by Diane Duane
Until a burglar, surprised in the act, shot and killed his Uncle Ben.
Weeping, raging, Peter had struggled into his costume, going to join the pursuit. There was an old warehouse not too far away where the burglar had gone to ground. By ways the police couldn't manage, he had gone in, cornered the burglar, disarmed him, battered him into submission—and then had found himself looking, horrified, into the face of the man he hadn't bothered to stop.
That face hung before him again, now. Other memories might mercifully fade. Not this one. Since that awful night Spider-Man had learned the lesson that with great power comes great responsibility. The weight on his conscience of his uncle's lost life had perhaps lightened a little over the intervening years, but he doubted he would ever be completely free of it—and maybe he didn't want to be.
Now he looked down into the warehouse, alert, and saw nothing but what was actually here. As good a chance to test this as any, he thought, and silently unshipped the camera apparatus, set it up near the edge of the skylight, checked its view and made sure that the pan-and-tilt head worked freely and without fouling itself. He wasn't using a flash tonight; instead he had loaded the camera with a roll of the new superfast ASA 6000 film, which would let the camera work by available light and keep it from betraying its presence to unfriendly eyes.
Right, he thought. Now let's see what the story is in here.
Softly he walked around to another of the skylights and peered inside. There was more glass in this one, and the view through it was somewhat obscured: he rubbed at one pane with a gloved hand and looked through. Nothing.
Spider-Man went along to the third skylight. This one, as the first, was missing most of its glass. Now, though, he heard something: voices muttering, the clunk of something heavy being moved, metal scraping laboriously over metal. He peered down. There was a shape on the floor. He squinted.
A security guard in uniform lay askew, crumpled and motionless. Unconscious? Dead?
He went through the biggest pane of glass with a crash, uncaring, taking only time enough to leave a strand of web behind him to ride down as it lengthened and break his fall to the floor. Landing, he took in the surroundings in tableau, as if frozen—four men, thuggish-looking, caught in the act of loading big oil-drum-like metal canisters onto a truck backed into the warehouse's loading ramp. Wide eyes, mouths hanging open, certainly unprepared for his arrival.
Not that unprepared, Spider-Man thought, as one of them pulled a gun. But the man was moving at merely human speed, and his opponent had a spider's swiftness of reaction. Spider-Man flung out one arm, shot a thick, sticky line of web at the gunman. It stuck to the gun, and Spidey yanked it out of the man's hand and threw it across the warehouse into the piles of trash in the shadows. The man yelped—apparently his finger had gotten stuck in the trigger guard, and now he stood shaking the hand and cursing.
"Serves you right," Spidey said as the others came for him, one of them pulling his own weapon. "But come on, now, didn't you see what just happened?" He threw himself sideways as the second man fired, then came up out of the roll, shot another line of web and took the second gun away, flinging it after the first one.
"Anybody else?" The first of the four came at Spidey in an attempt to get up-close and personal. "Oh well, if you insist," he said, resigned but amused. Spidey sidestepped the man's headlong rush, shot a line of webbing around his ankles, and got out of the way to let him sprawl face-first to best effect. The second one, now deprived of his gun, swung a board at Spider-Man and missed in his excitement. Spidey cocked one fist back, beginning to enjoy himself, and did not miss. That sound of a perfect punch landing, so bizarrely like the sound of a good clean home run coming off a bat, echoed through the warehouse. The man went down like a sack of potatoes and didn't move again.
"Glass jaw. Guess the gun is understandable," Spidey said, as the third of the four came at him. This one didn't just dive headlong, but stopped a few feet away, turned, and threw at Spider-Man what under normal circumstances would have been a fairly respectable rear thrust-kick. Unfortunately, these circumstances were not normal, as Spidey had been having two-bit crooks throwing such kicks at him since the craze for kung-fu movies had started some years before. While the kick looked good, the man throwing it had obviously never heard about the defenses against it, and Spidey simply stepped back a pace, then grabbed the foot hanging so invitingly in the air in front of him, and pulled hard. The man fell right down off his inadequately balanced stance on the other foot, and straight onto his tailbone with a crunch and a shriek of pain.
"I'd get that X-rayed if I were you," Spidey said, throwing a couple of loops of restraining web around the man before he could struggle to his feet. "Now then—"
His spider-sense buzzed sharply, then, harder than it had on initially seeing the warehouse. Spidey threw himself instantly as hard and as far to the right as he could. It was just as well, for just to his left there was a deafening BANG! and an explosion of light, and dirt and trash from the warehouse floor were flung in all directions through a thick roil of smoke.
The light and the noise were horribly familiar: Spider-Man had run into them entirely too often before. Pumpkin bomb, he thought. He came up into a crouch, aching slightly from the concussion but otherwise unhurt, and stared through the smoke at its inevitable source. Tearing through the smoke, standing on the jetglider which was one of his trademarks and his favorite way of getting around, was the orange-and-blue-garbed figure of the Hobgoblin.
Spidey jumped again as another bomb hit near him and went off, then leapt one more time to get out of range. "Hobby," he shouted, "why can't you stick to playing with cherry bombs, like other kids your age? This kind of antisocial behavior's likely to go on your permanent record."
A nasty snicker went by Spidey overhead: he rolled and leapt again, to be very nearly missed by an energy blast from one of Hobgoblin's gauntlets. "Spider-Man," Hobgoblin said in that cheerful, snide voice of his, the crimson eyes glinting evilly from under the shadow of the orange cowl, "you really shouldn't involve yourself with matters that don't concern you. Or with anything else but your funeral arrangements."
A couple more energy blasts stitched the concrete in front of Spider-Man as Hobgoblin soared by low overhead. Spidey bounced away from the blasts, hurriedly throwing a glance toward the four thugs. They were already showing signs of recovery, and the webbed ones were struggling to get loose. Not good. Spider-Man looked at the truck. This may not go exactly as planned. I need a moment to plant a spider-tracer on that— Another pumpkin bomb hurled near him and, warned again by his spider-sense, he jumped one more time, but almost not far enough. He felt the concussion all over the back of his body as it detonated. "Hobby," he shouted, "I expected better of you. How many of these things have you thrown at me, all this while, and not gotten a result?"
"One keeps trying," Hobgoblin said from above, over the whine of the jetglider. "But since you insist—"
Immediately it began to more or less rain small knife-edged electronic "bats" which buzzed dangerously near. It was too dark to see their edges glint, but Spidey had had occasion before to examine them closely, and they were wicked little devices—light graphite and monacrylic "wings" with individual miniaturized guidance systems and razor-sharp front and back edges. Me and my big mouth, Spidey thought, resisting the urge to swat at them as they buzzed around him—they could take off a finger, or even a hand, in no time flat. He ducked and rolled out of the way as fast as he could, slipping behind a couple of standing canisters in an attempt to confuse the razor-bats.
"Is this better?" Hobgoblin said sweetly.
Spider-Man didn't answer, intent as he was on dodging the bats. He spared a glance upward. Came in through the skylight. I wonder, Spidey thought, did the camera get him? Well, we'll see. Meanwhile, I want him out of here—he's got too much of the advantage of mobility, and inside here I'm a sitting duck for these things. Also, I've got a better chance of snagging him out in the open.
Outside, he looked up and around. Several buildings in this block and the next were ten stories high or better. He shot a webline at the nearest of them and went up it in a hurry. Behind him, to his great satisfaction, he heard the camera click, reposition itself, click again. Good baby. You just keep that up.
Hobgoblin, standing on the jetglider, soared up out of the skylight without noticing the camera. Whatever else happens, Spidey thought with slightly unnerved satisfaction, these pictures are going to be dynamite.
The bright, noisy detonation near him in midair reminded Spider-Man that he had more immediate explosives to worry about. Now if I can just keep clear of those, he thought, long enough to snag that sled.
For that, though, he needed to get himself anchored to best advantage, ideally in a situation that Hobgoblin would fly into without adequate forethought. Little time to manage such a situation. All the same, Spidey thought, there's a chance. Those two buildings there are pretty close. He swung around the corner of the building to which his webbing was presently attached, but instead of shooting out more webbing to the next anchorage and continuing around, he pulled himself in close to the side of the building and lay flat against it. Hobby shot on past and kept going, apparently assuming that Spidey had done so as well. Good. He always tends to overreact a little.
Now Spider-Man swarmed around the side of the building, back the way he had come, shot several strands of web across to the next building, felt them anchor; moved down and shot a couple of more, anchoring them in turn. In the dark, they were almost invisible. Now all I need to do is swing across there with Hobby behind me, and one or another of those lines is going to catch him amidships and take him right off that glider.
He wall-crawled as fast as he could up to the top of the building, peered around, saw nothing. Good. He anchored another strand of web, waited—
—and suddenly heard the buzzing all around him. The razor-bats had followed him up out of the warehouse.
Without hesitation he jumped off the building and web-slung for all he was worth, working to shake the things by swinging perilously close to the wall of the next building over. Several of the razor-bats hit the wall, disintegrating in a hail of graphite splinters. But the rest followed, and one of them got in close and nailed him in the leg. He managed to kick it into the building in passing, but his leg had a two-inch-long razor cut in it now, shallow but bleeding enthusiastically. Next best tactic, he thought, and shot out another line of webbing, heading upward toward where Hobby was gliding by, watching the fun and laughing hysterically.
"Yeah, this whole thing is just a bundle of laughs, isn't it? Let's see if it stays this funny," Spidey shouted, and made straight for him, energy blasts and pumpkin bombs or not. Even Hobgoblin had cause to be a little twitchy about being caught in a rapidly approaching cloud of his own flying razors. Sure enough, Hobby backed off slightly, tossing spare pumpkin bombs and firing off energy blasts as best he could. Spidey smiled grimly under the mask, noticing that his enemy was swooping toward the space between the two buildings where he had stretched his trap of weblines—
Then, without any warning, Hobgoblin turned, his great cloak flaring out behind him, and threw a pumpkin bomb right at Spidey. Caught up in Hobby's barrage, he was unable to dodge it, and it went off, seemingly right in his face.
He fell. Only an uprush of spiderly self-preservation saved him, the jet of webbing streaking out to catch the edge of the nearest building and break his fall to the roof of the old warehouse. It was not enough to cushion that fall, though. He came down hard and lay there with the world black and spinning around him.
Dead, he thought, I'm dead. Or about to be.
He could just hear the whine of the jetglider pausing in midair above and beside him, could just feel the sting of the roof gravel its jets kicked up. He knew Hobgoblin was bending over him.
"It doesn't matter," Hobby said, and laughed, not quite as hysterically. There was purpose in the laughter, nasty purpose, and the sound of genuine enjoyment. "Right now you wish you'd never heard of me, for all your smart talk. And shortly the whole city will wish it had never heard of me." More laughter. "Wait and see."
The laughter trailed away, as did the sound of the jet-glider. Spider-Man could just barely hear Hobgoblin scolding his henchmen down in the warehouse, yelling at them to hurry, get themselves cleaned up, get the truck loaded, and get it out of here! He must have passed out briefly: the next sound he heard was the truck being driven away, fading into the greater roar of the city.
It was some while before he could get up. Click, whirr, click, whirr, he heard something say. The camera, its lens following his motion, the motion of a very dazed and aching Spider-Man staggering toward it, holding his head and moaning. Click, whirrrrr, said the camera. Then it said nothing further. It had run out of film.
He sat down next to it, hard, picked up the camera after a moment, and pushed the little button to rewind the film. This worked, at least, he thought. But whatever else was going on down there, there's no way to tell now. I didn't even have time to put a tracer on that truck. Oh well—I bet we'll find out shortly. Whatever it is, it's big—Hobby wouldn't be involved otherwise.
Meantime, I'd better get home.
“And WGN news time is one forty-five. It's eighty-four degrees and breezy in New York. Looks like we're in for worse tomorrow—our accu-weather forecast is for hazy, hot, and humid weather, highs tomorrow in the mid-nineties with expected humidity at ninety-two percent."
"I wish to God," said a weary voice off to one side, "that you'd turn that bloody thing off."
Harry sighed and reached out to turn it down, at least. "Can't get to sleep without my news," he said, turning over in the thin, much-flattened sleeping bag.
From his companion, half inside a cardboard box, wrapped in discarded Salvation Army blankets and numerous alternating layers of newspapers and clothes, there came a snort. "I can't sleep with it. Why don't you at least use the earphones, since you've got them? Jeez." There was a slight rustle of the other turning over restlessly in his box.
Harry grumbled acquiescence and started going through his things in the dark, looking for the small bag that contained the earplugs for the transistor radio. The sound echoed through the empty old warehouse: nothing else was to be heard. That didn't stop Harry from wrapping himself in several layers, despite the heat. You never knew what would be crawling around—or who. Best to keep protected, and keep what few possessions you had as close as possible.
He and Mike had been here for about six days now, having wormed their way in through a back-alley service entrance—the door to one of those ground-level elevators which, when they were working, came clanging up through the sidewalk to deliver crates and cartons to the storage area below a building. In the case of this particular freight elevator, it had been many years since it had worked. Some careful prying with the crowbar that Mike carried for self-defense got them in. They squirmed and wriggled their way through and found their way into a subcellar, then up a couple of flights of crumbling steps to the warehouse floor.
It wasn't as old as some of the buildings around here; it looked to have been built in the late forties and fifties, when there was still something of an industrial boom going on in this part of town. To judge from the general look of the place, Harry thought, it had been let go to seed for the past ten years or so. Now it looked like no one had been in to clean or maintain it for at least that long. There were chips and fragments of old paint and downfallen plaster all over the floor, and much of the light-blocking stuff they used on the glass windows had also peeled off. In other places, sun on the other side of the building had burnt the glass to translucent iridescence. There were some big old dusty canisters stacked up against one wall, forgotten, no doubt, by the previous owner, or the present one, whoever they were.<
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There were no signs of other habitation, which was unusual in this neighborhood. Squatters and dossers were all over this part of town, looking for a place to spend a night, or five, or ten. This building's quiet was a treasure, a secret that Harry and Mike kept very close to themselves and never spoke of when they were out on the street during the day, going through the trash and cadging the cash they needed for food.
"Money you spend on batteries for that thing," Mike muttered, "you could get food for."
Harry sniffed. His friend was single-minded in pursuit of something to eat: whatever else you could say about Mike, he wasn't starving. But his conversation wasn't the best. Harry, for his own part, might be homeless, but he liked to keep up with what was happening around him. He would not be this poor forever—at least, he tried to keep telling himself so.
At the same time, it was hard to predict how he was ever going to climb out of this hole he had fallen into two years ago. Job cuts at Bering Aerospace out on the Island left him an aircraft mechanic out on the street, unable to get a job even at McDonald's, because they said he was too old, and overqualified.
At least he had no family to support, never having married. So, when Harry's savings ran out, and he lost his apartment, there was no one else to feel grief or shame for. He had enough of that for himself. He kept what pride he could. He availed himself of a bath at least once a week at the Salvation Army; he only resorted to the various charities which fed homeless people when he absolutely had no choice. Most of all, he did his best not to despair. He kept himself as well fed as he could, and not on junk food, either. When he had the money, he bought fresh fruit and vegetables to eat. Whereas others might paw through garbage cans strictly for half-finished Big Macs, Harry as often as not would be distracted from his growling stomach by something in print that looked interesting, a foreign newspaper or a magazine. And there were, as Mike complained, nights when Harry went without anything to eat so that he could afford batteries for the transistor. That little radio had been with him a long, long time, a gift from his father many years ago, one of the first truly transistorized radios. It was on its last legs, but Harry refused to throw it away before it gave up the ghost on its own. It was, in a way, his last tie with his old life, and it kept him in touch with the rest of the world as well.
