by Diane Duane
The second bullet went wheet!, just the way bullets were supposed to go, through the air right past his ear. It had been fired at Hobgoblin, but Hobby had banked hard around again, laughing hysterically. And here came the snap of the whip—
Spidey hung on, eyeing the buildings under him for one tall enough. If he could snag one of them with a webline and mate it with the one attached to the jetglider—without being pulled in two pieces first like a Thanksgiving wishbone, that is.
But he didn’t have time. The next thing he saw, again without his spider-sense giving him the slightest warning, was a pumpkin bomb flying straight at his head.
Spider-Man let go the web and dropped, spread-eagled—he had learned long ago from watching real spiders, and from experience, that this was the only way to buy yourself a second or two in free fall. Behind and above him, the bomb went off. More rifle fire laced up past him toward Hobgoblin as Spidey looked around desperately for something to web to. One building had a radio mast on it, VHF from the look of it, and fairly sturdy. He shot web at it, felt it anchor, hauled himself in hard, managing to slingshot around it with enough speed and effort to keep himself from crashing into the roof of the building.
He looked up and saw Hobby heading straight down toward the open hatch of the sub. He had just enough time to see some sub crewman look up out of the hatch open-mouthed at the noise, take in the spectacle above, and duck hastily out of sight—but not fast enough to close the sub’s hatch. Down the hatch Hobby went, and there followed several seconds of horrible silence.
And a BANG!
Oh God, no, Spidey thought, and swung straight down after him. It was a long shot for the hatch of the sub. He let go of the webbing, casting off as hard as he could to get those last few feet of distance.
He came down hard just at the edge of the hatch as the smoke came boiling up. Not one of the high-explosive pumpkins, he thought. Maybe he’s not feeling homicidal today.
He dropped through the hatch and realized that the lack of spider-sense had betrayed him one more time. The first billow of smoke had been an ignition artifact from the bomb, nothing more. Down in the body of the sub, everything was drowned in a thick fog of gas: people were struggling in all directions, falling over each other. This gas Spidey knew from old experience. At high enough concentrations it paralyzed, even killed—and the bombs usually went off in two stages. He stopped breathing and made his way hurriedly along the way to where the cloud was thickest, squinting through his mask, which gave him some protection. There—looks like—He fumbled along the floor, and after a moment his hand came down on the round shape of the pumpkin bomb. Spider-Man leapt back up the ladder to the hatch in two great bounds, reared back and threw the bomb up and out of the hatch. In midair it detonated again, letting loose its main dose of gas, the one meant to flood the whole place and kill, but the breeze off the bay began to take the big noxious green cloud away immediately.
Not that this solved the problems of the men down in the sub. Spidey dove back down that hatch and started grabbing men any which way, upside down, right side up, a double armful of them. Up the hatch he leapt again, making harder work of it this time, but if a spider could jump around while lifting such proportional weights, so could he. He dropped the men in a heap on the upper hull and dived down the hatch again. A second load, men choking and coughing with tears streaming down their faces, cursing the gas and trying to find out what was happening to them. He leapt back up into the clean air, dumped them by their buddies, took a great lungful of breath and dived back down—and was slammed sideways into the opening of the hatch by Hobgoblin, still laughing, as he rocketed back up into the open with his arms full of something metallic and bulky. He soared away.
Spidey clung to the edge of the hatch and shot a webline at Hobgoblin, furious at one more failure of his spider-sense, desperate not to let Hobby get away. But Hobby veered to one side and was off across the river, heading for Manhattan at high speed, his laughter trailing away as he went. The web fell, useless, not being much good at changing direction in mid-shot.
Spider-Man clambered up out of the hatch and went over to check out the men lying around on the upper deck. They were still coughing and rubbing streaming eyes, but none of them were dead, which was something. “Hey,” one of them said, focusing on him when his eyes were working again, “thanks, buddy. Maybe I’ll do the same for you some day.”
Spider-Man looked around him at the dark elegant bulk of the sub. “You’ve been doing it for a long while,” he said. “I’m just returning the favor.”
He heard clanking footsteps on the ladder from the big hatch, and turned. A tall dark man with eyes still wet from the effects of the gas, and wearing a sidearm, had come up out of the hatch and was eyeing him coolly. He said, “Captain wants to see you, Mr.—”
“Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man will do,” Spidey said, trying to sound as cool. “My pleasure. Lead the way.”
The sergeant-at-arms went down the ladder: Spidey followed him. Blowers had been activated inside the sub, and the gas was slowly clearing, so that off to his left Spider-Man could see something he would have missed the first time: a large door labeled DANGER—RADIATION, and bearing the radiation-warning trefoil. Now that’s interesting, he thought. Hobby never gave that a second glance, if I’m right. Very strange indeed….
“This way,” the sergeant-at-arms said, gesturing Spider-Man rightwards. Spidey went. Around him, in the corridor, men were being helped to their feet by others wearing anti-gas equipment. The corridor ended in what seemed like the bridge of the ship—or, at least, a bridge—and standing there was another man wearing an expression entirely too calm for the situation, and triple stripes on the short sleeves of his shirt, which accounted for the expression.
“Spider-Man, I presume,” the Captain said. “That’ll be all, sergeant-at-arms.”
The officer saluted and turned away.
“Permission to come aboard. Captain—”
“LoBuono,” the Captain said, and held out his hand. They shook. “Granted. My medic tells me you saved the lives of the men who were stuck aft.”
“I think so, Captain.”
“Thank you,” the Captain said. “We seem not to have sustained any serious damage. But there has been a loss.”
“Not of life—”
“No. Your friend there—”
“No friend of mine, sir. Hobgoblin.”
“He deserves the name. And worse. He broke into one of the missile silos just forward of the hatch—” A young officer came hurrying up to Captain LoBuono at that point. “A moment,” he said. “Report?”
“He got at number three, Captain,” said the officer. “Pulled the upper actuator right out.”
“Damn him straight to hell,” the Captain said, again quite calmly. “Anything else?”
“No, sir. He tried number four as well, but seems to have decided not to bother.”
“Doubtless one was enough,” Captain LoBuono muttered. “Very well, start decommission procedures on that silo, and notify shoreside and Omaha by the usual procedures. And check number four out. Dismissed.”
The officer saluted and went. “Actuator?” Spidey said.
The Captain let out a long breath. “The device that triggers the atomic reaction in a fired missile,” he said. “Certainly something which could have other applications.”
“For someone like Hobgoblin,” Spider-Man said softly, “no question whatever. And over the last day or so, he’s been involved with the theft of some nuclear material.”
Captain LoBuono looked at him thoughtfully. “Nuclear.… Would you come with me?” he said.
Spider-Man followed him. Further into the body of the sub, air-tight doors had closed and the air was still clean. They went through several of these until they came to the door which led to the Captain’s office. The Captain closed the door behind them, gestured Spider-Man to a seat.
He sat down himself, across the desk from him, and paused a moment to r
un his hands over his face and through his hair. For that second all his dignity didn’t so much fall away as relax to reveal beneath it a very tired and upset man. Then he straightened, everything in place again. “I want to thank you again,” Captain LoBuono said, “for saving my people.”
“Hey,” Spidey said, “otherwise I would have kept tripping over them.”
The Captain’s smile was thin, but amused, that of a man used to seeing people conceal what was going on in their minds or emotions. “We have had some other unusual occurrences here over the past day or so,” he said, “and in the light of this, I think perhaps you should know about one of them.”
His spider-sense might not have been working, but Spidey could still get that sensation described by some as A Very Bad Feeling, and he was getting it now.
“We had an unusual passenger aboard,” the Captain said. “We made pickup—I’m not at liberty to say where—and were to deliver it to a safe location in Greenland. However, our passenger parted company with us very shortly after we docked here.”
“‘It,’” Spider-Man said.
Captain LoBuono nodded, folded his hands. “You have been to some unusual places,” he said, “and you have a reputation for dealing with—unusual people—so I feel safe about imparting this information to you. There are no guarantees that our, uh, passenger, stayed on this side of the river. It may turn up in your bailiwick, as it were.”
“What actually is your passenger? Or was.”
The Captain’s face wore a curious expression. “I can’t say.”
A moment’s silence. “Meaning ‘shouldn’t’?” Spider-Man said.
The Captain nodded. “This much seems plain: it is of extraterrestrial origin.”
“It was in that chamber—and broke out—”
“Through the hull of my boat,” Captain LoBuono said, for the first time looking annoyed. “Though perhaps I should be grateful.”
“Did anyone see it?”
“No. Not from the beginning of the cruise, and not when it left us.”
Spider-Man thought about this. “Was it radioactive?”
“Not in itself, no. But its habits require that it stay in a chamber containing radiation.”
“And now it’s loose,” Spider-Man said, “in a city with enough radioactive sources to feed on.”
The Captain nodded. “I would say so.”
Spider-Man nodded. “Captain,” he said, “precisely what am I supposed to do about it?”
Captain LoBuono was silent for a moment. “Watch out for it,” he said.
“Just that?”
“Just that. I doubt I have the right to ask much more.”
Spider-Man restrained a sigh. “Okay.”
“Very well.” The Captain stood up. “You can find your way out?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good day to you, then. And, Spider-Man—thank you again.”
Spidey nodded, caught between feeling abashed and profoundly confused. He made his way out of the sub to the applause and cheers of the men who saw him go. But it was not until he was away from there again, and had recovered his camera and was web-borne on his way back to Manhattan, that he was able to deal in much detail with the confusion. Plainly the Captain had given him classified information—though not much. A thing that no one had seen, something that could go through the hull of a sub—something fond of radiation, but not radioactive itself—was loose in the city.
He thought suddenly of the warehouse wall he had seen on TV, crumbled or melted, and of the homeless man’s story of something lapping at the radioactive waste. Drinking it.
Spider-Man headed home in a hurry.
FIVE
IT took Peter several hours to process that evening’s film. The photos weren’t quite as good as the last batch had been: too much swinging and jumping around, he thought. From the look of things, the camera almost suffered some sort of electronic nervous breakdown as it tried to follow their wild gyrations through the air.
It had, Peter noticed happily, taken an excellent shot of Hobby zooming out of the hatch of the sub with his arms full of equipment, knocking Spider-Man on his butt in the process. Peter felt certain Jonah would feature that shot prominently on the front page, if only to show his old nemesis getting taken down a notch.
He was still fuming over the way he had been unable to stop Hobgoblin from getting into the sub. The problem, he thought, hanging up a finished print and eyeing it critically—the composition on some of these was nowhere near as good as it had been on the last batch—the problem is that I’ve been depending too much on my spider-sense and not enough on my brains.
It was useful to have a sixth sense watching his back while he was fully occupied with matters in front, that warned him of dangers and stresses ahead of time. The spider-sense had saved him many times—from unpleasant surprises, from severe or fatal injuries, from the elaborate forms of sudden death his opponents were capable of handing out. But suppose Hobby had managed an improvement in the gas that caused this loss of his special sense. The thought of having to do without it permanently gave Peter the creeps. Suppose the loss was irrevocable? Suppose that he was going to have to go through the rest of his career this way…?
He sighed. Right now there was nothing else to do but go about his work as usual, and do it the best he could, and keep himself as far out of harm’s way as that work allowed. He had too much going on to be incapacitated due to a sense that wasn’t there.
While he worked, he listened eagerly for the sound of the phone going off. It was unusual for MJ to be out so late without checking in.
I wonder if she got that job, he thought. Desperately, he hoped the answer was yes. But there was no use getting your hopes up about these things. Too often MJ had stumbled onto what had seemed to both of them a sure thing only to come home afterwards very depressed when it didn’t pan out. They had both learned from bitter experience not to raise one another’s hopes unnecessarily, for there was never any way to tell when luck was going to strike and too many ways to be mistaken about it.
All the same, I wish she’d get home. I miss her.
There was that other thought in the back of Peter’s mind as well. Venom. Often enough in the past, Venom had put pressure on MJ in order to flush Spider-Man out into the open, where the two of them could tangle. On days like this when she was late and Venom was known to be in the area, he could never quite get rid of the fear that somewhere, in some dark alley or quiet spot where no one would hear her yell for help, that dark shape was looming over her, smiling with all those teeth.
He wouldn’t hurt her, Peter thought. She is an innocent. Isn’t she?
That was the question he couldn’t answer. As far as Spider-Man was concerned, it was a good question whether Venom considered anyone associated with him to be truly innocent. All the same, Peter’s resolve was clear.
If he touches her…
The difficulty with Venom was that the odds were stacked against him. They had fought some desperate battles in the past, and though on some occasions a flash of genius-under-pressure—or just plain luck—had intervened on Spider-Man’s behalf, once or twice those capricious dice had fallen favoring Venom, and the result had almost been fatal for Spidey. All the free-flowing hatred of someone who thought that Spider-Man was responsible for the destruction of his career and his life made Eddie Brock and his symbiotic suit a very dangerous adversary.
He hung up the last print and looked at it closely. It showed an enlarged view of Hobgoblin shooting out of the hatch, and Peter looked carefully at the shiny metal box with what looked like some circuit boards and exposed contacts sticking out of the back of it, and a couple of lights and switches on the front. Probably just yanked it right out of a console. So much equipment has gone modular these days. Easy to remove for repair or replacement, and just as easy to remove for robbery. But if I was suspicious about him building some sort of bomb, this seems to clinch it. First radioactive material, now a trigger. What the devil is H
obby up to this time…?
He picked up MJ’s borrowed hair-dryer and started fanning it over two of the prints to dry them faster. The part of the theft giving Peter the most trouble was the radioactive material itself. Even if you were going to build a bomb, you needed the so-called “weapons-grade” fissionable material that thriller-writers were so fond of. You couldn’t just make off with a barrel of nuclear waste, hook a fuse and a trigger to it, and hope that the end result would be boom. A barrel of gunpowder, yes. But not this stuff.
It would have to be refined. The refining was an expensive, slow, and above all, obvious process, as some countries, never mind crooks, had already learned. Refining uranium ore, or even spent low-grade reactor waste—where part of the process had already taken place—into metallic U-235 needed a linked series of massive heavy-metal separation centrifuges. Such equipment took up a great deal of space and consumed an equivalent quantity of power.
You couldn’t build such a facility in a populated area without someone noticing, no matter how much you tried to disguise it. The power drain on the local grid whenever the separation system was running—and it would have to run almost constantly—would tell even the most unimaginative electrical engineer that something out of the ordinary was going on.
Later, Peter thought, when I have some time, I’m going to look into the thefts at the two warehouses in a little more detail. I want to find out exactly what was in those canisters. More to the point, why is someone storing nuclear waste—nuclear material of any kind—in Manhattan? Offhand he could think of about six environmental groups that would blow their collective stacks if they found out about it… and were perhaps already doing so. That’s for later, he thought. Right now…
