by Diane Duane
Peter heard the faraway sound of cash registers. He knew that smile, slight as it was. “He won’t win any beauty contests,” he said.
Kate held up the full-face picture of Hobgoblin. “How did you get that one?” she asked, cocking an eye at Peter.
He shrugged. “Long lens,” he said.
The look she threw at him was amicably suspicious. “Since when can you afford lenses that give you that kind of detail without grain? Then again, this is that new ASA 8000 film, isn’t it?”
“Six,” he said. “I got a price break on it.”
“You must have,” Kate said. “Buy much of that stuff at the regular prices and you just about have to go into escrow. Well—” She held up the Hobgoblin shot. “This one with the canisters—this is the actual robbery itself, isn’t it?”
Peter nodded.
Kate looked sidewise at him. “Enthusiasm is a good thing,” she said, “but you want to watch you don’t get reckless. What you were doing up on that rooftop, that time of night?”
Peter opened his mouth, thought better of it and shut it again. Kate just smiled. “Long lens,” she said. “I remember.” Then she added: “Came in with this a little late today, didn’t you?”
“As soon as I could.”
“Yes, well, I sent someone down to the crime scene already,” she said. Peter’s heart sank. “And he’s back, and the pictures are developed, and already in the system for pasteup. Now I’m going to have to get into the system again and pull them out. You could have saved me some trouble by being a little earlier. I hate that damn new software.”
Peter smiled. This was a common complaint all over the Bugle. They had just gone over to a new computer-based pasteup system, and everyone was moaning about the endless inservices needed to learn how to use it, especially since they were used to the old system, no matter that this one was supposed to be so much more flexible and usable. “Anyway,” Kate said, “anybody who’s out with this ‘long lens’ in the middle of the night and gets pictures like this, deserves a little over his rate.”
She scribbled for a moment on a pad, looked at the numbers, made a change. “Here,” she said, “this should help you get some sleep tonight.” She reached for another pad, the sight of which made Peter’s heart rise again: it was the voucher pad, and you took the filled-out form on it to the cashier downstairs. Whatever she was writing, Peter could see that it was in three figures.
She tore off the sheet and handed it to him, and Peter could see which three figures. He suppressed the gasp. This figure was half the Visa bill, on the spot. “Thanks, Kate,” he said.
She waved a hand at him negligently. “You do the work, you get the pay,” she said. “The composition on these is a little better than what you’ve been showing me lately.”
Peter said nothing, but was silently glad that the motion sensor was performing as advertised.
“Initiative, I don’t mind. Enthusiasm is fine. Just you be careful,” Kate said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Peter said, and walked out.
He wandered down the hall clutching the voucher, looking at it once or twice to make sure it wasn’t actually a typo or a mistake. But she had written the amount both in numbers and words. As Peter went down the hall, he could hear two familiar voices. Had they been anyone else’s, he would have called what he was hearing an argument. As it was, when one of the voices belonged to J. Jonah Jameson, the noise going on was merely a discussion. “What the hell am I paying you for?” J. Jonah was shouting out his open door. This, too, was an indication of the casual level of the discussion; for a real argument, JJJ would have been right out into the hall.
“How could you possibly be so obtuse? Here we have the biggest super villain ever to hit this city, and one of the worst, and you know why he’s here.”
“I don’t, actually,” said Robbie Robertson’s calm voice. “He seems to have forgotten to fax me his itinerary again.”
“Don’t get cute with me, Robbie.” JJJ emerged into the hall, gesticulating. “All the other papers are going to be all over this like a cheap suit. You know perfectly well that any time Venom turns up, Spider-Man turns up as well, and they begin bashing each other all over this city, trashing buildings, driving the city’s garbage-removal budget through the ceiling, and doing all the other kinds of things that make news.” He stalked back into the office again, apparently waving disgustedly at the computer. “And we’re stuck with two-bit break-ins, and secondhand reporting about flying hooligans zooming around, flinging exploding squash in all directions. We should be coming down a lot harder on this Venom story. It’s just not the same as—”
“As the newsworthiness of having the flesh flayed off your bones? No, I suppose not,” the answer came back. “But the police are saying that the forensics are looking a little funny. We don’t have enough—”
“Funny? Now how can they not look funny when the thing that committed the murder is half psychopathic human and half some kind of mind-reading man-eating amoeba with a bad body image? Yet another little present to our fair city from Spider-Man, let me remind you. I tell you, there is not a garbage can in this town that you won’t find the damn webslinger at the bottom of it—”
“There is not enough data to lean really hard on the Venom story,” Robbie said calmly, “and I would sooner be late than be wrong. Extremely wrong.”
“C’mon, Robbie,” JJJ grumbled. “Right is doing it first. And I know it’s right. I know it’s Venom. I can feel it in my bones. This is some kind of plot between Venom and Spider-Man. I’ve seen it before. One turns up, and the other turns up, and the city gets trashed. And I refuse to miss the chance to cover it in my paper!”
“With all due respect—” Robbie said quietly.
“Yes, yes, with all due respect, you’re not going to do what I say, because I’m not editor-in-chief anymore, and you are.”
“Something like that,” Robbie said, “yes. You can say what you like about it in your publisher’s editorials. But while I’m editing, I edit. When I don’t think there’s enough data to set a story on, I let it build up until there is.”
“I don’t know what this business is becoming these days,” JJJ bellowed, coming out into the hall again, with Robbie ambling along behind him, sucking resignedly on his empty pipe.
Peter was standing nearby, leaning as respectfully as he could on the wall—being careful to put his pay voucher out of sight lest JJJ should get a glimpse of it and start going on about his freelancers being seriously overpaid. He couldn’t resist putting in his two cents. “But, Jonah,” he said. “Spider-Man—”
JJJ whirled on him. “And what would you know about it?”
“That Spider-Man wasn’t anywhere around there,” Peter said. “He was off fighting Hobgoblin when Venom showed up.”
“Oh? Who says?
“I saw him,” Peter said. “I got pictures of it.”
“Did you, now?” Robbie said, his eyebrows going up.
“Hmm,” Jonah said. “Think, Parker, use your brains! Don’t you know what it means?”
Peter looked at Robbie, who just gave an infinitesimal shake of his head. “No, sir,” Peter said.
“It means Spider-Man, Venom, and Hobgoblin are all in it together! Hobgoblin strikes in one spot, then Spider-Man turns up to pretend to fight him, and while they’re drawing attention away, Venom is off murdering people on the other side of the city, or committing some other kind of weird crime! Drinking toxic waste, it looks like, for pity’s sake. As if that monster isn’t enough trouble, without messing with stuff like that as well.”
“Oh,” Peter said, not able to find much to add.
“Oh, go on,” Jonah said, glaring at him and gesturing away between himself and Robbie. “I’m tired of looking at you. You just don’t have any imagination, that’s the problem. And as for you,” he said, turning to Robbie.
Robbie winked at Peter as Peter slid by. For his own part, Peter was glad enough to escape. When Jonah got on one of these rolls
, there was no stopping him. He would blame Spider-Man for the federal budget deficit, global warming, and World War II if he kept going long enough.
I wish I understood it, Peter thought as he made his way down the hall. It’s not as if Spider-Man ever really had it in for JJJ. Maybe he was just one of those personalities, like the old king in Thurber, who thought that “everything was pointed at him” to begin with. That Spider-Man should be as well would only help him make more sense of the world. But who knew?
In any case, JJJ had long since made up his mind and no longer had any desire to be confused by facts. Peter doubted any fact concerning Spider-Man was big enough to do anything but hit Jonah and bounce at this point.
At any rate, he had other things on his mind right now. First, that voucher. He took himself downstairs to the accounting offices, and took his turn standing in line at the cashier’s armor-glass window. Maya smiled from behind the window, and said, “Long time no see!”
It was her constant tease, one she used with all the freelancers. “Yeah,” Peter said. He handed her the voucher.
She widened her eyes appreciatively at the sight of it. “That’ll buy some cat food,” she said.
Peter chuckled. “We don’t have cats.”
“I know,” Maya said. “Which makes you the perfect home for one of the new kittens!”
“Maya,” Peter groaned. “Don’t tell me you still haven’t had her spayed!”
“I just hate interfering with nature,” Maya said. Her beautiful Persian had struck up a nonplatonic and extremely fruitful relationship with a handsome black tom from several buildings over, and periodically escaped, the result being litter after litter of gorgeous, long-furred, mixed-color kittens, with which Maya had populated half the Bugle’s employees’ apartments. “No, thanks,” Peter said gratefully. “We’re a no-pets building.”
Maya tsked, handing him the cash. “Terrible sort of place to live,” she said. “You should move out.”
Peter just sighed, but thought, We may have to if Venom finds us again…. He headed off.
“I’ve got a real cute one!” she shouted after him. “Black longhair!”
Peter just waved at her and kept going. He had a lot more than cats on his mind.
He took the elevator back up to the second floor to the Bugle’s morgue. These were the archives where earlier editions of the paper were kept. Once upon a time, they had been kept in their original paper format; later, the archives had gone over to microfilm, but over time, even that had proved too bulky. Now both new paper and old microfilm were being stored on CD-ROM, able to be called up instantly from any terminal at the newspaper. At least, that was the plan. Everybody would be able to do that when the new system was completely installed, but at present the installation was only half done and the staff half trained. And there would always be those who preferred to go down to the morgue as a break from being stuck at their desks. Many claimed that this new system was in fact intended to keep them at their desks, where keystroke-activated “smart” productivity monitoring systems buried in the software would keep track of who was working and who was slacking off. Peter had heard of such things at other companies, but he personally doubted anything like that would be brought online at the Bugle. He suspected strongly that JJJ was too cheap to pay for such stuff, preferring to go stalking into people’s offices and bug them about their productivity personally.
Peter sauntered into the big airy room. There were only a few people at the scattered workstations. Off to one side, the big mainframe computer sat, making no noise except that of its private air conditioners. The rest of the place, too, was pleasantly cool, the computer’s own aggressive air-conditioning keeping the temperature down.
Bob the computer maven wandered over to Peter as he stood looking around. Bob was a big, rugged-looking, handsome Irish guy, another one gone prematurely silver, with a mustache to match, and a big engaging smile. He looked less like a software nerd than anything you could imagine. “You need some help?” he said to Peter.
“Just a spare terminal. I could use a look at today’s edition, too,” Peter said.
Bob grinned at him. “Why not just pick up a paper?”
“What,” Peter said, “and get newsprint all over me?”
Bob snickered. “We could make a software jockey out of you eventually,” he said. “Come on over here.”
He showed Peter to a spare terminal and handed him a photocopied booklet. “There,” he said. “This is the idiot’s guide. Control-F1 gives you the main menu. Just page through it and pick the day you want.”
The screen in front of Peter was a big handsome one, the size of a full tabloid page. Bob hit the keys for him the first time, and the menu came up on screen: a numbered list of dates, starting with today’s and proceeding backwards. “Morning edition okay?” Bob said. “Evening’s not out of comp yet.”
“Morning is fine.”
Bob brought up the page. It appeared in black and white. The front page had a quite well composed but not terribly illuminating photo of the shattered wall in the warehouse, a few canisters still scattered about, all rather dark. A little hurried, Peter thought. If I were him, I would have waited and gone up a couple more f-stops—gotten a little more light.
He pushed the arrow key to turn the “page,” looking for the rest of the story. “Give a shout if you need anything,” Bob said, and strolled off to see about something else.
Peter read on through the continuation on page three. The language was straightforward enough. Venom was indeed accused of the murder of a homeless man by his friend squatting in the warehouse, the man whom Peter had seen early that morning on the news. The story gave a little more detail: the address of the warehouse; its owner, Consolidated Chemical Research Corp. in New Jersey; and some detail, rather garbled, about what Venom had looked like to the man. The description mostly focused on the tentacles the man saw. That was accurate as far as it went: the symbiote’s tentacles looked like strands and long flowing lines, tendrils that came alive and reached for what they wanted.
But the part of it all which still left Peter most confused was that Venom did this at all. Venom had settled in San Francisco and was supposedly protecting homeless people there. The idea that Venom would kill a homeless person, much less any innocent bystander, was hard for Peter to imagine. One of his few redeeming qualities was his belief that the innocent were to be protected at all costs, that life had given them a hard enough run as it was, and that somewhere they needed a protector.
Something, though.… Peter paged forward to see if there was anything more about the story but filler. Nothing.
He paged back again. Consolidated Chemical Research, he thought. I could have sworn that CCRC had a sign on that warehouse where I was last night. He pulled out the contact sheet from his portfolio, studied it. Yes, on that photo near the front of the roll, the lens had just caught it. Three letters out of four: CCR.… Right, he thought. And the likeness between the canisters, which MJ had spotted: she had been absolutely right.
And here, that weird detail which the homeless man reported in today’s story, that he had seen Venom drink the radioactive toxic waste. Peter sat there and shook his head. Is this some weird new taste the symbiote’s developed? he wondered.
“How’s it going?” Bob said, materializing at his shoulder.
“Not too bad. Is there a way to scan for a specific word or phrase in this thing?”
“Oh, sure. You want to scan for a string? Just take it out of graphic mode. Here.” Bob tapped the control key. The screen went mostly blank, except for a C:> prompt up in the corner. Then Bob entered something which didn’t echo to the screen—a password, probably. The screen went dark and showed another menu. One option highlighted on it was “string search.”
“There,” Bob said. “You get, I think, up to sixty-four characters. There are ways to sort for two or three phrases at once, if you want. Just hit this one here and it’ll show you the sample screen, with examples of how
to enter the stuff so you get what you want.”
“Hey, this isn’t so bad,” Peter said. “Why’s everyone complaining about it?”
“Because it’s not what they had the last time,” Bob said, resigned.
Peter grinned. “That’s okay. In five years they’ll get used to this, and then Jonah will bring in something newer.”
Bob moaned. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “I know damn well.”
Peter turned back to the screen and had a look at the help menu. Carefully, because he knew how relentlessly stupid computers were about typographical errors, he typed, “CONSOLIDATED CHEMICAL RESEARCH.”
“One Moment Please,” the screen said. “Processing Your Request.”
The cursor sat there and blinked at Peter for a little while. Then, up came a list of locations in the text archives where the computer had spotted the name. There weren’t that many of them. The company was a newish one, as Peter found from reading the articles, mostly from the financial pages: a small company specializing in radioactive materials of various kinds, tailored isotopes for radioimmunoassay, and the medical equipment and so forth needed to handle them. None of the articles contained anything particularly interesting.
The last two entries on the main menu were: (8) Crossindex to Yellow Pages and (9) Crossindex to White Pages. Peter chose the second. The New York phone directory came up, with a long listing of addresses—corporate headquarters in the city, some other office addresses, and then their warehouses. There were four. One was the warehouse Peter had been in last night. The other one was the warehouse into which Venom had supposedly broken.
He backed up to the main menu again, and this time carefully typed, “VENOM.”
“Age Of Story?” the computer prompted.
