by Diane Duane
“Thank you, sir,” Vreni said, and sat down. Another reporter jumped up and started asking questions about the Agency’s possible cruelty to animals, but Vreni scribbled on her press pack again, looking profoundly satisfied.
A few minutes later, still another reporter, from the Los Angeles Times, stood up and began inquiring about security breaches on the KSC grounds over the past couple of weeks. “Nothing has happened,” Buckingham said, “which in any way affects or threatens the launch of STS-73, if that’s what you’re concerned about. We are indeed breaking in a new facility-wide security system, which always means a certain number of false alarms and hiccups—as any of you know who’ve installed or tuned an alarm system lately. But no one’s stolen the silver.”
More chuckling went around the room, and the press conference turned to other topics, while Vreni turned and winked at the LA Times reporter, a little man with shaggy hair and wicked eyes. Finally, about an hour after it started, the conference ended, and the people up at the head table posed briefly for a photo opportunity, then left.
Peter took the opportunity, even though he didn’t have to, then went off after Vreni, who was chatting with the guy from the Times. “Bobby,” she said as Peter joined them, “Peter Parker. He strings for the Bugle. Peter, this is Bobby London, LA Times, as you heard. I owe you one, Bob.”
“My pleasure,” Bobby said softly. “I got wind of some craziness down this way last week. No one seems to want to talk about it: either outright denials, like this, or a lot of muttering, but no details.”
“If I hear something,” Vreni said, “I’ll pay you back that much.”
“No more?” Bobby said.
“One favor at a time,” said Vreni, “and every reporter for herself. Peter? We should probably get back to Miami—there are some things I want to look into.”
“Right.”
They said good-byes to London and headed off to their car. “So?” Peter said.
Vreni laughed out loud as they got in and stowed their various gear. “They’re running scared about something, that’s for sure, and probably the reactor is at the heart of it. Usually they can’t throw enough information at you at these press conferences. But I’ve never heard of one this short before.”
“So is this the reactor that Greenpeace and everybody was protesting about?” Peter said as he started the car.
“Good question. I didn’t believe Buckingham, just then… that’s all I’m sure of. And here’s the question—”
Peter drove out the entrance, where security people were still checking the people coming in. Vreni said nothing until they were back on the freeway again. “Look,” she said, “if they wanted to send something up secretly, why didn’t they just do that? They’ve done it before.”
“Maybe,” Peter said, “they thought that no one would be interested in the reactor—a mistake, granted—and now they’re trying to cover up the fact that they’re putting it up anyway.”
“Yes, but why mention this MPAPPS thing, then? Which sounds so much like some kind of clandestine power source—a reactor by any other name? Why not just put the thing up there, hush hush, and be done with it?”
Peter shook his head. “It’s beyond me.”
Vreni sighed. “Well, at least I have something to run with now. I’m going to get started on those interview schedulings today, and see if I can get hold of my police buddies. Meanwhile, if I can get some interviews scheduled for tomorrow…”
“You’re on,” Peter said. “After I drop you, I’ll be out with the camera and the Questar. I’ve got to get the hang of this thing. Breakfast tomorrow?”
Vreni nodded. “The Breakfast Club, that’s us. Let’s make it early, though. The Hilton holds these big brunch buffets on weekends, and if I see all that food, I’m going to try to eat it. Not a good thing.”
Peter chuckled. “For either of us. Early it is.”
* * *
SEVERAL hours later, Peter was standing in a swamp, being bitten all over by hungry mosquitoes, and was happier than he’d been in months.
After dropping Vreni off, he had called Aunt Anna’s to check in with MJ. She wasn’t home: Aunt Anna told him that MJ wasn’t expected back until late—something about a gallery-opening party being run by one of the people with whom she had left her CV, a gathering at which it was smart for MJ to put in an appearance.
Oh, well, Peter thought, and set himself up for a day out, and an evening as well, doing work of different kinds. He packed the Questar, and one other piece of useful equipment: his police-radio scanner. He also brought an extra camera—one which he had been using, as Spider-Man, quite effectively of late. It had a motion-actuated mount, with a little circuit board, a whole PC’s worth of intelligence, to drive it. A couple of weeks ago, after finishing the business with Venom, he had added one more useful piece of hardware to it—a simple vise-style C-clamp. The camera had shown a tendency to fall over, occasionally, when he left it to its own devices on a tripod. (His usual method of webbing the camera in place had the drawback of not allowing the motion sensor to move freely.)
The C-clamp, though, would leave it freer to move and less likely to do a dive from a wall or other unstable situation. Peter could even clamp it onto a pole or a tree limb, now, and be fairly certain of finding it where he left it when he got back, rather than lying on its lens in a puddle, or smashed to bits.
An hour’s drive out of Miami on Route 41 brought him into the Big Cypress National Preserve. It was in the Everglades, though not part of the Everglades National Park as such. Twenty-four hundred square miles of hardwood tree islands, scattered slash pine, dry prairies, marsh, and mangrove forest. Here and there he would pass a little knot of houses, maybe with a tiny store nearby, and nothing else for miles except the huge boles of cypress and beds of waving reeds. Birdsong was everywhere: once, when Peter stopped to give himself a break from driving and listen to the wind, he heard a low coughing cry repeated several times, and it took him some minutes to realize that the sound was that of a Florida panther, somewhere out there among the tangled islands of marl and knotted tree-roots, going about its business.
He stopped several times to work with the Questar and do some wildlife photography that was as good a practice for the next couple of weeks’ work as he was likely to get. The Questar’s range was indeed ridiculous, and it took him a while to get used to it. He could sight a rock half a mile away and get a close-up of a cottonmouth sunning on it which suggested he was more like ten feet from the stone—though he much preferred the real distance. A flock of flamingos a mile off, an alligator a quarter-mile away, rolling lazily in a drainage canal—they seemed close enough to walk up to and touch. Peter began to wish desperately that some money would drop from the heavens so he could afford a Questar of his own. I might as well wish for that Hasselblad they left on the moon, he thought, and then wondered whether one of his fellow super heroes might be passing that way anytime soon. If they were….
Peter chuckled to himself and straightened up. It was getting near dusk again. He had pulled off to the side of the road to catch the moon coming up, for the Questar was after all primarily a telescope, and it would be stupid, he thought, not to experiment with that aspect of its function as well. Big and round, the moon slid up. Peter fussed over the camera’s f-stops, looking for the best setting to catch that apparently huge disk without the diminution of its apparent size that was every photographer’s bane. He blew nearly a roll of film on that alone. Behind him, in the car, the police scanner muttered softly to itself, mostly about speeders and domestic disturbances.
The moon was an hour or so up the sky when Peter stopped at last. Vreni’s not going to want to hear excuses in the morning, he thought, and we’ll have a lot of driving to do tomorrow, I would imagine. Better pack up and go. And he was doing just that, and had just slid into the driver’s seat of the Chevette, when the scanner started talking to itself again. It had been quiet for a while; the new urgency in the dispatcher’s voice caugh
t Peter by surprise.
“Okee four one eight—”
“Four one eight, go.”
“Got a report of a large reptile walking around near Deep Lake.” That was one of the small towns in the area, in the heart of Big Cypress, near Route 29.
“That’s the fourth ’gator today,” said four one eight wearily.
“Not a ’gator,” said the dispatcher, somewhat anxiously. Peter blinked.
“What?”
“No ’gator, four one eight. The report was of a reptile. Also from Deep Lake, report of a large man in distress, seen heading out of town in a hurry. And a silent alarm. The general store in Deep Lake.”
Peter grabbed his road map, shook it open, and checked his position. Deep Lake was no more than two miles away.
“Okay, dispatch. ETA ten minutes. We’re over by Ochopee at the moment—that break-in.”
“Ten-four, four one eight.”
Peter leaped out of the car, seized the Questar and his camera bag, locked the car up, and hotfooted it into a clump of cypress near the roadside. A half a minute later, Spider-Man swung down out of the trees—having first webbed the Questar, the camera bag, and his car keys tightly to the cypress’s innermost trunk, about fifty feet up, just in case anyone should stop to have a look at his car with less than friendly intent. His own camera, the small C-clamped one, was tucked away in his costume should he need it.
He took off cross-country at his best speed. Here the going was better than in the suburbs: the biggest trees, the most ancient of the great bald cypresses, stood up like towers dotted across the landscape, their huge thick branches outstretched and ready to catch a slung web. Where the bald cypresses didn’t grow, the lesser ones grew in plenty. Spider-Man might not get a lot of height, but he made good speed. With little chance of anyone seeing him, out here in the middle of almost nowhere, the two-minute mile was no problem.
Deep Lake was a very small town indeed: a gas station, a diner, a post office, a little general store, and a scatter of small houses on a side road behind it. The blue strobe light of the general store’s alarm was flashing, and lights were on inside. Spidey swung past and glanced in the window, saw no one hurt, only some shelves knocked over and an old man looking at them, shaking his head. He would have stopped and looked in, but his spider-sense twinged hard, and he looked down past the faint aura of radiance thrown by the town’s three streetlights. He thought he heard, in the vast country silence, someone or something crashing through the undergrowth.
Swiftly he went after the noise, out of town and on down Route 29, then eastward into the swamp. Swamp was probably the wrong name for it; it was wet prairie, really, mixed with dry-footed reed beds alive with the singing and peeping of frogs. Louder than the frogs, he could hear heavy footsteps thudding on soft ground, splashing through the wet, and a low, almost singsong growl. The footsteps went in a two-footed rhythm. Definitely not a ’gator, Spidey thought.
Here there were fewer trees to work with. Spider-Man leapt again and again, and finally, ahead of him, caught sight of what he pursued—or, rather, whom. The moon was higher, and glinted off wet, scaly hide. Color was washed out of everything in this light, but Spider-Man knew that that hide would be green by daylight. He saw the lash of the tail. The growl got louder.
One big leap brought him down right in front of it. Shocked, the creature started, then planted its huge hind claws, grounded the powerful tail behind it for balance.
“Curt,” Spider-Man said. “Curt, we’ve only got a couple of minutes to talk. The police are coming—”
The Lizard flung his arms wide, and roared, flexing his claws. A glint in the air —did something fly off to one side? Or was it a bat, or some night-flying bird, flickering briefly bright in the moonlight? Spidey didn’t dare take his eyes off the Lizard to see—a moment’s error with this creature could leave you very dead.
“Curt, listen,” he said. “Martha—”
Another roar. The Lizard shook his head wildly from side to side as if even the mention of her name caused him pain. Maybe it does, Spidey thought, wrenched with pity. He wanted not to have to try this tack again, but anything that might get through to Curt Connors, to the man trapped inside, was worth trying. “Martha and William—”
Half roaring, half screaming, the Lizard rushed him. Spider-Man leapt sideways and felt the wind of the Lizard’s plunge brush by him, felt the claws go whiffing past his face, just missing. Sometimes I really miss the good old days when the Lizard was semi-intelligent, and not a mindless, rampaging beast, he thought.
He heard cars, two of them, pull up by the roadside. That was followed by car doors being thrown open and slammed shut. Flashlights came on, and people headed out into the darkness toward them.
“This is the police,” said an amplified voice. “We’re armed, and we’ll shoot if we have to. Come out and give yourself up.”
Spidey leapt up and out of the way to get a look at where the police were. He was astonished when his spider-sense warned him that one of those huge clawed hands was reaching toward him. Unable to twist out of the way in midair, the Lizard plucked him out of the air and dashed him to the ground. Stunned, he lay there just long enough to gasp and roll sideways as the Lizard’s razor-sharp claws came down and slashed the ground where he had been. Spider-Man shot a web at the Lizard, but as fast as he shot it, the creature clawed it aside.
“Hold it right there!” yelled a man’s voice. Enraged, the Lizard spun, took a fraction of a second to sight on the intruder—then leapt. Spidey barely had time to shoot out one last strand of web, aiming for the Lizard’s legs. He caught him. The Lizard slammed down hard on the ground. “It’s the Lizard!” Spider-Man shouted. “Get out of here! Get back in your cars!”
A second’s silence—then gunfire. There was no way to tell in what direction the bullets were traveling. All Spidey could see were muzzle flashes, and all he could hear were ricochets. The Lizard tore the web off his legs, reared up again and made for the officers. Spidey staggered to his feet, picked the one decent-sized cypress in the area, and shot a line of web at its top. It held. This works for Tarzan and Luke Skywalker, he thought, let’s see if it works for me.
The Lizard charged, claws outstretched. Right in front of his face, Spidey came swinging by, caught the first cop out of the Lizard’s path, grabbed the second between his legs, and swung them both up and out of the Lizard’s reach, into the cypress. The three of them thudded into the trunk, and the cops had the sense to cling on tight, while the Lizard rushed the bottom of the tree and hit it almost head-on. The crash shook the whole tree, but it held fast: three hundred years’ worth of hurricanes had taught it a trick or two.
The Lizard roared rage and defiance, shook the tree, but the tree still held. Then came what Spidey had feared: the Lizard sank his talons into the trunk and started to climb it. Hurriedly Spider-Man looked around him, sighted another treetop that he thought he could hit with a web.
Out on the road, a third cop car arrived, sirens blaring and lights flashing, then a fourth. The Lizard let the tree go, roared in fury, and loped off into the swamp. Spidey tried to tell where he was going, but in the uncertain moonlight, it was hopeless—in less than a few seconds, the Lizard might as well have been invisible. And, encumbered as he was with a pair of cops, there was no opportunity to hit him with a spider tracer.
“You guys all right?” he said to his two fellow travelers.
One of them answered unprintably. The second said, “And who the hell are you, buster?”
He slid down the webline with both of them and saw them safely onto the ground before answering, “Just your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, officer.”
“Not mine,” said the first policeman, and spat expressively.
The second dusted himself off, eyed Spider-Man with an expression that looked thoughtful, if not entirely friendly. “You on vacation?”
Spidey had to laugh. “No,” he said. “This is a business trip.”
“And w
as that your business?” the second cop said, gesturing after the Lizard with his chin.
“Partly,” Spidey said. “I heard he’d been seen down here.”
“More than seen,” said another of the policemen, one of the group who had just arrived. They were carrying shotguns, and one of them had leveled his at Spidey. “They took Saunders’s store apart, back there. Money missing. And, Harry? Your gun’s gone from your car. So’s Ed’s.”
“Your friend there,” said the second policeman to Spider-Man, “seems to have had a friend with him.”
“Not my friend,” Spider-Man said. “An accomplice?” That was a new one on him. The Lizard was a loner by nature. This puts an entirely new spin on things.…
“Never mind that,” said the first policeman. “What’re we gonna do with you, now, Mister Friendly Neighborhood?”
“He’s a crook like the others,” said one of the newly arrived cops. “Arrest ’im.”
Spider-Man sighed inside the mask, and looked toward the second policeman, who looked back with that thoughtful expression again. “I think we might have trouble with that,” he said. “Anyway, you did us a good turn just now, son. That thing would’ve fileted us. But this is our neighborhood, so I think it would be best if you let us handle matters around here, and took yourself on back wherever you came from.”
“I understand you perfectly, Officer,” Spidey said. “My pleasure to have been of service.”
He shot a webline up into the tree and swung away, heading northward toward Route 41. When he got back to the spot where he had parked his car, he got in, started it up, and moved it several hundred yards farther along the road and out of sight, on a small service road running parallel with a canal by the road. If they noticed it, he thought, I don’t want them coming back and tracing it… it could cause uncomfortable questions.
Once the car was seen to, and he double-checked that the Questar was still lodged in the tree, he webslung his way back to within a few hundred yards of where he and the Lizard had clashed. The police were still going over the area, so Spidey perched in one of the bald cypresses, waiting for them to leave. They took an hour or two about it, going very thoroughly over the ground where the fight with the Lizard had taken place. Finally, though, they realized there wasn’t much more they could do until morning, on such varied and uneven ground, and they left.
