Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  They did try, for about half an hour. But no scalpel, tome, or other implement in Kavanagh’s lab, not even his Swiss Army knife, could get so much as a chip or a sliver off the hydrogel. “It’s too bad,” Kavanagh said sadly, at last. “Take it away before I’m tempted too far. And whatever you do—” he looked at Peter seriously “—don’t let the world at large know you have this stuff. I would imagine there are people who would do quite a bit to get their hands on it… and wouldn’t deal kindly with you if they knew it’s with you.”

  Peter nodded, knowing this was almost certainly true. Curt, he thought, why did you have this stuff? What’s going on out there…?

  Peter thanked Kavanagh for his help, got back into his car, and drove back north.

  There’s got to be a pile of money behind this, he thought, as he pulled back onto the freeway. There’s no way that this kind of materials engineering happens on the cheap. Either a lot of money was spent to steal this from Livermore, or a lot was spent to produce it somewhere else.

  Kavanagh had given Peter a copy of the Scientific American article, which gave full enough instructions for a careful chemist to synthesize it on his own, given the proper equipment. And Curt had had it. Stolen from someone else… or synthesized by Curt, for his own purposes?

  But the Lizard was carrying it. It was hard enough to communicate with the Lizard at all, let alone make it act like some kind of courier—

  The phone rang. Peter picked it up. “Hi, MJ—”

  “Peter! Oh, gosh!”

  “What’s the matter? Where are you?”

  “Up on the shoot. Oh, honey!”

  “MJ, what’s wrong?”

  “Venom!” she said.

  “What?!”

  “He was on the news just now. He was up in some skyscraper—intimidated some executive, it looks like, and just walked out afterwards. By the time the police got there, he was long gone.”

  “Oh, that’s just wonderful,” Peter said.

  “I thought—”

  “MJ,” Peter said hastily, “not on the cellular. People can eavesdrop on these things. Are you busy tonight?”

  “No… they’re putting us up at a hotel here. Do you want to come up?”

  “I might do that. Which hotel?”

  “The Splendide, on North Collins.” She chuckled. “It’s about as splendid as a landfill, but never mind. Around eightish?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  He hung up, and thought bad words, many of them.

  Venom!

  They had tangled last month, several times; in the middle of it, Hobgoblin had been added to the equation. Finally the alien creature had been put out of harm’s way, and with Hobgoblin carted off as well, Venom had announced that, since he had other business to handle in San Francisco, he would leave Spider-Man to his own devices for the moment. He must have handled it by now, Peter thought. And now that the media are announcing I’ve turned up here, he must feel he has leisure to come back this way and settle my hash. Not on his own turf, of course—but this isn’t exactly mine, either.

  Damn! Why can’t he leave me alone?

  It didn’t seem likely, though. The symbiote to which Venom was bound was one that Peter had rejected when he realized just how alive his new “costume” was. It had gone hunting a new host, and had found one—and the symbiote did not forget the pain of its rejection. It held a grudge, and Eddie Brock was only too glad to help the symbiote deal with its own anger. Venom had nearly killed Spider-Man several times now, and so far luck or skill in fighting had saved him. But he couldn’t count on it forever.

  And now they’re here.

  And what about the Lizard? Peter thought. If Venom runs across him, who knows what he’ll do? He thinks he’s just a crazy monster, likely to harm the innocent.

  It occurred to Peter, ever so briefly, that it would be an interesting fight to watch. While he wasn’t exactly invulnerable, neither was anybody going to tear the Lizard up like wet paper, not even Venom. But he very much doubted he’d have the leisure to watch any such fight, since if Spider-Man were anywhere in the neighborhood, Venom would happily put the Lizard on hold until old business had been dealt with.

  Peter sighed. I really needed this, he thought. Well, if he crosses my path, I’m gonna do my best to trash him. I’ve almost managed it, a couple of times before. Then the police can have him.

  It probably wasn’t very compassionate to want so badly to pound someone into a pulp. But Venom had been making Spider-Man’s life difficult for some time now—and Peter Parker’s, too. Venom had not scrupled to try to get at Spidey by frightening MJ. That, if nothing else, earned him a good thrashing in Peter’s opinion.

  Just this once, he thought. Seeing Venom locked up in the Vault would do him no end of good.

  But then there would still be the Lizard.

  Curt, Peter thought, as he swung south onto the freeway toward Miami, what’s going on?

  FIVE

  NOT surprisingly, the few structures standing in the Everglades have a temporary look. Heavy building materials are not easy to get in and out, and the weather makes any building situation unpredictable. The swamp and marsh are endlessly malleable by the elements. Canals that were passable last week may be drowned and lost today; ground that was dry yesterday may today be under two feet of water. And, even if you do manage to get your materials in and get something built, there’s no predicting when or if a hurricane will come screaming through and rip up everything you’ve done.

  As a rule, it isn’t easy to see buildings in the Everglades. The lush growth makes even a cleared site look like primeval forest within a matter of years. And if you go out of your way to hide a structure, then only the spy satellites will know where you are—and even they have to be told where to look. There are places in the wetlands called hammocks where trees seed themselves prolifically, and they and their rootling trees grow so closely together that there’s no seeing what lies inside the little self-contained island they create. The temperatures in such places, sealed off above by a thick canopy of leaves and surrounded by a wall of many trunks, soar far higher than elsewhere in the landscape. Rare flora—air plants, bromeliads and orchids—grow wild inside such hammocks, a kinder environment than any greenhouse.

  Entering a hammock is like walking into a close, dark, humid room. The occasional song of a bird, the shriek of a shrike, are the only sounds to be heard in the acoustically close little place, and the only illumination are the few turning spots of light shifting and flowing along the interior as the sun moves. Hammocks can be as small as twenty or thirty feet in diameter, or quite large.

  There was a large one, covering maybe half an acre, some miles north of Big Cypress and about ten miles from a town called Felda. No one in Felda knew much about it. In that wilderness of canals, that “river of grass,” as the poet called it, filled with wetland, dry land, poisonous plants, and snakes, it was difficult enough to really know the landscape around your home, let alone that ten miles away.

  But someone had found this biggest of the local hammocks, and someone had used it.

  Inside the palisade of cypress, bald cypress and dwarf cypress, mangrove, and tangled banyan, a little, long, low building had been erected. It was a temporary structure of the kind built by people who supply pre-fab trailers and so forth to construction sites. It had two levels, the second accessed by a stairway up the outside. It looked as if someone made a halfhearted attempt to keep it clean, but the fiberglass of the outside was rapidly becoming festooned with Spanish moss and bromeliads, which considered the exterior of the building to be just another kind of tree trunk. The building had no windows, it was not built for pleasure or convenience, but for a specific purpose.

  Upstairs in the small building, in a blank-walled office that looked just like so many others he had worked from in his time, a man in a lab coat worked busily at a personal computer. The screen was displaying an automated computer-assisted design program. He placed his left hand on the speciall
y designed mouse—a necessity, since he had no right arm, and the typical mouse was designed for right-handed use. He clicked, and on the screen a diagram of sticks and balls, a complex molecular structure, rotated itself. The man picked up another stick and ball from a pile of them on one side of the screen, mouse-dragged them into the diagram, and hooked them onto one side of it. The new stick and ball bounced away, there was a soft chime, and the computer—using a sound-file lifted from a well-known television series—announced, in a chaste, cool female voice, “This procedure is not recommended.”

  The man sighed deeply. Using the mouse, he picked up a different color of ball, another stick, plugged the stick in, then thought for a moment, squashed another ball into the first one, and applied them both to the stick. There was another soft chime, but this time no protest from the autoCAD program.

  The man sat back in his chair and let out a long sigh. He was good-looking, with dark hair and fine features, eyes with the slight, smile-created downturn at the corners that suggested a kind-hearted, thoughtful person. Under the lab coat, his clothes had an inexpensive look to them. They had not been tailored to accommodate his uneven proportions; the right sleeve simply hung limply. Considering what frequently happened to his clothes, Curt Conners didn’t see any reason to spend a great deal of money on them when they might be torn to shreds at any moment by an annoyed Lizard—the thing at the bottom of his soul.

  The lab door opened, and he glanced up to see Fischer walk in, if Fischer could ever be said to merely “walk” anywhere. To say that he hulked in might have been a more accurate description. Curt thought he had never seen shoulders so broad. On some super heroes possibly, but not on an ordinary human being. Fischer always looked as if he belonged in an action-adventure movie.

  He tended to prefer wearing camouflage clothing. His hair was cropped in a Marine-style crew cut, his eyes were an astonishing, photogenic frozen blue in a broad face with high cheekbones, a big, square jaw, and a thin-lipped mouth that could wear a deceptively wide smile. He was a most improbable-looking man, and most improbably handsome, but he was real enough. He had certainly become one of the realities of Curt Connors’s life in the past six or seven months. And he had to be dealt with, whether Curt liked it or not.

  “How’s it coming?” Fischer said.

  Curt nodded. “The substrate’s in place,” he said, “but the beta-N ring structure is giving me some trouble—”

  “I don’t need the jargon,” said Fischer. “How close are you to being done?”

  Curt sighed. The man’s obtuseness about science was deliberate, rather than an inability to handle it. Fischer just didn’t see science as anything a reasoning being would get interested in, any more than he would get interested in, say, a screwdriver or a telephone. It was a tool, not a source of pleasure in itself.

  “Very close,” Curt said. “It might be a week, it might be less. Depends on how quickly I can finish putting this together. Some of it—” he shrugged, a regretful gesture “—is just a matter of trying all the pieces in different configurations until they work. And some of it, I’m afraid, genuinely does require a certain level of inspiration.”

  Fischer stared at him with those cold blue eyes. “Well,” he said, “you’d better get inspired. Once we manage to arrange another delivery of the administration medium—”

  Curt met the stare without flinching. “I don’t know what went wrong with the last one,” he said, “and there’s really no use dwelling on it, is there? Even before the installation, the Lizard was unpredictable enough. But now that,” he raised his eyebrows, “your favorite gadget’s been installed, it’s hardly his fault if something goes wrong. You want to have a word with the programmer. Or whoever else wrote the code. Or your pet surgeon, who put the thing in. If one of the neural implants—”

  “Shut up, Connors,” said Fischer. He said it jovially enough, but the tone of voice would have been more reassuring if Curt didn’t know, from previous experience, that if he didn’t shut up violence would follow. To Fischer, the use of force was just one more form of conversation, and Curt had seen what happened to other people who didn’t shut up when Fischer told them to.

  His guts began to roil a little inside him. He despised this necessary pretense of cowardice; he would have liked to wait until the inevitable happened—and then calmly take this man apart with the Lizard’s bare claws. That much he would enjoy. But it would destroy the whole point of this exercise, and so he restrained himself from even thinking about what was hopeless and couldn’t happen.

  “Programming isn’t at issue,” Fischer said, leaning back against one wall with his arms folded. “What is, is that the Lizard picked up our consignment. And then he lost it again. Not very good. It’s going to take us another few days to get any more. It’s going to be tougher than last time, and even then we attracted enough notice.”

  “But you will manage it?”

  “Oh yeah, we’ll manage it.”

  “And then?”

  “Then the surgery will go ahead as scheduled,” said Fischer, again jovially, “assuming you have the kinks worked out of that by the time we get it.”

  “It’s not so much working them out as working them in,” Curt said ruefully, looking again at the molecular diagram on the screen. He had been hanging D-benzene rings all over the long-molecule structure like blown-glass ornaments on a Christmas tree—but no Christmas tree had ever been such a delicate construction, or so easily misbalanced. Too many balls on one side and the structure of the molecule came apart, or twisted itself into some odd configuration he hadn’t planned.

  Already this week he had constructed some enzymes that might prove extremely useful in the genetic engineering of vegetables, and at least one proteolytic structure that might possibly someday be part of a cure for cancer. But that wasn’t the cure he was looking for, and so he put it aside—having first carefully noted the structure, and resolved to write a paper about it someday, when he was back doing normal work again. He had to hold that hope in front of himself. If he ever lost it, ever let go of it.…

  If that ever happens, I’ll cease to be human, he thought. Since I’m only sporadically human these days anyway, I’d better hang on to the little that I have.

  “Anyway,” Fischer said, “Certain People will be very glad that you’re making such good progress. Certain People wouldn’t like to be kept waiting very much longer. They have their own agenda, and your price is rather small.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Good.”

  There were other things on Curt’s mind, though. He was beginning to feel rumblings of something he knew all too well now, an array of sensations superficially like an epileptic’s aura, a certain change in the way things looked, a shift in the perception of colors, a metallic taste that heralded changes in the sensorium.

  “It’s going to happen again shortly,” he said.

  Fischer’s eyes widened just slightly. That was as much of a surprise reaction as you could get out of him. “How long?”

  “Soon. It’s never very consistent.”

  “All right, then. You’ll want to get yourself out of here. You wouldn’t want to wreck the joint after seven months of work, would you now?”

  “No,” said Curt. “I just want to back this up, before—”

  “Fine,” said Fischer. “I’ll leave you to it. Just be careful not to lose anything.”

  “Believe me,” Curt said. “That’s the last thing on my mind.”

  Fischer turned and bulked out of the room again. Curt waited until he heard the footsteps receding down the metal stairs outside the building—probably going off to warn the rest of his people, he thought. Only when the man was safely away, for just a moment he lowered his face into his hands and breathed out a long, soft sound. A moan.

  Martha… he thought.

  It would be easier for him, so much easier, if he was the kind of person who could just forget about people, let them go or even shut them forcibly out of mind
and memory. Keep them at arm’s length. But that wasn’t the way he had been raised. His parents had been loving, his relationship with his family had been good. They cared about each other.

  His parents were both dead now, and his family separated; but all of them kept in touch by phone, and he knew, on the rare occasions when he called them, that they were always glad to hear him. But there was always a note in their voices that said, “Why have you become so distant? Why have you drawn away? Is it something we did? Tell us, and let us make it up.”

  It was, of course, nothing he could ever explain. There had seemed no point in spreading the pain Martha already suffered around the rest of the family. So he became the somewhat-lost brother, the distant uncle, the cousin who was a bit of a black sheep, who didn’t keep in touch, who no one really knew much about anymore. He knew that when his relatives spoke of Martha and William, they shook their heads, and sighed, and felt sorry for them.

  Not half as sorry as he did.

  For maybe the ten thousandth time, Curt thought back on the day the experiment went wrong, and he wished as hard as ever that time was reversible, that you could point at a given moment, a causal linkage, and just explode it. To delete it, to hear the cosmic voice saying, “That procedure is not recommended,” and watch the elements of the dumb move, the Big Mistake, separate and float back to the side of the screen, waiting for you to do it again, and this time, do it right—that would be worth almost anything.

  But reality had not been so kind.

  Curt opened his eyes and gulped. The taste at the back of his mouth was wrong, and the colors in the room were shifting. Hurriedly he began to take his clothes off—there was no point in ruining any more of them than he absolutely had to—and silently, looking as erect and proud as he could look when he knew that inside of ten minutes he would no longer be a man, Curt Connors went outside to await the inevitable.

  Fischer watched, from his position leaning against a thick-trunked mangrove, as Connors edged sideways out of the hammock into the relatively open air, paused, then stepped down into the smooth brown water and swam slowly away. He moved with a fair amount of splashing. That gave the water moccasins and the cottonmouths a chance to get out of the way before he changed into a form less hospitable to the native wildlife.