by Diane Duane
Spider-Man came down from his tree then, slightly stiff, but no less intrigued than he had been earlier. That memory of something, faint but definitely there—flying off the Lizard? or being thrown?—was nagging him.
He went over the ground with spider-senses alert. Even so, the terrain was so variable, such a crazy unpredictable mixture of wet and dry, of bog, dirt, mud, reeds, and prickly undergrowth, and the light was so poor, that it wasn’t until the false dawn began that he found it. “It” was a little can, about a foot long and matte-silvery, like a very upmarket thermos bottle.
Now then, he thought, and worked on getting the top unscrewed. It took a certain exertion of his super-strength to loosen the thing—a normal person probably wouldn’t have been able to get it open without mechanical help. Finally, though, he got it off, and peered into the “thermos.”
Nothing.
He shook the bottle. The faintest sound of impact inside: something, not rattling, just thumping gently against the sides of the bottle. There was something in there.
Then why couldn’t he see it?
He upended the bottle over one hand. Something slid out, into his palm. Impact—but without weight.
Spider-Man peered at the object in his hand, if “object” was the word he was looking for. It’s a piece of smoke, he thought, completely mystified, for that was what it looked like. If you had a smoke-filled room, and took a knife and cut a rectangular slice of the air, sort of the shape of a slender brick—and then took it outside into clean air to examine it, it would look just like this. The edges of the substance seemed to fade away into the air itself. The body of it was semitransparent, and grayish, just like smoke. It was lighter than an object of equivalent size made of paper or hollow plastic.
What on Earth is this? Spider-Man wondered. Is it even from Earth? And what the heck was the Lizard doing with it?
Spider-Man put the “smoke” back in its bottle and closed it tight, webbed it to him, and started back to the car as dawn’s early light started to come up over the wetlands, and the first birds of morning started to test their voices. He was going to have to find out what this was, and what the Lizard was doing with it. But it was going to have to wait a little. In a couple of hours, Vreni would be waiting for Peter Parker, downstairs at the Hilton.
As he swung off toward the road, he yawned. If I’d known the super hero business kept calling for these all-nighters, he thought, I doubt I’d ever have gotten into it.
But this was at least partly a fib. Spider-Man swung off into the new morning, the proud possessor of a piece of smoke, and a whole new batch of unanswered questions.
THREE
WHEN Peter got back to the hotel, it was nearly seven. He’d agreed to meet Vreni for breakfast at about eight. There would be just time to get himself up to the room and run a lot of cold water over himself very quickly in an attempt to wake up.
Not that the evening’s events weren’t interesting enough, but Peter was having a reaction that happened sometimes after a night’s excitement: the adrenaline would run out, and he would find himself totally wrecked. There was no time for that now, though. He had a long day of driving and shooting ahead of him.
Peter took the elevator up to the twelfth floor in the hotel and walked down the long hall to his room. As he slid the key card into the door, he saw to his surprise that the little light on the doorplate, which usually flashed green when the door was ready to open, was now coming up red. He tried the knob, and found the door bolted from the inside. “Hello?” he said.
“Ung,” said a weary voice from inside. He heard the closet door slide aside, someone feeling among the clothes there: then the sound of the door unbolting, the chain coming off. MJ opened the door, blinked blearily at him. “If you’re going to have such late nights while you’re down here,” she said, “I wish you’d let me know.”
“What’re you doing here?” he said, coming in and shutting the door behind him.
“Well, since you did slip me that spare key,” MJ said, “I thought I might as well make use of it. I couldn’t get back to Aunt Anna’s from that party last night. It was too late, I didn’t want to disturb her; and the cab would’ve cost a fortune.” She shrugged. “So I thought I’d just crash here.”
“Well,” Peter said, hugging her, “I’m glad somebody got to use the room last night, because I sure didn’t.”
“I noticed,” she said, sitting down on the bed. “Business, I take it.”
He nodded. “Take a look at this,” Peter said.
He rummaged among his bags and things and came up with the thermos bottle, unscrewed it, and went over to sit at the table by the window. MJ got up and looked over his shoulder as he tapped the contents of the bottle onto the table’s surface. There lay, in the morning sunlight, the piece of smoke. Where the sun struck it, it seemed even less there—just a pale misty oblong, a little brick of fog. MJ looked at it, her eyes wide. “What is it?”
“You tell me.”
She reached out a hand toward it, then pulled the hand back. “It’s not radioactive or anything, is it?”
Peter shook his head. “Couldn’t tell for sure,” he said, “but if it were hot enough to be dangerous, I’d get a twinge from my spider-sense. I don’t get anything like that at all, so…”
“And you found this where?”
Quickly Peter told her about the Lizard, and his encounter with him. MJ shook her head. “Strange,” she said. “I thought that these days he was sort of mindless when he was the Lizard. I mean, as Curt Connors he might make plans, or do intelligent things, but—as the Lizard?”
“I don’t know, MJ.” And then Peter checked his watch. “Oh, jeez, look at the time. I’ve got to get into the shower, honey.”
He headed for the bathroom, shedding clothes in all directions. MJ wandered after him. “You’re gonna like that shower,” MJ said. “It’s so strong, it nearly rips your hair off.”
“Good,” Peter said. He turned it on, producing a violent stream of water and a satisfying cloud of steam. He climbed in and started to scrub.
“You’d better shave too,” MJ said. “Your seven-o’clock shadow is showing.”
“I just bet. How did you do last night?”
“Ohh,” she said, sitting down on the sink, “not great.”
“Why? Wasn’t it a good party?”
“Oh, it was good. There were all these network TV people there. Lots of nice food.” She sounded morose.
“Doesn’t sound like you enjoyed yourself much.”
“I didn’t. They were all better-looking than I was.”
“Oh, come on! I think that’s statistically impossible.”
“No, I’m serious. And in the middle of the party, they introduced the model who’s going to get that part on the talk show.”
“Oh, really.” Now he understood where the moroseness was coming from. Peter sighed. He thought he knew what MJ was thinking: that they needed the money, but also that being passed over for a job was a personal blow to her, no matter how casually she acted about such things.
“And she,” MJ said, “was gorgeous. Gorgeous.” She pouted slightly. “It’s just not fair.”
“No,” Peter said, “I guess it’s not. What’re you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I was talking to some of the people at the party last night. Some of them were from agencies I’d applied to.” She shook her head. “It’s funny, but they see acting as a step down from modeling. They think that if you’ve gone into acting in TV, you’ve essentially written yourself off as a model. I don’t understand it. I would have thought it’d give you more credence, not less. But that doesn’t seem to be the way it works, not down here.” She laughed, a somewhat bitter sound. “All of them were interested in talking to me about my TV work, but if I talked to them about modeling, they looked at me as if they thought I just wanted to come back and… slum. And it’s not like that! You know that.”
“You wouldn’t know how to slum,” Peter said,
groping around for the shampoo bottle. “It’s insulting for them to even think that way.”
“Oh, I know, but they don’t see that. A lot of these people are really kind of wrapped up in themselves.”
Peter smiled slightly. This was a complaint he had heard from her before, and it was, he supposed, understandable. When your work and your livelihood depended on how good you could make yourself look to other people, the temptation to become very self-centered, it seemed to Peter, would be tough to resist. He had kept to himself, some time back, the suspicion that one reason MJ’s modeling career was a little up-and-down was because she did not have that self-centeredness. But that was one of the things he loved about her, and he wasn’t sure he’d trade it for any amount of success.
“Anyway,” MJ said, “I had a couple of offers.”
“Anything serious?”
MJ laughed again, pulled a Kleenex out of the box, and began shredding it methodically. “They weren’t much better than wage slavery, really, and the travel allowances—” She shook her head. “I’d be crazy to take them. I do have my pride.” She glanced up at him. He could just see her out the shower curtain, and the look in her eyes was an almost stern expression that he had seen before. “You start working cheap, here or anywhere, and word gets around. Pretty soon no one will have you anymore. So…” She trailed off. “Are you angry with me?”
“What? For not taking bad job offers? You have to be the judge of these things, babe. This isn’t my area of expertise.” He put his head out the shower curtain and smiled at her. “You want advice on how to climb up the sides of apartment buildings, or where to sock Venom to make him yell—”
“Please,” MJ said. “I’d just spent a few days without even thinking of him. But I see your point.”
“Well,” Peter said, “I’ll be guided by your opinion. If you think a job’s bad, you shouldn’t be taking it.”
She sighed. Peter got out of the shower and hastily rubbed himself down: it was almost seven-thirty. “You know,” she said, looking up at him, “you’re really good to me.”
“Well, I should be! You’re my wife!”
“Yeah, well, you put up with a lot, you know that? Me and my insecurities.”
“And you don’t put up with a lot?” He hung up the towel, drew her close. “With a husband who swings around on webs and gets himself in trouble? I think you have a fairly high tolerance level, actually. I’m a pretty lucky guy.”
She pulled his face down to hers. For a long minute or so, there were no words. Then MJ said, “You want me to rinse out your uniform for you?”
Peter chuckled. “It doesn’t need it yet. Besides, if one of the hotel staff came in and found it hanging over the tub—”
MJ dimpled. “I see your point. Well, never mind.” She stepped out and started rummaging in the closet for her clothes. “I should go back to Aunt Anna’s. I left a message for her, but you know how she is. Until she sees me with her own eyes and hears everything that happened, she won’t be satisfied. And she won’t have anything to tell the neighbors.” She chuckled. “‘My Niece The TV Star.’”
“Well, give her my best.”
Peter started dressing hurriedly. When he turned away from checking himself out in the mirrored sliding doors, he saw MJ staring thoughtfully at the little piece of smoke on the table. “It’s so strange,” she said. “It looks—” she shrugged “—illegal somehow.”
“Illegal as in drugs?”
“No… just as in, it shouldn’t be there. It looks wrong.”
She reached out a hand, prodded it hesitantly. Then MJ put up her eyebrows. “It’s a little springy. Did you feel that?”
“No.” He came over to MJ and reached out a finger, poked the stuff. There was indeed a response as if he were pushing on very resistant foam rubber. But when he pushed it and let it spring back, he couldn’t see any change in the object, no evidence of what he could physically feel it doing. It was very strange.
“I’ve got to find somebody who can tell me what the heck this is,” Peter said. “But it’s going to have to wait. Vreni’s going to have a lot of interview appointments today, I think.”
“What’re you going to do with this?” MJ asked.
“Oh, I’ll take it with me… there’s room in the camera bag.”
“Why would the Lizard have it?” she continued, as Peter shrugged into a light jacket and started packing his work bags up. “Where would he have been taking it? Where did it come from?”
“I hope I can find out,” Peter said.
* * *
IN San Francisco that morning, the mist hung low, as it often did: sometimes until noon, nearly, before burning off. Many people in San Francisco paid no particular attention to this, being used to it. Others paid no attention to the weather because they couldn’t see it.
Down in the darkness, below the city streets, the doings of the open sky were no concern of theirs, except on rainy days when the water made its way down through the drains and trickled into the city’s underheart. Down there in the darkness, under the great buildings, under the old city, a newer one had been born. A place of tunnels and warrens, lit here and there by lamps illumined with stolen power, maintained with materials brought down quietly from the surface by night. It was a city of the disenfranchised, the homeless, the victimized, of people who had turned their backs on the mist and the sunshine both, and sought a different kind of life, private, silent, remote.
In one such quiet warren, a man sat on someone’s castaway chair, and thought. It was not strictly accurate to call him a man—not anymore. The core of him was human, but things had been added. He was not a single being any longer… and had almost forgotten what it was like to be one.
He was part of a symbiosis, one that some people found deadly, others found reassuring. In a long-forgotten tunnel between two buildings, in a little makeshift “living room” containing a table and chairs, and the remains of a takeout meal, Eddie Brock, known to his friends and his enemies as Venom, sat going over some paperwork and considering his options.
The decay and destruction of something he loved was on his mind. The past month or so had been a busy one for him. San Francisco was his home, but he left it willingly enough when business called. Business, for him, meant defending the innocent, the helpless, from those who would prey upon them; defending them violently, if need be. He had gone to New York to do that, for he had gotten word that someone there was masquerading as Venom and attacking innocent people. If there was any kind of behavior he could not allow to happen in his name, it was that. Making his way to New York, he had dealt with the problem—had helped to deal with the creature which, as it turned out, had unwittingly been impersonating him by night in the streets of New York.
There had also been other satisfactions. Going to New York had also meant dealing with Spider-Man. Venom had dealt with the wall-crawler, at least to his temporary satisfaction, giving him one or two extremely conclusive drubbings and reminding him once again of the error which Spider-Man had made in rejecting the symbiote ”costume” which was now part of Venom. Venom had been slightly surprised, as well, during their brief and peculiar alliance, to find that Spider-Man was perhaps slightly less a hopeless case than Venom had thought. Not that this would make any difference in the long run: Venom would destroy him eventually. The symbiote’s emotions regarding Spider-Man, and Peter Parker, were too clear for Venom to ignore. Sooner or later the moment would be right, and this particular aspect of his history with the symbiote would become a closed chapter.
For the meantime, though, Venom had parted from Spider-Man, content to let him live a while longer in return for his aid against the bizarre extraterrestrial creature which had been killing people in Venom’s apparent likeness, and also for his action against Hobgoblin—unquestionably a factor in keeping all of Manhattan from being blown halfway to the moon.
Other aspects of the month’s work, though, were still niggling at Venom. The extraterrestrial monster had mostly ki
lled in search of radioactive materials, its food. And there turned out to be far too much material of that kind in the city for Venom’s taste… courtesy of a strange import-export firm called Consolidated Chemical Research Corporation. This firm had stored radioactive materials in odd places around Manhattan, places too accessible to normal human beings who could (and did) come to harm by them. Barrels of waste, caches of fissionable material, things that had no business being in a city full of the innocent—Venom and Spider-Man had recovered a number of caches. The New York City government, alerted to this problem, had been cleaning up the sites as best it could: as far as Venom could tell from the news, and his more clandestine sources of information, they were doing a fairly good job.
But his own concerns didn’t stop there. A firm like CCRC, which had been so careless once in the middle of one of the most heavily populated areas on the planet, would likely be just as careless elsewhere. Any big company which became so cavalier with the lives of human beings was a concern to Venom, and he intended to keep working at this problem until it was solved.
He looked at one of the pieces of paper which lay on the chipped Formica table on which he sat. He didn’t have to reach for it: the symbiote, which was presently masquerading as his shirt and jeans, put out a slim graceful pseudopod and flipped the page over so that Eddie could see the next one, a long list of names and addresses. Venom had continued to look into the corporate structure of CCRC.
Through his investigation of state and county documents, Eddie had found that CCRC’s New York branch had been having dealings with numerous companies of varying types in various states. Some of these had been shut down abruptly over the last month: corporations were sold or otherwise divested, registrations were shifted around. Now there were only a few active links to CCRC left. Venom had found it very interesting that all of them were in Florida.
