by Diane Duane
He checked the six best of his prints to make sure they were dry, put them in his portfolio, put the negatives in as well, and headed for the door. As he went, he threw a last look over his shoulder at the stubbornly silent phone. MJ.… he thought, then shook his head and smiled a bit to himself at his own nervousness. She’s a big girl, she can take care of herself.
He headed for the Bugle.
* * *
“YOUR long lens again?” Kate said, looking over his shoulder at the prints as he put them down one after another on her desk. “That one’s not too bad.” Critically, head on one side, she studied the shot of Hobby coming up out of the sub. “A little underexposed, though.”
“They can push it in Comp,” Peter said. Kate nodded. Another shadow fell over the desk. Peter turned, and saw J. Jonah Jameson standing there, scowling down at the photos.
“What are these?” he said, picking up the shot of Hobby, the sub, and Spider-Man. “Not again?”
“Why, Jonah,” Kate said dryly, “I’d have thought you’d be delighted. We’re having a good news day. Look at that; there’s your headline. ‘Hobgoblin Strikes Again.’”
“Who cares about that creep?” J. Jonah growled. “It’s Spider-Man I’m wondering about. What’s he doing inside a nuclear sub in the Port of New York? He could have been doing anything in there!”
“Uh, Mr. Jameson,” Peter said gently, “it was Hobby who was doing the ‘anything.’ Seems he grabbed a trigger for a nuclear missile out of there. You can see it in the shot.”
“Maybe,” JJJ said, frowning. “But I’m still sure Spider-Man wasn’t there just for the good of his health.”
Peter thought of the noxious green cloud of gas that had enveloped him inside the sub and silently agreed.
“There’s got to be some connection,” J. Jonah said. “Hobgoblin and Venom and Spider-Man all in the same day. Are you trying to tell me they’re not involved with each other somehow?”
Peter agreed with that too, but not in the way that JJJ thought.
“Look, Jonah,” Kate said, “that doesn’t matter at the moment. We’ve got the best picture in town for the Bugle’s front page, and we’ve got time to run it for the first evening edition. I don’t care if those two were getting together for their weekly pinochle game, this picture’s going to make us look good tonight! You have any problems with it?”
Jonah glowered at Kate. “Well, not that way, but—”
“Good,” she said with satisfied finality. “That wording sound all right to you?”
“Well, it’ll do for the moment, but—”
“Good,” she said again, even more satisfied, “then we’re set.” She bent over the shot of Hobgoblin.
“Just let me decide how I want to crop this—” Just then Harry Payne, one of the junior editors on the City Desk, stuck his head around the edge of Kate’s door. “Hey, Kate,” he said, “something on the scanner you might find interesting.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“There’s something going on in the rail yards over by Eleventh Avenue,” he said. “I think it’s Venom!”
“What?” all three of them said, turning, the photographs forgotten.
“That’s what it said on the scanner. ‘Unidentified person, big, black, huge teeth, drooling slime.’ That sounds like Venom to me…”
Kate shook her head and grinned. “This is my lucky day,” she said. “Peter, don’t you move until I can find—” She put her head out the door, looked around for a moment, then shouted down the hall. “Ben? Ben! Saddle up! You’re needed!” She turned back to Peter. “You go with Ben,” she said. “Grab a cab. Go!”
“Let me know how it comes out,” Jonah muttered, and stalked off down the hall towards his own office.
Kate watched him go, then glanced at Peter. “You know, I wish I could yell ‘Stop the presses!’ But it’s kind of a problem when you haven’t started them yet… And what are you still here for? Go on!”
Ben Urich was one of the most experienced reporters on the Bugle. Peter was uncertain exactly how long he had been in journalism—it might have been thirty years or longer, but there was no telling by looking at him. Ben’s age seemed to have frozen at forty-five, a hard-bitten, cool-eyed forty-five that Peter suspected would hold right where it was until Ben was ninety.
By the time Peter got down to the Bugle’s front doors, it was dark out. Ben was already pacing and looking impatient. He had a cab waiting at the curb. “Come on,” he said, “time’s a-wasting!”
Peter jumped into the cab. Ben followed. “Go!” he told the driver, who took off and went racing through the traffic.
Ben glanced down at Peter’s camera, then pushed his thick-framed glasses back up the bridge of his nose and looked at Peter. “That all loaded up?”
“Yup.”
“Nervous?”
Peter looked at him sharply. “If what we think is down at the rail yards is actually there. I’d say we have reason, wouldn’t you?”
Ben raised his eyebrows. “ If it’s what we were told.”
“You don’t think so?” said Peter.
Ben leaned back in the seat and stretched. “Kind of hard to tell at a distance. All we’ve had so far is hearsay, and extremely odd-sounding hearsay at that.”
“Odd-sounding how?”
Ben looked at him, causing his glasses to slip down again. “As I understood it, Venom isn’t much the type for killing people who don’t need it. These days, anyway.”
“That’s what I’d heard, too,” Peter said. “Still, you don’t suppose he could have had a change of heart?”
Ben’s mouth quirked, and he pushed his glasses back up. “People change their minds all the time,” he said. “Their hearts—not so often.”
“If you can call Venom ‘people.’”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ben said. “There is a human being in there somewhere.”
“There’s a lot of difference,” Peter said, “between being a human being, and being a man.”
Ben raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. “Semantic difference, mostly,” he said. “Anyway, we’ll soon find out. Assuming—” and Ben looked even more skeptical “—that the man, creature, or whatever does us the courtesy of hanging around until we get there.”
Ben leaned forward and gave the cab driver instructions. They pulled into the pickup and delivery entrance for the rail yards. Overhead, the rail yards’ huge yellow sodium lights cast a harsh glare on everything, making the buildings look unreal, like a movie set. The red-and-white strobe of several police cars added to the effect, making the whole place seem like a kaleidoscope.
“Now, then,” Ben said, and launched himself out of the cab.
“Your friend meeting somebody?” the cabbie said to Peter, as they both stared at Ben’s hurrying back.
“I hope not,” Peter said sincerely. Sighing inwardly, he paid the fare and got a receipt. He’d have to put in for reimbursement the next time he was at the Bugle.
Then he followed Ben into the guard’s shack, a long low building full of file cabinets, a couple of ancient formica-and-aluminum tables, and numerous very upset railroad personnel, many of whom were talking to cops. Ben already had his pocket recorder out and was speaking to one of the supervisors who wasn’t giving a statement to the police. “It was this tall,” the big blond man was saying, indicating a height at least two feet higher than his own head. “And this wide—”
Peter studied the distance in question and wondered if Venom had put on a great deal of weight. Then again, the costume could change shape….
“Where did you see it first?” Ben said.
“Down by the siding,” the foreman said, pointing. “At first I thought it was a cat, moving in the shadows down in the mouth of the tunnel. We have a lot of cats down here, they run in and out all the time. But then it came a little closer, and I got a better look at it—and cats don’t get that big. It came sliding out of the tunnel, all black—”
“Black,” Ben said.
“Did you see any designs, any patterns on it?”
“It had these big long arms—”
“Patterns. Did you see any color on it?” Ben said.
“No, I don’t think—that is—” The foreman shook his head. “It moved too fast. That was the trouble. It just came storming out of there all of a sudden, you know? And then there was this train coming down the line at it, and it looked at that, and it roared. It didn’t like that—”
“It roared?” Ben said. “It didn’t say anything?”
“It just kind of yelled—”
Peter, taking pictures of the man for the “our-witness-tells-us” part of the story, had quite vivid memories of that particular roar. It was usually followed by a statement that Venom intended to have some portion of your anatomy for lunch. “So it roared then,” Ben said. “ Then what did it do?”
One of the other rail workers, a small sandy-haired man who had just finished giving his own statement to the NYPD, said, “He jumped. He jumped away from the train that was coming at him—it was heading into the tunnel—and yeah, like Ron says, he roared at it. But then he stood still. He kind of hunkered down and just looked—”
“Yeah,” said a third man, small and dark. “He just looked around him.”
“Could you see his eyes?” Ben said.
The three men shook their heads. “Just these blank spots,” one said. “Pale,” another said. “All white. But when he was in the shade, they glowed a little, you know? Kinda fluorescent.”
Peter concentrated on taking more pictures of the three storytellers, while thinking that that odd, faint glow was something he had seen or seemed to see before in the costume—possibly a function of its being alive. He wasn’t sure. “It was smelling,” the foreman said. “Sniffing.”
“You heard it?” Ben said.
“No, no,” the three men said, shaking their heads, waving their hands. “It was just the way it looked like—with its head, it sniffed, you know—” One of them put his head up and mimicked something smelling the air, looking alertly from side to side, seeking. “Yeah, and pieces sort of came off it, and swayed around—”
“Came off it?” Ben said. “Came completely off?”
“No, just stretched out, you know?”
“You mean it put tentacles out?”
“Like an octopus, or something like—that’s right. They sort of waved all around it, like that, as if it was smelling with them. Like a jellyfish, an octopus, yeah. Do octopuses smell with those?”
“I couldn’t help you there,” Ben said. “Then what?”
“Well, then,” said the sandy-haired man, “another train came up out of the tunnel.”
“And it smelled at it,” said the small dark man, stretching out his arms and wiggling his fingers at Ben in what Peter assumed was an octopus or tentacle imitation. “And it jumped at it—”
“And it knocked the train over,” they all three said, more or less simultaneously.
Ben blinked. “The train. It knocked it over?”
“Come on,” said the foreman, and he led Ben and Peter out the back door of the building. Behind it was a rust-stained concrete platform, littered with stacks of railroad ties, coils of wire and cable, and some small stacks of track rails further down. From one end of it, to their left, tracks ran down to the railbed. Six tracks ran in parallel here, with two sets of siding on each side.
Between the number one and number two tracks, slewed over on its side, lay the train. Its engine, one of the big Penn Central diesels, had been knocked furthest off the track and now lay diagonally across it, on its right side. The other cars of the train, four of them, had derailed. It looked, Peter thought, as if some giant child had lost patience with his Lionel train set and had given it a good kick between the second and third cars. He started taking pictures as fast as he could, walking down the length of the train, while the railroad workers stopped near the engine with Ben.
“At first we thought it was gonna jump,” said the foreman. “But it didn’t. It held still, and it crouched down, kinda, and it put out a lot of those arms, tentacles, whatever, and it grabbed the engine—”
“About how fast was the engine going?” Ben said.
The foreman shook his head. “No great shakes. This is restricted-speed track. You can’t really open up until you get across the river. About ten miles an hour, maybe.”
“Even so….” Ben said. “So a train weighing—how many tons?”
“These diesels are rated for twelve,” said the foreman. “It just sort of grabbed the front of the engine—”
“It sort of shied back, shied away a little, when it did that,” said the sandy-haired man. “The bell, you know the bell on the diesel goes constantly under fifteen miles an hour—it was going right in front of the guy’s face. I don’t think it liked that.”
Peter’s eyebrows went up at that as he continued down the length of the train, snapping images of the huge exposed undercarriages, the wheels in the air. He turned to get another shot of the gesturing men, small beside the huge overturned engine.
“I don’t know about that,” said the foreman. “I didn’t see that. But then it grabbed the engine, and it just hunkered down and”—he shrugged—”wrestled it off the track. Threw it down.”
“The engineer’s all right?” Ben said.
“Yeah, he climbed out the window when it went over on the other side.”
“So it grabbed a twelve-ton train,” Ben said slowly, “and pulled it off the track.”
“Right,” said the small sandy-haired man. “So it stood there a moment, and it smelled around a little more—and then it went straight back to the third car—”
“Ripped the door right off it,” said the foreman. “Like cardboard. And then it climbed in, and came out with a little drum of something. An oil drum, I thought at first.”
“But not oil,” Ben said.
“Nope,” said the little sandy-haired man. “It had the ‘radioactive’ sign on it.”
“I pulled the shipping manifest,” said the foreman. “Here it is.” He reached inside his bright orange work vest, came out with some paperwork.
“Now what’s this,” Ben said, pointing down the list. “Uranium hexafluoride—”
Peter came back from down the length of the train and looked over Ben’s shoulder at the manifest. “It doesn’t go in toothpaste, that’s for sure,” he said. “It’s a by-product from the uranium-enrichment process.” He looked up at the foreman. “What did it do with the canister then?”
“It tried to bite it, first,” said the foreman, sounding understandably puzzled. “With those teeth, I thought we were going to have a spill right here on the tracks. But it looked like it was having trouble. By then, pretty serious noise had started up—the yard sirens and all—and the warning loudspeakers in the tunnel, all that stuff. It looked around, like it didn’t like the noise, and it grabbed the canister in some more of those tentacles and ran off.”
“Which way?” Ben said.
The foreman pointed down into the tunnels, into the darkness. “Thataway.”
“I take it no one followed it,” Ben murmured.
The rail workers looked at him, and all shook their heads. “Hey,” one of them said, “we’ve all got families. I know theft from the rail network is a felony, but—no paycheck’s worth that much.”
The small sandy-haired man looked from Ben to Peter, and back to Ben again. “It was him, wasn’t it?” he said. “That Venom guy.”
Ben looked at his little pocket recorder, switched it off. “Boys,” he said, “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sound like it.” The three exchanged nervous glances. “But I want to be sure about this. You didn’t see any markings on it? Any white in that black?”
The men shook their heads. “Just the eyes,” one said.
“And the teeth!” another said, shivering.
They all stood there in silence for a few. “Well, gentlemen,” Ben said, “is there anything else you need to tell me
?”
They all shook their heads. “Don’t want to see him again,” one of them said, “and that’s a fact.”
“I hope you don’t,” Ben said. He turned to Peter. “Pete, you got enough pictures?”
“More than enough.” He handed Ben the film he’d already shot and unloaded: his camera was whining softly to itself as it rewound the second roll. “Will you take this stuff back with you?” he said. “I’ve got an appointment tonight that I can’t blow off.”
“No problem,” Ben said. “I see you’ve had a long day, what with one thing and another. Your photos got page one and two today, Kate tells me.” He grinned. “Well,” he said to the rail workers, “thanks for your help, gentlemen. If I could get your names and phone numbers for questions later on if we need to ask them?”
They spent a few minutes sorting that out. Then Ben and Peter made their way back up through the guard shack and up onto the street again, where they waited to hail a cab.
“This should make interesting reading in the morning,” Ben said, tucking his recorder away.
“What’s the headline going to be, you think?” Peter said.
“‘VENOM,’” Ben said, “with a big question mark after it.”
“You’re still not convinced,” Peter said.
Ben shook his head. “I am not. There were a lot of the right signs there, but not all.”
“The costume?” Peter said.
Ben nodded. “Partly that. But also—” He shrugged, looking down the street for any sign of the light at the top of a cab. “Venom has always been a very verbal sort. Not the kind to do something and then just leave without saying anything, let alone bragging a little. Every report I’ve heard has made him out to be a talker. I just don’t know….”
Peter nodded. It was good to hear his own thoughts being substantiated this way. Ben was a sharp thinker. Peter had learned from Daredevil, one of the local costumed crimefighters, that Ben had worked out for himself Daredevil’s secret identity from fairly minimal information, when others had had much more and had never made the connection. “Well,” Ben said, “J. Jonah may not like it, but I’m not going to construct a story that’s not there. I’ll report the news as it was reported to me, and let it do the work itself.”
