by Diane Duane
—until the whine of the jetglider stopped them both where they stood.
It was a pitiful-looking package which was soaring slowly, but more and more quickly every second, up out of the shattered building. Shreds and rags of web hung off Hobby, the jetglider, and the safe—all ascending as Hobby put on speed.
“Oh, no,” Spidey moaned. He dashed out and shot web desperately at the receding form, but the jetglider kinked suddenly sideways, rose over the walls of the college, and was gone.
Glaring terribly, Venom rid himself of the last few rags of Spidey’s webbing. “You utter fool. Now he’ll get away and finish whatever awful thing he’s started! Not to mention going back to impersonating us. And there’s no telling where he’s heading now—”
Spider-Man said nothing. He had seen, as the safe ascended, that his tracer was still on it. When his spider-sense came back fully—which he hoped would be soon—he would be able to track him well enough. He turned to Venom. “You’re serious about this. It really wasn’t you down there.”
“You still don’t quite believe us,” Venom said, his voice a low, angry growl. “O ye of little faith.”
“Yes, and the Devil can quote scripture to his purpose,” Spider-Man said. Still, he thought, I’ve been giving him the benefit of the doubt all this while. And now when he comes to me and tells me I was right—I can’t believe him?
“You’re telling me that you didn’t knock over a train last night?” Spidey said.
Venom’s smile was grim, but just a touch more humorous-looking than usual. “Someone who could knock over trains,” he said, “would not have had the trouble with your webbing that we just did.” He frowned. “We must see about a more effective remedy.”
“Let’s leave that aside for the moment,” Spider-Man said.
“I think we had better. That creature can’t continue impersonating us—”
“I’m not so sure it was Hobgoblin,” Spider-Man said. “And it would be dreadful to eat his spleen for the wrong reason, wouldn’t it?”
“If he’s doing what we think he’s doing at the moment,” Venom said, his tongue flickering in shared rage, “there’s reason enough to rip him limb from limb, even leaving personal business out of it. Hobgoblin is almost certainly building a bomb of some kind, wouldn’t you agree?”
Spider-Man could only nod at that.
“And the only reason one builds atomic bombs is to threaten other people with their use. And sometimes… to actually use them.” Venom glared at Spider-Man again. “We, for one, though we consider this city a Hell for the innocent, and the den of every kind of injustice and crime, would prefer not to see it blown up… it, or any other like it. That Hobgoblin is even willing to threaten to do such a thing, or to help someone else to do it, merits him death. If he would do more—if he would actually detonate a bomb and end millions of innocent lives—then he merits death millions of times over. And we promise to make that death as prolonged and painful as he would make the deaths of many of the people here!”
“Look,” Spider-Man said, “I’d agree, but—”
“No buts,” said Venom. “We are going after him. This wretched creature has been brought to ‘justice’ enough times—with what result? This. We swear to you, we will find him before you do. By the time we are done with him, he will bewail the fate that kept you from finding him first.”
Venom turned and leapt out the blown-out end of the building.
Spider-Man leapt after him.
SEVEN
MJ had seen Peter off that morning in a somewhat mixed state of mind. She had the pleasure of knowing that he was rested, not aching too badly (for a change), he’d had enough to eat, and most important, he’d actually had enough time to digest and consider what had been happening to him for the last couple of days. MJ watched her husband with considerable concern. She was afraid that, if he went out one time too many unrested and without his plans in order, he wouldn’t come back.
She knew what he was planning for his day at ESU. She couldn’t say she was overwhelmingly happy about it, but he was as well-prepared as he could be; he had a plan. So, there was nothing much more to be said about it. That being the case, she made tea and toast, sat down at the dining-room table with the sun coming in through the window, and paged through the trades she’d bought the other day at Mr. Kee’s. There wasn’t anything much of interest that she hadn’t already seen. News of mergers, buyouts, movie deals—I’d love to have anything happen to me, she thought, that had lots of zeroes after it….
She made a second batch of toast, buttered it, and sat down when the phone rang. She debated letting the machine take it, then got up and went over to the phone table. “Hello?”
“Ms. Watson-Parker?”
“This is she.”
“This is Rinalda Rodriguez, over at Own Goal Productions—”
“Yes,” MJ said, and her heart leaped. It was the people who had offered her the audition.
“Listen, I’m sorry to trouble you so early, but we’ve had a change of plan—”
There it goes, MJ thought. The whole thing’s off.
“My partner and I have to leave for LA early tomorrow morning—”
I knew it, it was too good to be true.
“—so is there any chance that you could come up to do your audition today?”
“Today?” MJ said, swallowing. “Certainly. I don’t see why not. What time?”
“Would after lunch be all right?”
“After lunch—”
There was some babbling in the background. “Oh, no, wait a moment—” The phone was covered, and some words were exchanged. “Actually, three o’clock. How would that be?”
“Three o’clock. Fine. Same place?”
“No, we’re moving uptown for this one.” The AP gave her an address on the Upper West Side.
“That’s fine,” MJ said. “I’ll be there.”
“Sorry again to change plans on you like this.”
“Oh, that’s all right. It’s nice of you to tell me this early,” MJ said, meaning it. Some producers she’d known would change plans without warning and then make it sound as if it was your fault somehow when you couldn’t meet the new requirements. “I’ll see you this afternoon, then. Bye!”
She hung up. This afternoon. Ohmigosh!
She had planned to spend a leisurely afternoon, studying the material she’d been given, reading to feel what the material did for her, and working to the mirror, making sure that her expressions were doing what she thought they were doing. Well, it was going to have to be mostly mirror work today, and in a hurry, too. As always, when a crisis like this came up, she was all nerves, all at once. She scooted over to the window, leaned against the windowsill and looked out across the rooftops, twitching slightly. Peter… she thought.
But Peter could take care of himself. He had proven that often enough in the past, in one set of clothes or another. Now she was going to have to get out there and do the lioness thing. She would make him proud of her.
She let out a fast, excited breath, then went to get those script pages.
* * *
THE time until two o’clock, when MJ needed to leave, flew by. How to read young Dora, the social worker character—that was the main problem. She was young: if the producers were casting actresses 22–25, they meant it. Surely they didn’t want Dora too experienced, too knowledgeable. Yet at the same time, someone coming out of school that age could have considerable expertise—and the series bible did emphasize the character’s sense of humor. That, MJ thought, was the key. When the character knew for sure what she was talking about, she would be all business and certainty, but when something happened with which she’d had no previous experience, she’d cover with humor while trying to figure out what to do.
As time to leave got closer, it got harder for MJ to concentrate. I wonder how many other people are auditioning? she thought. She had trouble dealing with cattle-calls like the one the other day. But surely most of those peo
ple had been shaken out. All the same, she didn’t like watching a lot of readings before her own—the fear dogged her that she could accidentally adopt someone else’s approach when her own would really work better. And at the same time, she was usually forced to see a lot of other readings, because her name began with “W.” So she did her best to ignore what was going on around her—but the long wait always made the nervousness worse. Sometimes I think it would be less stressful to go out and have a fight with a super villain.
As two o’clock inched closer she read the pages one last time, putting some extra emphasis on the set of lines about hunger, letting the feeling out. There was a lot of it: her close look at the shelter yesterday reminded her how easy it was to forget about the homeless problem completely, and the anger and frustration came up in the reading, she thought, to good effect.
Well, she decided at last, this is as good as it’s going to get. Let’s get dressed and head out.
She had showered and taken care of her hair and makeup earlier. Now she went into the bedroom and hunted through the closet for the right thing. Something attractive, but appropriate for a young social worker. Fawn linen skirt, just barely below the knee; medium heels; white silk shirt. She thought for a moment and pulled out her one and only Hermes scarf, the one with the tigress on it, a present from Peter. She twined it around her neck outside the shirt collar and left it hanging down casually. There, she thought, looking herself over in the mirror. A touch of class.
She went out, grabbed her purse and keys, the script pages and audition pack, and her copy of War and Peace, and headed down to catch a cab. Normally, MJ had cab luck. Rain or shine, all she had to do was go out to the curb, stick her arm out, and a cab would materialize from nowhere. Today, naturally, the luck deserted her for all of five minutes, so that she stood there twitching impatiently, thinking. What if I don’t get a cab at all, what if I’m late, what if there’s a traffic jam…
Peter…
She let out a breath, then smiled at herself. At times like this, her free-floating anxiety fastened on anything it could find. Peter was quite probably happily and coolly ensconced at ESU somewhere, biding his time.
A cab finally pulled up. She got in, gave the driver the address, and let him whisk her away. From Peter, her mind jumped again to the homeless people she had met. While she and Peter had been in the tub, they had talked about the radiation sickness—for so it seemed to be—that some of these people were suffering from. The submarine captain said, she thought, that the creature itself wasn’t radioactive. And Peter mentioned the hole in the bottom of the warehouse, leading down into the sewers. If that thing’s been down in the sewers, and in the train tunnels where some of the homeless people are, doesn’t it have to be the cause? But if the captain’s right and it’s not affecting them, not the cause of their radiation sickness—what is?
She turned the problem over in her mind, but could find no obvious answer. Could there he some kind of radioactive waste leaking down into the tunnels and sewers? Could someone be disposing of the stuff illegally? She knew that toxic waste got dumped in landfills where it didn’t belong. Sometimes, tankers full of it just sprayed their contents out on the side of some lonely country road, or into common sewerage, where it just flowed out to sea, untreated. Suppose someone was doing something similar with radioactive waste here in the city?
It would be easy enough to do, and there would be reasons for it. Disposing of nuclear waste safely was expensive: companies that used the legal methods of disposal were charged a lot for it. Why not save the money and just dump the stuff somewhere?
She was too nervous to think clearly about it. There was something nagging at her—the image of people, hungry and homeless to start with, now having to watch the blotches and sores form on their bodies, their hair falling out, feeling themselves getting more ill and weak every day. It didn’t bear considering. She hoped somebody—Spider-Man, or the police, or even Venom—would find the creature, if it was the cause of this, and end its threat. Those poor folks, she thought and was surprised to find her eyes stinging with tears.
She got a tissue out of her purse and dabbed herself dry again. Nerves, she thought. And then, after a few seconds, she shook her head ruefully, catching herself in a lie. Nerves was not what it was about, feeling was what it was about—and there was no need to be ashamed of that.
The cab pulled up in front of a tall old brick building. She paid the cabbie, put herself in order, tossed her hair back, and strode into the building’s lobby, smiling and ready.
* * *
TWO hours later, she felt a lot less ready, but the smile was still there, mostly.
The reception area was typical: full of comfortable, sleek furniture, big sofas curving around to match the lines of the room, gorgeous modern art on the walls, two separate televisions showing two separate channels, and a busy, expensive-looking receptionist working behind a massive and politically incorrect desk of polished teak that MJ estimated would have cost about a year’s rent on their apartment.
The audition room where she and the twenty-three other actresses all gathered to meet the production staff was more of the same: state-of-the-art sound and video equipment all stashed away in absolute tidiness behind a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, not a loose cable or wire in sight. Next, the AP ushered them into a big, bright, clean, carpeted rehearsal space, everything brand-new. There was serious money here and MJ was determined to be part of it, one way or another.
The competition daunted her. She looked good—she knew that—but some of these women looked spectacular, with the kind of effortless beauty that suggested they didn’t have to do anything to themselves in the morning but wash their faces and toss their hair back out of their eyes. It was not in MJ’s style to be jealous—not after a first flash of emotion which usually simply translated as, “It’s not fair!” and then melted away into rueful and slightly forlorn admiration. At least ten of her fellow auditioners looked like this. The others were all at least extremely good-looking, and possibly better actresses than she was. And here she was, enduring the Curse of the W’s, watching them go in before her, one after another. Why the producers would want to look at her in the face of this competition, she couldn’t imagine.
She sighed and determined to raise her mood somewhat. How, though, she wasn’t sure. She had already read every magazine sitting out here on the Italian glass-topped tables. War and Peace did nothing for her today. The smell of hot coffee in the pot off to one side had been enticing when she came in. Now she was getting sick of it.
She leaned back and looked at the televisions. One of them was showing a large, purple, blunt-faced dinosaur, which was at that moment dancing clumsily and singing a song about how it wanted to be someone’s friend. MJ gazed at it and had a sudden bizarre but very satisfying image of herself introducing it to Venom: taking the dinosaur by its pudgy purple hand, turning, and saying very sweetly, “Here, make friends with this.”
The other television was in the middle of a commercial for a used-car dealership, car after car and license-plate number after license-plate number flashing on the screen, followed by the image of the dealer, a man with one of those faces MJ would never buy a used car from. I don’t know how he does it, MJ thought. Maybe I’m just suspicious. Must come of having super villains running in and out of Peter’s life all the time.
The screen went mercifully black, then suddenly MJ found herself looking at a card that said, “SPECIAL REPORT.” The card was replaced by the image of a newswoman sitting at a desk, an “Action News” logo and the network “bug” in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. “Reports are coming in of an explosion on the ESU campus in the Village,” the reporter said. “Emergency services are responding. Witnesses report substantial damage to the ESU science facility—”
And whatever composure MJ had managed to recover went right out the window.
Peter!
* * *
ACROSS town and downtown, Spider-Man was swinging
between building and building, scanning the streets frantically for any sign of the dark shape which was his quarry.
That boy really can move, he thought again. One of the most annoying things about having to tangle with Venom was how closely they were matched, in terms of their powers and abilities—and when it came to physical strength, while Spider-Man’s strength was proportionally that of a spider his size and mass, the strength the symbiote lent Eddie was another matter entirely. The symbiote’s job was to do, literally, whatever its host wanted—and it frequently seemed to bend various physical laws to make it all happen. Having worn the symbiote himself for a little while, he remembered the astonishing feeling of something as light as silk but as strong in its way as a steel exoskeleton—something that flowed around you being as hard or soft, as edged or smooth as it needed to be for the moment’s requirements. It looked like whatever you wanted it to look like and became whatever you needed. Without thought, without hesitation—just doing it. Wearing that symbiote, you didn’t need a weapon. You were a weapon.
Going through walls would be no problem for Venom. If he wanted to claim he couldn’t knock over a train, well, perhaps that was true—but watching him try would be worth the price of admission, and if bets were being taken, Spider-Man wasn’t sure he wouldn’t put a five on the symbiote, just to be safe.
In the meantime, there was no telling where Venom had gone. Theoretically, since they were both chasing a flying target, Venom should still be out in the open the way Spider-Man was. But if Hobgoblin had gone to ground, there was nothing to prevent Venom from going right through walls, or the ground, for that matter, to get at him.
Either way, Spider-Man’s only chance to find them both was to get some height and cover as much ground as he could as quickly as he could. So head for the tall timber and start looking, Spidey thought. There was a good cluster of skyscrapers just west of him, near Columbus Circle. He would go up the old Gulf-Western building, have a look around, and decide his next move before the trail got too cold.
