by Diane Duane
" 'It,' " Spider-Man said.
Captain LoBuono nodded, folded his hands. "You have been to some unusual places," he said, "and you have a reputation for dealing with—unusual people—so I feel safe about imparting this information to you. There are no guarantees that our, uh, passenger, stayed on this side of the river. It may turn up in your bailiwick, as it were."
"What actually is your passenger? Or was."
The Captain's face wore a curious expression. "I can't say."
A moment's silence. "Meaning 'shouldn't'?" Spider-Man said.
The Captain nodded. "This much seems plain: it is of extraterrestrial origin."
"It was in that chamber—and broke out—"
"Through the hull of my boat," Captain LoBuono said, for the first time looking annoyed. "Though perhaps I should be grateful."
"Did anyone see it?"
"No. Not from the beginning of the cruise, and not when it left us."
Spider-Man thought about this. "Was it radioactive?"
"Not in itself, no. But its habits require that it stay in a chamber containing radiation."
"And now it's loose," Spider-Man said, "in a city with enough radioactive sources to feed on."
The Captain nodded. "I would say so."
Spider-Man nodded. "Captain," he said, "precisely what am I supposed to do about it?"
Captain LoBuono was silent for a moment. "Watch out for it," he said.
"Just that?"
"Just that. I doubt I have the right to ask much more."
Spider-Man restrained a sigh. "Okay."
"Very well." The Captain stood up. "You can find your way out?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good day to you, then. And, Spider-Man—thank you again."
Spidey nodded, caught between feeling abashed and profoundly confused. He made his way out of the sub to the applause and cheers of the men who saw him go. But it was not until he was away from there again, and had recovered his camera and was web-borne on his way back to Manhattan, that he was able to deal in much detail with the confusion. Plainly the Captain had given him classified information—though not much. A thing that no one had seen, something that could go through the hull of a sub—something fond of radiation, but not radioactive itself—was loose in the City.
He thought suddenly of the warehouse wall he had seen on TV, crumbled or melted, and of the homeless man's story of something lapping at the radioactive waste. Drinking it.
Spider-Man headed home in a hurry.
It took Peter several hours to process that evening's film. The photos weren't quite as good as the last batch had been: too much swinging and jumping around, he thought. From the look of things, the camera almost suffered some sort of electronic nervous breakdown as it tried to follow their wild gyrations through the air.
It had, Peter noticed happily, taken an excellent shot of Hobby zooming out of the hatch of the sub with his arms full of equipment, knocking Spider-Man on his butt in the process. Peter felt certain Jonah would feature that shot prominently on the front page, if only to show his old nemesis getting taken down a notch.
He was still fuming over the way he had been unable to stop Hobgoblin from getting into the sub. The problem, he thought, hanging up a finished print and eyeing it critically—the composition on some of these was nowhere near as good as it had been on the last batch—the problem is that I've been depending too much on my spider-sense and not enough on my brains.
It was useful to have a sixth sense watching his back while he was fully occupied with matters in front, that warned him of dangers and stresses ahead of time. The spider-sense had saved him many times—from unpleasant surprises, from severe or fatal injuries, from the elaborate forms of sudden death his opponents were capable of handing out. But suppose Hobby had managed an improvement in the gas that caused this loss of his special sense. The thought of having to do without it permanently gave Peter the creeps. Suppose the loss was irrevocable?
Suppose that he was going to have to go through the rest of his career this way . . . ?
He sighed. Right now there was nothing else to do but go about his work as usual, and do it the best he could, and keep himself as far out of harm's way as that work allowed. He had too much going on to be incapacitated due to a sense that wasn't there.
While he worked, he listened eagerly for the sound of the phone going off. It was unusual for MJ to be out so late without checking in.
Iwonder if she got that job, he thought. Desperately, he hoped the answer was yes. But there was no use getting your hopes up about these things. Too often MJ had stumbled onto what had seemed to both of them a sure thing only to come home afterwards very depressed when it didn't pan out. They had both learned from bitter experience not to raise one another's hopes unnecessarily, for there was never any way to tell when luck was going to strike and too many ways to be mistaken about it.
All the same, I wish she'd get home. I miss her.
There was that other thought in the back of Peter's mind as well. Venom. Often enough in the past, Venom had put pressure on MJ in order to flush Spider-Man out into the open, where the two of them could tangle. On days like this when she was late and Venom was known to be in the area, he could never quite get rid of the fear that somewhere, in some dark alley or quiet spot where no one would hear her yell for help, that dark shape was looming over her, smiling with all those teeth.
He wouldn't hurt her, Peter thought. She is an innocent. Isn't she?
That was the question he couldn't answer. As far as Spider-Man was concerned, it was a good question whether Venom considered anyone associated with him to be truly innocent. All the same, Peter's resolve was clear.
If he touches her. . .
The difficulty with Venom was that the odds were stacked against him. They had fought some desperate battles in the past, and though on some occasions a flash of genius-under-pressure—or just plain luck—had intervened on Spider-Man's behalf, once or twice those capricious dice had fallen favoring Venom, and the result had almost been fatal for Spidey. All the free-flowing hatred of someone who thought that Spider-Man was responsible for the destruction of his career and his life made Eddie Brock and his symbiotic suit a very dangerous adversary.
He hung up the last print and looked at it closely. It showed an enlarged view of Hobgoblin shooting out of the hatch, and Peter looked carefully at the shiny metal box with what looked like some circuit-boards and exposed contacts sticking out of the back of it, and a couple of lights and switches on the front. Probably just yanked it right out of a console. So much equipment has gone modular these days. Easy to remove for repair or replacement, and just as easy to remove for robbery. But if I was suspicious about him building some sort of bomb, this seems to clinch it. First radioactive material, now a trigger. What the devil is Hobby up to this time . . . ?
He picked up MJ's borrowed hair-dryer and started fanning it over two of the prints to dry them faster. The part of the theft giving Peter the most trouble was the radioactive material itself. Even if you were going to build a bomb, you needed the so-called "weapons-grade" fissionable material that thriller-writers were so fond of. You couldn't just make off with a barrel of nuclear waste, hook a fuse and a trigger to it, and hope that the end result would be boom. A barrel of gunpowder, yes. But not this stuff.
It would have to be refined. The refining was an expensive, slow, and above all, obvious process, as some countries, never mind crooks, had already learned. Refining uranium ore, or even spent low-grade reactor waste—where part of the process had already taken place—into metallic U-235 needed a linked series of massive heavy-metal separation centrifuges. Such equipment took up a great deal of space and consumed an equivalent quantity of power.
You couldn't build such a facility in a populated area without someone noticing, no matter how much you tried to disguise it. The power drain on the local grid whenever the separation system was running—and it would have to run almost constantly—would tell even
the most unimaginative electrical engineer that something out of the ordinary was going on.
Later, Peter thought, when I have some time, I'm going to look into the thefts at the two warehouses in a little more detail. I want to find out exactly what was in those canisters. More to the point, why is someone storing nuclear waste—nuclear material of any kind—in Manhattan? Offhand he could think of about six environmental groups that would blow their collective stacks if they found out about it . . . and were perhaps already doing so. That's for later, he thought. Right now . . .
He checked the six best of his prints to make sure they were dry, put them in his portfolio, put the negatives in as well, and headed for the door. As he went, he threw a last look over his shoulder at the stubbornly silent phone. MJ ... he thought, then shook his head and smiled a bit to himself at his own nervousness. She's a big girl, she can take care of herself.
He headed for the Bugle.
"Your long lens again?" Kate said, looking over his shoulder at the prints as he put them down one after another on her desk. "That one's not too bad." Critically, head on one side, she studied the shot of Hobby coming up out of the sub. "A little underexposed, though."
"They can push it in Comp," Peter said. Kate nodded. Another shadow fell over the desk. Peter turned, and saw J. Jonah Jameson standing there, scowling down at the photos.
"What are these?" he said, picking up the shot of Hobby, the sub, and Spider-Man. "Not again?"
"Why, Jonah," Kate said dryly, "I'd have thought you'd be delighted. We're having a good news day. Look at that; there's your headline. 'Hobgoblin Strikes Again.' "
"Who cares about that creep?" J. Jonah growled. "It's Spider-Man I'm wondering about. What's he doing inside a nuclear sub in the Port of New York? He could have been doing anything in there!"
"Uh, Mr. Jameson," Peter said gently, "it was Hobby who was doing the 'anything.' Seems he grabbed a trigger for a nuclear missile out of there. You can see it in the shot."
"Maybe," JJJ, frowning. "But I'm still sure Spider-Man wasn't there just for the good of his health."
Peter thought of the noxious green cloud of gas that had enveloped him inside the sub and silently agreed.
"There's got to be some connection," J. Jonah said. "Hobgoblin and Venom and Spider-Man all in the same day. Are you trying to tell me they're not involved with each other somehow?"
Peter agreed with that too, but not in the way that JJJ thought.
"Look, Jonah," Kate said, "that doesn't matter at the moment. We've got the best picture in town for the Bugle's front page, and we've got time to run it for the first evening edition. I don't care if those two were getting together for their weekly pinochle game, this picture's going to make us look good tonight! You have any problems with it?"
Jonah glowered at Kate. "Well, not that way, but—"
"Good," she said with satisfied finality. "That wording sound all right to you?"
"Well, it'll do for the moment, but—"
"Good," she said again, even more satisfied, "then we're set." She bent over the shot of Hobgoblin. "Just let me decide how I want to crop this—"
Just then Harry Payne, one of the junior editors on the City Desk, stuck his head around the edge of Kate's door. "Hey, Kate," he said, "something on the scanner you might find interesting."
"Oh? What is it?"
"There's something going on in the rail yards over by 11th Avenue," he said. "I think it's Venom!"
"What?" all three of them said, turning, the photographs forgotten.
"That's what it said on the scanner. 'Unidentified person, big, black, huge teeth, drooling slime.' That sounds like Venom to me . . ."
Kate shook her head and grinned. "This is my lucky day," she said. "Peter, don't you move until I can find—" She put her head out the door, looked around for a moment, then shouted down the hall. "Ben? Ben! Saddle up! You're needed!" She turned back to Peter. "You go with Ben," she said. "Grab a cab. Go!"
"Let me know how it comes out," Jonah muttered, and stalked off down the hall towards his own office.
Kate watched him go, then glanced at Peter. "You know, I wish I could yell 'Stop the presses!' But it's kind of a problem when you haven't started them yet. . . And what are you still here for? Go on!"
Ben Urich was one of the most experienced reporters on the Bugle. Peter was uncertain exactly how long he had been in journalism—it might have been thirty years or longer, but there was no telling by looking at him. Ben's age seemed to have frozen at forty-five, a hard-bitten, cool-eyed forty-five that Peter suspected would hold right where it was until Ben was ninety.
By the time Peter got down to the Bugle's front doors, it was dark out. Ben was already pacing and looking impatient. He had a cab waiting at the curb. "Come on," he said, "time's a-wasting!"
Peter jumped into the cab. Ben followed. "Go!" he told the driver, who took off and went racing through the traffic.
Ben glanced down at Peter's camera, then pushed his thick-framed glasses back up the bridge of his nose looked at Peter. "That all loaded up?"
"Yup."
"Nervous?"
Peter looked at him sharply. "If what we think is down at the rail yards is actually there, I'd say we have reason, wouldn't you?"
Ben raised his eyebrows. "If it's what we were told."
"You don't think so?' said Peter.
Ben leaned back in the seat and stretched. "Kind of hard to tell at a distance. All we've had so far is hearsay, and extremely odd-sounding hearsay at that."
"Odd-sounding how?"
Ben looked at him, causing his glasses to slip down again. "As I understood it, Venom isn't much the type for killing people who don't need it. These days, anyway."
"That's what I'd heard, too," Peter said. "Still, you don't suppose he could have had a change of heart?"
Ben's mouth quirked, and he pushed his glasses back up. "People change their minds all the time," he said. "Their hearts—not so often."
"If you can call Venom 'people.' "
"Oh, I don't know," Ben said. "There is a human being in there somewhere."
"There's a lot of difference," Peter said, "between being a human being, and being a man."
Ben raised his eyebrows, looking skeptical. "Semantic difference, mostly," he said. "Anyway, we'll soon find out. Assuming—" and Ben looked even more skeptical "—that the man, creature, or whatever does us the courtesy of hanging around until we get there."
Ben leaned forward and gave the cab driver instructions. They pulled into the pickup and delivery entrance for the rail yards. Overhead, the rail yard's huge yellow sodium lights cast a harsh glare on everything, making the buildings look unreal, like a movie set. The red-and-white strobe of several police cars added to the effect, making the whole place seem like a kaleidoscope.
"Now, then," Ben said, and launched himself out of the cab.
"Your friend meeting somebody?" the cabbie said to Peter, as they both stared at Ben's hurrying back.
"I hope not," Peter said sincerely. Sighing inwardly, he paid the fare and got a receipt. He'd have to put in for reimbursement the next time he was at the Bugle.
Then he followed Ben into the guard's shack, a long low building full of file cabinets, a couple of ancient formica-and-aluminum tables, and numerous very upset railroad personnel, many of whom were talking to cops. Ben already had his pocket recorder out and was speaking to one of the supervisors who wasn't giving a statement to the police. "It was this tall," the big blond man was saying, indicating a height at least two feet higher than his own head. "And this wide—"
Peter studied the distance in question and wondered if Venom had put on a great deal of weight. Then again, the costume could change shape. . . .
"Where did you see it first?" Ben said.
"Down by the siding," the foreman said, pointing. "At first I thought it was a cat, moving in the shadows down in the mouth of the tunnel. We have a lot of cats down here, they run in and out all the time. But then it came a
little closer, and I got a better look at it—and cats don't get that big. It came sliding out of the tunnel, all black—"
"Black," Ben said. "Did you see any designs, any patterns on it?"
"It had these big long arms—"
"Patterns. Did you see any color on it?" Ben said.
"No, I don't think—that is—" The foreman shook his head. "It moved too fast. That was the trouble. It just came storming out of there all of a sudden, you know? And then there was this train coming down the line at it, and it looked at that, and it roared. It didn't like that—"
"It roared?" Ben said. "It didn't say anything?"
"It just kind of yelled—"
Peter, taking pictures of the man for the "our-witness-tells-us" part of the story, had quite vivid memories of that particular roar. It was usually followed by a statement that Venom intended to have some portion of your anatomy for lunch. "So it roared then," Ben said. "Then what did it do?"
One of the other rail workers, a small sandy-haired man who had just finished giving his own statement to the NYPD, said, "He jumped. He jumped away from the train that was coming at him—it was heading into the tunnel— and yeah, like Ron says, he roared at it. But then he stood still. He kind of hunkered down and just looked—"
"Yeah," said a third man, small and dark. "He just looked around him."
"Could you see his eyes?" Ben said.
The three men shook their heads. "Just these blank spots," one said. "Pale," another said. "All white. But when he was in the shade, they glowed a little, you know? Kinda fluorescent."
Peter concentrated on taking more pictures of the three storytellers, while thinking that that odd, faint glow was something he had seen or seemed to see before in the costume—possibly a function of its being alive. He wasn't sure. "It was smelling," the foreman said. "Sniffing."
"You heard it?" Ben said.
"No, no," the three men said, shaking their heads, waving their hands. "It was just the way it looked like—with its head, it sniffed, you know—" One of them put his head up and mimicked something smelling the air, looking alertly from side to side, seeking. "Yeah, and pieces sort of came off it, and swayed around—"
