Spider-Man: The Venom Factor

by Diane Duane

  "Came off it?" Ben said. "Came completely off?"

  "No, just stretched out, you know?"

  "You mean it put tentacles out?"

  "Like an octopus, or something like—that's right. They sort of waved all around it, like that, as if it was smelling with them. Like a jellyfish, an octopus, yeah. Do octopuses smell with those?"

  "I couldn't help you there," Ben said. "Then what?"

  "Well, then," said the sandy-haired man, "another train came up out of the tunnel."

  "And it smelled at it," said the small dark man, stretching out his arms and wiggling his fingers at Ben in what Peter assumed was an octopus or tentacle imitation. "And it jumped at it—"

  "And it knocked the train over," they all three said, more or less simultaneously.

  Ben blinked. "The train. It knocked it over?"

  "Come on," said the foreman, and he led Ben and Peter out the back door of the building. Behind it was a rust-stained concrete platform, littered with stacks of railroad ties, coils of wire and cable, and some small stacks of track rails further down. From one end of it, to their left, tracks ran down to the railbed. Six tracks ran in parallel here, with two sets of siding on each side.

  Between the number one and number two tracks, slewed over on its side, lay the train. Its engine, one of the big Penn Central diesels, had been knocked furthest off the track and now lay diagonally across it, on its right side. The other cars of the train, four of them, had derailed. It looked, Peter thought, as if some giant child had lost patience with his Lionel train set and had given it a good kick between the second and third cars. He started taking pictures as fast as he could, walking down the length of the train, while the railroad workers stopped near the engine with Ben.

  "At first we thought it was gonna jump," said the foreman. "But it didn't. It held still, and it crouched down, kinda, and it put out a lot of those arms, tentacles, whatever, and it grabbed the engine—"

  "About how fast was the engine going?" Ben said.

  The foreman shook his head. "No great shakes. This is restricted-speed track. You can't really open up until you get across the river. About ten miles an hour, maybe."

  "Even so. . . ." Ben said. "So a train weighing—how many tons?"

  "These diesels are rated for twelve," said the foreman. "It just sort of grabbed the front of the engine—"

  "It sort of shied back, shied away a little, when it did that," said the sandy-haired man. "The bell, you know the bell on the diesel goes constantly under fifteen miles an hour—it was going right in front of the guy's face. I don't think it liked that."

  Peter's eyebrows went up at that as he continued down the length of the train, snapping images of the huge exposed undercarriages, the wheels in the air. He turned to get another shot of the gesturing men, small beside the huge overturned engine.

  "I don't know about that," said the foreman. "I didn't see that. But then it grabbed the engine, and it just hunkered down and—" he shrugged "—wrestled it off the track. Threw it down."

  "The engineer's all right?" Ben said.

  "Yeah, he climbed out the window when it went over on the other side."

  "So it grabbed a twelve-ton train," Ben said slowly, "and pulled it off the track."

  "Right," said the small sandy-haired man. "So it stood there a moment, and it smelled around a little more— and then it went straight back to the third car—"

  "Ripped the door right off it," said the foreman. "Like cardboard. And then it climbed in, and came out with a little drum of something. An oil drum, I thought at first."

  "But not oil," Ben said.

  "Nope," said the little sandy-haired man. "It had the 'radioactive' sign on it."

  "I pulled the shipping manifest," said the foreman. "Here it is." He reached inside his bright orange work vest, came out with some paperwork.

  "Now what's this—" Ben said, pointing down the list. "Uranium hexafluoride—"

  Peter came back from down the length of the train and looked over Ben's shoulder at the manifest. "It doesn't go in toothpaste, that's for sure," he said. "It's a by-product from the uranium-enrichment process." He looked up at the foreman. "What did it do with the canister then?"

  "It tried to bite it, first," said the foreman, sounding understandably puzzled. "With those teeth, I thought we were going to have a spill right here on the tracks. But it looked like it was having trouble. By then, pretty serious noise had started up—the yard sirens and all—and the warning loudspeakers in the tunnel, all that stuff. It looked around, like it didn't like the noise, and it grabbed the canister in some more of those tentacles and ran off."

  "Which way?" Ben said.

  The foreman pointed down into the tunnels, into the darkness. "Thataway."

  "I take it no one followed it," Ben murmured.

  The rail workers looked at him, and all shook their heads. "Hey," one of them said, "we've all got families. I know theft from the rail network is a felony, but—no paycheck's worth that much."

  The small sandy-haired man looked from Ben to Peter, and back to Ben again. "It was him, wasn't it?" he said. "That Venom guy."

  Ben looked at his little pocket recorder, switched it off. "Boys," he said, "I'd be lying if I said it didn't sound like it." The three exchanged nervous glances. "But I want to be sure about this. You didn't see any markings on it? Any white in that black?"

  The men shook their heads. "Just the eyes," one said.

  "And the teeth!" another said, shivering.

  They all stood there in silence for a few. "Well, gentlemen," Ben said, "is there anything else you need to tell me?"

  They all shook their heads. "Don't want to see him again," one of them said, "and that's a fact."

  "I hope you don't," Ben said. He turned to Peter. "Pete, you got enough pictures?"

  "More than enough." He handed Ben the film he'd already shot and unloaded: his camera was whining softly to itself as it rewound the second roll. "Will you take this stuff back with you?" he said. "I've got an appointment tonight that I can't blow off."

  "No problem," Ben said. "I see you've had a long day, what with one thing and another. Your photos got page one and two today, Kate tells me." He grinned. "Well," he said to the rail workers, "thanks for your help, gentlemen. If I could get your names and phone numbers for questions later on if we need to ask them?"

  They spent a few minutes sorting that out. Then Ben and Peter made their way back up through the guard shack and up onto the street again, where they waited to hail a cab.

  "This should make interesting reading in the morning," Ben said, tucking his recorder away.

  "What's the headline going to be, you think?" Peter said.

  " 'VENOM,' " Ben said, "with a big question mark after it."

  "You're still not convinced," Peter said.

  Ben shook his head. "I am not. There were a lot of the right signs there, but not all."

  "The costume?" Peter said.

  Ben nodded. "Partly that. But also—" He shrugged, looking down the street for any sign of the light at the top of a cab. "Venom has always been a very verbal sort. Not the kind to do something and then just leave without saying anything, let alone bragging a little. Every report I've heard has made him out to be a talker. I just don't know. . . ."

  Peter nodded. It was good to hear his own thoughts being substantiated this way. Ben was a sharp thinker. Peter had learned from Daredevil, one of the local costumed crimefighters, that Ben had worked out for himself Daredevil's secret identity from fairly minimal information, when others had had much more and had never made the connection. "Well," Ben said, "J. Jonah may not like it, but I'm not going to construct a story that's not there. I'll report the news as it was reported to me, and let it do the work itself."

  Peter nodded. "When you get back in," he said, "if you want to call Alicia down in Comp, she'll take care of the developing—"

  Ben snorted. "I know what she'll do—she'll send your film around the corner to the one-hour p
lace! You let me take care of it—I'll see that they're properly developed." He smiled slightly at Peter as a cab pulled up in front of them. "Got a hot date with MJ tonight?"

  "That, and other things," Peter said. "Thanks, Ben! I appreciate it."

  "Have a good evening, youngster," Ben said. He climbed into the cab and was gone.

  Peter watched him go, and then made for the shadows, for somewhere private, where he could change into something more comfortable.

  Before too long, he was web-slinging along through the dark city streets, making his way from building to building and thinking hard.

  Mostly he was turning over a thought which had occurred to him belatedly, after recovering from the craziness last night. He really did have to find out what that radioactive stuff in the warehouses had been. Taken together, those two thefts raised a nasty question: what was Consolidated Chemical Research Corporation doing keeping radioactive material on Manhattan Island, in such insecure circumstances, in two different places? Environmental groups, when they heard, would go ballistic. So would the Environmental Protection Agency, for that matter. Normally, he thought, so would the city. There should be no storage facilities for such stuff within the city boundaries. The material stolen from the train, on the other hand, had been completely aboveboard, destined for the legal storage in one of the deep disused salt mines down south, where nuclear waste was now kept under controlled conditions and federal supervision.

  He was determined to take a closer look at CCRC, from the inside if possible. If a little discreet poking around turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, that was fine. But this whole thing smelled pretty fishy to him.

  He crossed the city carefully. His spider-sense showed no sign of coming back yet, which made him twitchy. He tried, as he went, to keep watch in all directions. If there was any time for Hobgoblin to hit him and take him unawares, this was it. Unless Hobby is off busy somewhere this evening, he thought, playing with his newfound toy.

  He shook his head. If Hobby was holed up building a bomb. . . . Something else to look into tomorrow at the paper, he thought. Check the database again and see if there have been any other recorded thefts or losses of nuclear material elsewhere in the country. Hobgoblin wouldn't necessarily have to be there himself to steal the stuff. He's not above having it stolen for him. And then— He frowned under his mask. He would have to sit down and work out exactly what critical mass was when you were working with uranium isotopes. It was not a piece of math he could do in his head, unfortunately. The physics of military fissionables was something he paid little attention to, on general principles. Some of his classmates spent happy afternoons working out engineering solutions and materials criteria for battlefield nukes. But Peter was not one who found such work enjoyable. I'll take care of it when I get home, he thought.

  Right now, though, the warehouse building from which the radioactive material had been stolen loomed ahead of him, and next to it, the office building which housed CCRC's New York City offices. CCRC's headquarters looked a little seedy, but in good enough repair. The police had the street in front of it and the warehouse cordoned off. Yellow "police line" tape rustled slightly in a slight warm breeze coming off the river, and the cops standing out on the street fanned themselves with their. This late, there was little traffic. They looked bored.

  All their attention was toward street, so it was no particular problem for Spidey to swing up from behind the building, let go of his last webline, land against the upper part of the outside wall, and cling there. He held still for a moment, waiting to see if anything had been dislodged by his impact, waiting to see if the police had noticed. They hadn't. Faintly he heard a voice come floating up: "So a guy is crossing the street, and he sees this duck—"

  He smiled inside the mask. A bored cop makes a happy Spider-Man, he thought, and wall-crawled down the building, testing window after window as he went. Only the lower ones had protective grilles over them. The upper ones were all locked, except for one. Always some careless person, he thought, who doesn't think that Spider-Man might visit their building tonight. He pushed the window open—it was an old-fashioned sash window—and swung in through it.

  His feet came down on thick carpeting. He looked around and saw a heavy walnut desk, with matching office furniture all around. Very nice, he thought. That explains the window, too. Some executive who doesn't want his view spoiled by bars—President's office? Vice-president's? Hmm. President's, or CEO's, probably; it was a corner office. He looked the place over for signs of alarm systems, saw none. Very lax—especially "when you're involved in this industry.

  Silently, Spider-Man stepped up to the door of the office, touched it. No contact alarms, either. No wiring on the door betraying a "reed switch" which would be broken when the door opened. He turned the knob: the door opened, and he found himself looking into an outer office, a secretary's office from the looks of it—nearly two thirds of the size of the office he had just come from, lined with file cabinets all in walnut, more of that thick carpeting on the floor, a big wall unit with a television, sofas, glass tables—a somewhat executive-level waiting room, it seemed, for people seeing the boss. Now let's see—

  He went over to the file cabinets. These, at least, were locked, but over time he had become fairly expert at lock-picking. Shortly he had the master lock on the first cabinet open, and was rummaging through the drawers, hunting for anything that seemed interesting.

  Several drawers down, he came across what, to judge from the thickness of it, must be the incorporation info for the company itself. He pulled the file out and riffled through it thoughtfully. CCRC turned out to be fairly young. The names of its members of the board could have been from anywhere in New York, but he was interested to note that the majority shareholder was not an American citizen: he was Ukrainian.

  He worked backwards to the date the company was formed. The Soviet Union would have just fallen—

  After turning up nothing else of great interest, he put the file back where he had found it. But ideas were stirring in his mind, nonetheless. One of the things they've been having trouble with in that part of the world, he thought, is radioactive material being smuggled out and sold cheap. What was that one report I heard?—how two guys took a near-critical mass of U-235 out of Russia in the trunks of two cars, and wound up abandoning them on the Autobahn in Germany because they misjudged the distance to Berlin, and ran out of gas? He shook his head. Not everyone dealing in radioac-tives from behind the former Iron Curtain was that stupid.

  He started going slowly and with care through drawer after drawer. There were a lot of file envelopes with English labels, which, when he opened them, he found contained pages and pages of stuff typed in Cyrillic. He tsked at himself. MJ had been teasing him for some time now about getting so singleminded about the sciences that he was letting the humanities pass him by, the languages especially. Russian was one of the languages she suggested he take—"Because it's one of the hardest," she had said, looking at him as if the sense of that reason should be obvious. Now he wondered whether he should have taken her advice. But Cyrillic or not, digits were the same. Some of the files he looked at, as he went through the drawers, were plainly shipping manifests of some kind: lists of figures, amounts in rubles and equivalent amounts in dollars—that much he could make out plainly. A lot of currency transactions, in fact, and a lot of changeovers from rubles to deutschemarks, and here and there a document turned up in what looked like German.

  He was only marginally better at reading German than he was at Russian, but at least here the alphabets were mostly the same. More amounts in deutschemarks appeared, along with references to weights and masses, always in tens or hundreds of kilograms. And here and there, the German word for "nuclear," which he had come to recognize during his doctorate work, having seen it often enough in the titles of dissertations and articles in journals. The names of the transuranic elements were also just about the same in German as in English, and he came across repeated references to U-
235, U-238, and the German word for "enriched" U-235—

  Each time it was mentioned, somewhere nearby was a column of figures which made it plain that money was changing hands. But nowhere in all those documents did he see anything like a customs stamp or a bill of sale authorized by any government—and governments had to authorize such sales, as far as he knew.

  This place, he thought, is a front, almost certainly, for smuggling the stuff around. The conditions under which they've been keeping it downstairs seem to confirm it. Those canisters had the barest minimum of labeling. They were being kept clandestinely—

  He shut the files, tidied up after himself as best he could, and looked thoughtfully at the computer on the secretary's desk. Not networked: a stand-alone. Might have some interesting files in it. He moved toward the desk.

  From downstairs, in the body of the building, he heard a single, hollow booming sound. A door shutting? He froze, listening hard.

  The sound repeated itself, just once. Boom.

  I think I'm just going to look into that. First of all, though, I want a look at that wall next door.

  He stepped to the outer office door, silently let himself out, looked up and down the hall. Nobody.

  He started looking for a door exiting to a stairwell. At the end of the corridor, he found one, opened it, slipped out, anchored a webline to one of the stair railings, and let himself down, slowly and silently, as far as the well reached: about six stories. When he let go, he found himself looking at a door with a large letter L on it. Loading? he thought, holding still, listening. Somewhere in the building, that soft, low boom sounded again, much closer—

  This level? he thought. Well, let's have a look.

  Softly he pulled the door open and peered through it. Nothing: a dark first-floor loading area, as he had expected, pillars supporting the ceiling, plain bare concrete floor—and, off to one side, a hole in the wall, with slumped, crumbling-looking edges. Much nearer to him, though, was a big hole in the floor. Its edges had the same look as those of the hole in the wall, and of the picture he'd seen on TV of the warehouse's wall. That hole would be just across the alley from this one, he thought, glancing up.