for him, please?”
/> Popping her gum in a manner which suggested she had been a machine gun in an earlier life, the young woman said, “Yeah?”
“Please tell him—” Peter had a powerful urge to say, Please tell him that Spider-Man was here to see whether his debt-consolidation loan’s been approved yet, or whether he has to get one of the Avengers to cosign for it. He restrained himself. “Please tell him Peter Parker stopped in to see if there was any news on his loan approval.”
“Uh huh,” said the young woman, and she turned away again.
Peter watched her go, then walked back out to the street again, feeling—actually, a little grateful. He was so sure the answer was going to be “no” when it came, that not finding the guy there to give him the bad news was a blessing, in a way.
He walked on down 48th Street toward Fifth Avenue, hands in his pockets, staring at the sidewalk—as much from self-defense as anything else. No matter how much you fined people for not cleaning up after their dogs, it never seemed to help much.
Banks…. Peter thought. This had been just one more of many situations in his life lately which had made him wonder whether being able to invoke the inherent cachet of superherodom openly would be any use. Or, would it just make matters worse? There were some heroes who functioned without secret identities, and when you saw them socially—if you did—they seemed to be managing okay. All the same, Peter suspected their answering machines were always full when they got home from heroing, or even from doing the shopping, and the thought of how much junk mail they must get made him twitch. Even without anyone knowing his own secret identity, Peter got enough to make his trips to the recycling bins a trial for anyone, super hero or not. And when you added MJ’s endless catalogs to the pile.…
He smiled slightly as he crossed Madison and headed on along toward Fifth. Mary Jane Watson-Parker was quite a celebrity in her own right—or had been, until she had left the soap opera Secret Hospital. Even before that, she had been well enough known for her modeling work. As a result, every mail-order house in the country, it seemed, sent her notifications of its new product lines… and she went through every one lovingly, pointing and oohing at the goodies.
But, of late, not buying from them. Things had gotten—well, not desperate, but tight. It was easy to forget how lavish money from TV work was until you lost it. Until then, MJ had spent some months persuading Peter to lighten up a little, to go ahead and spend a little money, buy himself that jacket, eat out more often. Peter had resisted at first. Finally, because it made her happy, he had given in—gotten used to enjoying himself, gotten used to having more funds to work with, gotten out of the habit of dreading the time the credit card bills came in.
And then, just as he had gotten used to it, it had all changed.
Now the mailbox was once again a source of uneasiness. The rent on the apartment, easy enough to handle on the combined incomes of a minor TV star and a freelance photographer, had now become a serious problem. Breaking the lease before it expired so that they could move somewhere smaller and cheaper was proving near impossible. So was keeping up the rent on just a freelancer’s salary. They had some savings: not a huge sum, but it would last a while. MJ was out there getting every interview and audition she could scrape up. She was getting depressed, too, at not having been hired for something else right away. But Peter, just as nervous about it all as she was, had been purposely staying cheerful, trying to keep her spirits up and prevent her from getting discouraged. At the same time, he desperately wished there was someone to keep him from getting discouraged.
Being a super hero is all very well, he thought. I just wish it paid better.
I wish it paid, period!
He stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, while around him people hurried across anyway, daring the oncoming traffic. Whether heroing paid or not, he had to do it. Just as he had to take pictures, because he loved to, whether he got paid for them or not. Just as he had to study science, whether there seemed to be a job in it for him later or not. The old habit, the old love, went back too far, was too much a part of him now to let go.
He just had to make everything work together, somehow.
The light changed. Peter crossed, heading up Fifth to West 49th, then over to the shop where he usually got his photographic supplies. He had a couple of hours’ work in the darkroom before him. Usually he tried to wind that up before MJ got home from her day out and complained about the smell of the developing solution (as well she might). It wasn’t always easy. Darkroom business had become a lot more complicated, and more expensive, since the Daily Bugle’s front page had gone color. Now a photographer who aspired to lead-story work had to be able to manage quality color processing at home—a one-hour place wouldn’t cut it. And color chemicals were four times the cost of black-and-white.
Nothing he could do about it, though. Peter swung into the store, waited a few moments: Joel, the owner, was busy trying to sell a guy in a leather jacket a large and complicated camera case. After a few minutes the guy shook his head and went off.
“Hey, Petey,” Joel said, “you need a camera case?”
Peter snorted. “That thing? With the plastic hardware on it? It wouldn’t last a week.”
They both laughed. It was an old game: Joel would push something useless at Peter; Peter would push it back. Then they would gossip a while. Peter had learned not to cut the gossip short—Joel sometimes knew about potential news stories in the area, and once or twice Peter had been able to bring in hot pictures to the Bugle as a result, before anyone knew anything about the news story in question.
“Hey,” Joel said, bending down to rummage under the counter for a moment. “Got that gadget you were asking me for.”
“Which one?”
“Wait a sec.” Joel vanished below the counter, and things began to appear on it: rolls of film, brushes, lens caps, lens hoods, and lots more small pieces of equipment. After a moment he came up with a little black box with a clear plastic lens on the front.
“Strobe slave,” Joel said.
“Got one already,” Peter said. It was a useful accessory for a photographer, a second flash cabled to his camera and “slaved” to the first, so that they went off together. That way you could add light to a dark scene, or fill in unwanted shadows from the side.
“Not like this, you haven’t,” Joel said. He picked up the little box and turned it to show Peter a tiny secondary lens on the side. “Wireless. It goes off when your flash does by sensing sudden changes in the ambient light.”
Peter picked it up and looked at it thoughtfully. He had been thinking about some improvements to his present rig. “Any way you could hook a motion sensor to this, you think?”
Joel nodded, pointing to a jack socket on the back of the slave flash. “One of my other customers did something like that. Nature photographer. He picked up one of those passive infrared things, you know the kind—the doohickey that turns on your outside lights when someone gets close to the door. Saved him having to watch the birdie so much.” Joel chuckled. “The bird moves, the camera takes its picture before it flies the coop.”
Peter smiled. “I can use this. How much?”
“Forty.”
He sighed, did some hurried addition in his head and pulled out his credit card. “Okay. And give me another package of three-by-five stock and a bottle of three-fifty, would you?”
“No problem.” Joel went back to the shelves, came back with the gallon bottle of developer solution and the photo paper. For a moment he worked at the cash register. “Your lady find work yet?” he said.
Peter shook his head. “Still hunting.”
“Hmm. You know, I have a guy comes in from the network place around the corner, the studios for the daytime stuff. Yesterday he told me they’re hiring actors all of a sudden. Some kind of high-class soap, he said.” Joel chuckled. “ Is there such a thing?”
“You’ve got me. But I’ll tell MJ to check it out.”
The cash register dinged. “Sixty-two th
irteen,” Joel said.
Peter winced and handed his credit card over. “Did the price of the three-fifty go up again?”
“Yup. Another four bucks. Sorry, Petey.”
“Not much we can do, I guess,” Peter said, as Joel swiped the card through the reader.
“Don’t I know it. The distributor says he can’t do anything since the manufacturer’s raised his prices…” Joel sighed. The reader beeped twice: Joel looked down at it, then raised his eyebrows. “Uh oh. They declined it.”
Peter swallowed. “Didn’t get the payment yet, I guess.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. Did I tell you I sent my sister-in-law in Brooklyn a birthday card two weeks early, and it didn’t get to her until two weeks afterwards? I ask you. You’d think we were in Europe or something. Come to think of it, I get letters from my cousin there faster than I do from Cecile.”
Peter dug out his wallet and produced the necessary cash, noting sadly that this process left him with the munificent sum of one dollar and sixty cents. “Yeah,” he said. “Here you go.”
“Right.” Joel handed him his change. “Hey, Petey—” Peter turned, already halfway to the door. Joel waggled his eyebrows at him. “Don’t let it get you down. It can only get better.”
Almost against his will, Peter smiled. “Yeah. See you, Joel.”
“See you.”
All the same, as he walked on down the street, it was hard for Peter to see any way that things would get better any time soon. There’s only one thing, he thought, that’s going to make it seem worthwhile.
Tonight….
The apartment was empty when he got there. It was big and roomy, with a nice enough view of the skyline, and a slightly less impressive view of the next-building-over’s roof, about ten stories below their own and in this weather well covered with people in bathing suits trying to get a tan through the smog. The apartment’s big windows let in plenty of light on white walls and a polished oak floor. There, as in some of MJ’s show-business friends’ apartments, it might have stopped, finding not much else to shine on. But unlike them, MJ had no patience with the presently fashionable minimalist school of decorating which considered one couch and one throw rug “enough furniture” and left the place looking barren as a Japanese raked-sand garden. Mary Jane Watson had been something of a packrat—though in the best possible taste—and Mary Jane Watson-Parker remained so. Her tastes ran more toward Laura Ashley than Danish Modern: big comfy sofas and chairs to curl up in, cushions scattered around, lots of bookshelves with lots of things on them—vases, bric-a-brac old and new (mostly old), and lots of books. It made for a comfortable and welcoming environment, though it was a pain to keep properly dusted.
