by Diane Duane
Peter thought. “THREE WEEKS,” he typed.
“Incorrect Entry! Please Try Again,” said the computer.
Peter frowned. “21,” he typed instead.
“One Moment Please,” said the computer. “Your Request Is Being Processed.”
Peter waited. At least it didn’t play music while processing.
Finally, “ONE REFERENCE,” the computer said.
Aha! Peter thought. He hit (1).
The screen filled, and the byline made him catch his breath. “San Francisco—A revolutionary breakthrough in snake-farming techniques means that for the first time, the antidote for rattlesnake venom will not have to be given in multi-vial doses, over the course of days, but in a single injection—”
“Oh, phooey,” said Peter. He backed out of that story, went back to its menu and the one before that, and studied the search criteria a little more carefully. But there seemed no way to differentiate between snake venom and the Venom Peter had most in mind. What this thing needs is a proper name filter, he thought.
He paused, then typed, “VENOM + SAN FRANCISCO.” The computer asked him for days again, and he told it “21.”
“ONE REFERENCE,” the computer screen said. Peter asked to have that displayed, feeling sure that it was going to be the same snake-venom story.
It was. Peter sat back and looked at the screen. At least, I think I know what this means. He hasn’t been sighted in San Francisco at all. At least—He backtracked through the computer’s menus to the point where one choice offered was Crossindex To Other Newspapers/News Services. Peter chose that, and when the program asked him again for search phrases, once more typed VENOM + SAN FRANCISCO.
“ONE REFERENCE,” it said, and once again, it was the snake-venom story.
Not a peep out of him, then, Peter thought. No one’s seen him or heard from him—not the wires, not the papers.
Which means he really could be in New York….
Or anywhere else, of course. There was no telling, with this dearth of data.
I still don’t get it, though. Radioactives….
He sat still and thought for a moment. Radioactives. There was not a lot of radioactive material loose in the city. The stuff in the hospitals—gamma sources for radiotherapy, blood isotope material and so forth—was too developed, too single-purpose, for much criminal use to be made of it. What a crook would want, Peter thought, would be less refined nuclear material, or nuclear material in bulk, or both. And there are only a couple of places in the city, really, where you could get such stuff….
Peter put that aside for the moment. It was simpler to deal with the facts as he understood them. He knew that two CCRC warehouses had been hit in one night, by different people—or entities, he thought—and possibly for different reasons. Both perpetrators had been interested in those canisters of waste for reasons Peter couldn’t yet understand. In the case of the warehouse where the homeless men had been sleeping, who or what the perpetrator had been remained unproven. Peter still couldn’t believe that Venom was involved.
As for the Hobgoblin—what would he want with nuclear material? Hobby’s motivations were something he had studied in the past. They seemed generally to come down to one thing—money. Either he would steal money directly, or he would steal something which he could ransom or sell to get a lot of money, or he would hire himself out as a mercenary for money. Nuclear waste, though? Peter got up from the terminal and hefted his portfolio. It was all very peculiar.
Then an idea, a sort of doomsday scenario, leapt to his mind. A bomb? Plans for atomic bombs were not hard to find: high school students had made them. The Freedom of Information Act made it possible to get all the data you needed except for a few crucial bits of information about critical mass and so forth, but those could be worked out by someone with, in one case, no better than high-school physics. The problem, of course, was the size. A bomb of any real destructive power could not be made very small. But small enough. You could hide a fairly damaging nuke in the trunk of a car, a much worse one in the back of a truck. There was certainly no question that, if he felt like it and had the time, Hobgoblin could build such a thing himself.
Even if he didn’t want to, there were enough terrorists, cranky underpaid scientists-for-hire, and disaffected high-school physics students whom Hobby could get to do such a job for him. But why now? It can’t be that the idea just occurred to him. Such do-it-yourself bombs had been in the news for years—either the possibility of them or the actuality. If Hobby were in fact building a bomb, or masterminding one, why right this minute? Why not a long time ago?
Either the talent he needed had just become available—or something else had just become available.
What?
Peter shook his head and waved to Bob, heading out of the morgue. There were still too many pieces missing from this puzzle. What he was sure of, though, was that Venom was not involved in this.
Peter was equally sure, though, that Venom did not like having his name used behind his back. If you mentioned him often enough, he had a way of turning up. And when he did… all hell broke loose.
Just what we don’t need right now, Peter thought. Bad enough to have Hobby messing around with some kind of unspecified nuclear material. All we need is old Chomp-’n’-Drool showing up at the same time.
Still, there were at least two very obvious places where nuclear material, in raw and refined forms, was kept and worked with, sometimes even stockpiled. One was Empire State University, where Peter was working on his doctorate. Half the doctoral candidates in the place were working in some aspect of nuclear physics, having sought out the labs there, widely thought to be the best-equipped on the East Coast. The other place—about which he had heard enough complaints over time, from people who didn’t care to have nukes so close to New York City—was the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nuclear subs came there, docked, and were refuelled and defuelled. A visit over there as Spider-Man would not go amiss.
Peter chuckled a little as he walked out of the Bugle offices. The Hunt for Web October, huh? he thought—
Preoccupied with all this information he’d just processed, he blithely stepped off the curb. The blare of the horn practically in his ear shocked Peter almost out of his skin. He jumped back, almost fell over, reeled to one side and clutched a lamppost to keep himself from ramming into it. “Why don’cha watch where you’re going, ya dummy!” shouted the voice of the driver of the truck which had almost turned Peter into paté.
He stood watching the truck roar away. My spider-sense should have warned me—But of course, it was gone, still gone, for another eighteen hours at least.
Peter muttered under his breath. I’m going to have to be a lot more aware of my surroundings until this clears up. He ostentatiously looked both ways, and crossed the street.
FOUR
MARY Jane Watson-Parker sighed, settled herself in front of the bathroom mirror, and started putting on her makeup. Her thoughts drifted to the apparent reappearance of Venom. Once, long ago, in one of those earlier apartments she and Peter had shared, she encountered Eddie Brock standing over her. Because he knew Spider-Man’s real identity, it had been easy for him to track them down. She found herself wondering whether they were going to have to move again, and if so, how the heck they were going to afford it. First-last-and-deposit on anyplace decent was really out of their reach at the moment, unemployed as she was and with Peter’s employment on the sporadic side. But if we have to, we’ll manage it. Somehow. She refused to tolerate the idea that a costumed villain—or, in Venom’s case, a villained costume—was going to start invading her and her husband’s personal space again. If there was something Peter deserved, it was a quiet place away from the bizarre and dreadful people and creatures with whom his work brought him into conflict.
She got out the mascara, fiddled with the brush to get the usual huge blob off the end of it, and began working on her lashes. MJ had become more philosophical about Peter’s work over the last couple of years.
There had been a time when she thought perhaps married life would steady him down to the point where he wouldn’t need his “night job” anymore, where his family life would be enough to make him renounce those long dangerous nights out. Now she smiled briefly at her own old naïveté. Peter’s commitment to what he did was profound, though he covered that commitment with glib, good-natured street talk most of the time as a distraction. Once MJ had come to realize this, life had become both simpler and more difficult. Simpler, because she stopped waiting for something which was never going to come; more difficult, because now she had to struggle for two. They were a team.
The issue of support came up sometimes with some of the women she knew from her television and modeling work. It wasn’t that the men weren’t trying, holding down menial jobs while struggling to make it. The women, meanwhile, would gather in one of their occasional kaffeeklatsch sessions, in the back of some studio or off to the side of some photo shoot, nodding and grinning a little ruefully at one another as they compared stories.
“It could have been worse,” June, one of her cohorts on Secret Hospital, told MJ dryly over their last lunch, “you could have married an artist.” She was married to one, the kind of wildly creative “conceptual artist” whose idea of a meaningful installation was to cover the inside of a plain-walled room with slices of bread stuck to the walls with peanut butter.
At such times, while sympathizing with June, MJ knew that her situation was worse, and there was no way to explain it to the others. So she let them console her on the rising price-per-credit at ESU and the cost of textbooks, and otherwise held her peace on the issues which really concerned her, like patching her husband up after he came home badly messed up following yet another brawl with some intransigent caped kook.
Now, while she knew that one of the worst of them was seemingly in the neighborhood, she had to concentrate on other things, and specifically, work. It was hard enough for Peter to be out and about his personal quest against evil without him having to obsess about the rent as well. That concern, at least, she had been able to keep off his mind while she’d had the job with Secret Hospital. But that job was gone now, and it was her responsibility to get employed again as quickly as possible, to leave Peter once again free to concentrate on his work.
MJ checked her face over one last time. Theoretically, she was just going down to the store for the trades, but if she saw something likely in one of them, MJ had to look good enough to walk straight off into an interview or a cold reading with confidence. Not too bad, she thought, for a woman who was up half the night wondering if her husband had fallen off a tall building.
She went back through the living room, where Peter was still snoring under the quilt, and paused a moment to look at him thoughtfully. I don’t like those circles under his eyes. But then his hours have never been exactly what you’d call regular.
She picked up her keys and her purse, and headed for the door, locked up, and went down in the elevator.
Their street was still fairly quiet, this time of morning. MJ didn’t hurry: there was no need, and the weather was too pleasant. This was the only time today when it was likely to be: the weather report claimed it was going to get up in the high 90s again, and with the humidity they’d been having, the climate would be no joke later.
The thought kept her sighing down to the open door of the store at the corner.
“Morning, Mr. Kee,” she said as she passed the owner at the counter.
“Morning, MJ,” he said, glancing up from behind the lottery tickets and the chewing gum. “Got your papers in, today.”
“Thanks.” She paused by the rack, picked up Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and turned to the back to have a quick look at the classifieds. There was nothing much in the Reporter, and she tucked it under her arm.
“Hey, MJ, you gonna buy that?” Mr. Kee called from the front of the store.
“Oh, no,” she said, “I was just planning to stand back here and bend all the pages.” She grinned. Mr. Kee was not above teasing her as if she was one of the comics-reading ten-year-olds whom he claimed were the bane of his existence.
That was when her eye fell on the boxed ad almost at the back of Variety.
OPEN CALL
Young-looking females, 22–25, for episodic work: reading & look-over. August 12, 445 W 54th St, 10 AM–2 PM.
MJ blinked and looked up hurriedly into the mirror to see if she looked 22–25. Then she smiled at herself, but the look was wry: these days, it seemed, 22–25 meant “just out of the cradle” to some of the directors she had auditioned for, and despite the fact that she was between the ages in question, the odds were no better than fifty-fifty that she would manage to be cast as such. Still—nothing ventured, nothing gained—
She made her way up to the checkout, still staring at the copy of Variety. Ten o’clock… there’s plenty of time to get back up to the apartment, pick up a couple of eight-by-tens and a CV or so… then get down there….
“Going to walk into a post or something, reading like that,” Mr. Kee said, eyeing the two papers. He tapped at the cash register for a moment. “Mmm… three forty-five.”
She fished around for the change. “You find anything?” Mr. Kee said.
MJ raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure. Do I look between twenty-two and twenty-five?”
He shook his head at her, smiling, his eyes wrinking. “Eighty at least.”
MJ grinned. “You’re no help. If I’m eighty, what are you, chopped liver?”
“Good luck, MJ!” he called after her as she went out. MJ, equipped with copies of her resume and publicity stills and dressed in interview clothes, got on the subway. A half-hour later, she was at the address where the open call was being held.
It looked like any other somewhat-aging office building in that part of the West Side: no air-conditioning, grimy linoleum, broken elevators, windows that appeared to have been last washed around the time the Mets won their first World Series. The only clue to anything interesting was the hand-scrawled sign taped to the elevator which said AUDITIONS—SECOND FLOOR.
MJ found the stairs and climbed them slowly: it was already getting warm, and she didn’t want to get all sweaty. She could hear a soft mutter of voices upstairs. Not too loud, though. Maybe not too many people. That would be good luck for me.
She pushed open a fire door at the top of the stairs, and the wall of sound, about a hundred voices, hit her. Well, so much for that, she thought, as she pushed her way into a hall full of women twenty-two to twenty-five years old, or purporting to be.
A harried production assistant was pushing through the crowd. “Anybody who doesn’t have a number yet,” she yelled to the assembled actresses, “take a number, will you? Numbers over on the table, ladies.”
I am not a number, MJ thought, somewhat ironically, pushing her way over there through the crowd, I am a free woman. She grabbed a card, one of only a few remaining on the table. Free woman number one hundred and six. Oh, joy. There was no hope of finding anywhere to sit; she resigned herself to leaning carefully against the cleanest piece of wall she could find, and pulled out her much-thumbed copy of War and Peace.
An hour and a half later it was about twenty degrees warmer, and all around her the remaining thirty or so women were wilting. MJ was not exactly cool herself, but the combination of images of a Russian winter and the likelihood that absolutely nothing would come of this interview were helping her somewhat.
“One oh four,” came the voice from the next room. One oh four, who was certainly no more than eighteen and dressed in the most minuscule possible shorts and a halter, vanished into the room and came immediately out again, looking morose. This had been happening with increasing regularity over the last while, MJ had noticed. The heat, she thought, was beginning to tell on the interviewers as much as on the interviewees. “One oh five,” the voice said, and no question that the PA at least sounded weary of the day, if not of life.
One oh five raised her eyebrows at MJ
and went in. The door closed. About three minutes later it opened again, and she came out. “One oh six,” said the tired PA’s voice from inside.
MJ slipped her paperback into her bag and strolled into the room, looking around. The room was bare, except for a table which held the first PA and two other people, a middle-aged woman and a younger man, all of whom looked at her with various degrees of loathing.
Except the middle-aged woman, whose expression changed abruptly. “You were on Secret Hospital, weren’t you?” she said.
MJ smiled. “Was, yes.”
Glances were exchanged at the table. The young female PA held out some sheets of paper. “Would you mind reading from this?”
Cold, MJ thought, not losing her smile in the slightest. I hate cold reading. But she took the pages, and started reading after no more than a glance.
It was something to do with social work, some dialogue about homeless people. Typecasting, MJ thought, do I mind? I should think not! She threw as much feeling into it as she could, recalling the compassion in the voice of one of her friends, Maureen, who had been doing some volunteer work with the homeless and had told MJ some dreadful horror stories about the situations they got into these days. When she finished, the three were looking at her with interest.
“Can you come back Thursday?” the young man said.
“Certainly,” MJ said.
“Do you have a CV?”
“Right here,” MJ said, and handed it over, along with her still.
And a few minutes later she was out on the street again, staring with mild bemusement at a five-page premise for something called Street Life, which was apparently intended to be a dramatic series with a comic edge, and involved a starring role for a female actor who was to play a crusading social worker. There were three more sets of dialogue and half a script to study as well. On Thursday she would read for real.
What happened to the interview? MJ wondered as she walked down the street, trying to recover her composure after the abrupt excitement of the past few minutes. Never mind: she hated interviews. She preferred job tryouts that seemed to actually have something to do with her acting ability, rather than her life experience.
