Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “Rod, you see that?” came the voice from down the alley. The sound of running footsteps followed it almost immediately.

  Yeesh, Spider-Man thought, and shot a webline to expedite his departure and chase down Venom.

  “There’s another one!” the cry went up. “Get him!”

  In the alley, Spider-Man looked and saw cops coming at him from both left and right. He shot a line of web up and out, and went up it just as fast as he could, shooting another line across to the CCRC building and then swinging out past it, around a corner and away, just as fast as he could. As he went, he scanned desperately for any sign of Venom, but there was none to see. Of course, Spider-Man thought, he’s immune to my spider-sense—even when it is working—and he can make himself look like anyone. I could be staring right at him and not even know it.

  Reluctantly, he started making his way home. The lights were on in the apartment when he got there. He found MJ just dropping her purse on the front table, and bending over the answering machine to get the messages. She looked up with delight at him as he swung in one of the windows which she had just thrown open. “Hey, tiger,” she said, “how was your day?”

  He pulled off his mask and shook his head, went to her and hugged her. “Not like yours, I bet.”

  “I bet,” she said, stroking his hair. “Listen—get changed and get something to eat inside you. We’ve got to talk.”

  He was tired enough at the moment not to argue with her. He changed, and made a sandwich, and ate it—and made another, and ate it. Then they sat down and she told him about her day.

  When she was finished, Peter was still blinking from the news that radiation sickness was being reported in the city. While trying to put this together with other facts, he told her about his day, in some detail. MJ’s eyes widened considerably when he told her about his conversation with Captain LoBuono, and they widened more yet when he told her about the hole in the sub’s wall. Afterwards, his tale of meeting Venom in the warehouse seemed almost anticlimactic.

  “Wow,” MJ breathed when he had finished. She looked at him, shaking her head. “There’s our riddle for today, then. What goes through walls, and likes radioactive stuff, and isn’t Venom… and is loose in New York? And comes from another planet.”

  “It’s the first stuff that’s our problem,” Peter said, leaning back on the couch. “In this town, who cares if you’re local? But now we have to figure out what to do next.”

  SIX

  THEY stayed up late that night talking. There was a lot to be gone over; a lot more news than a few minutes’ worth of conversation could hope to deal with. And additionally, just because of business, they hadn’t had a lot of time to see each other over the past few days. So there was a prolonged period of hugging, snuggling, smooching, and general touchy-feely before they got back on the subject again.

  “Slow down with the sandwiches, tiger,” MJ muttered, amused, “save some for me.” She headed into the kitchen, Peter close behind her. His stomach growled. “You’ve been eating!” she said. “I can’t believe you can still be hungry!”

  “You haven’t had the day I’ve had,” Peter said again and smiled slightly.

  “Oh, haven’t I? I may not have been swinging all over the city, but boy, do I feel grateful for food right now. And a place to sleep.” She cocked an eye at him as she started rummaging in the refrigerator. “Which is something you should start thinking about fairly soon. Look at the bags under your eyes!”

  “Bags or no bags, I couldn’t sleep right now if you hit me with a hammer. I’ve got too much on my mind.”

  “That’s the problem with you,” said MJ. “You wouldn’t know what to do if you didn’t have something on your mind. Just imagine it for a moment.” She shut the refrigerator door and looked at him challengingly. “Imagine a twenty-four-hour period when everything’s working. When the rent’s paid, and the phone bill’s paid, the electricity’s paid, and you’ve got a credit balance in your checking account, and no checks have bounced, and the credit card company is happy—”

  Peter opened his mouth.

  “Hush,” she said, “I’m on a roll.” He shut it again. “Where was I…? Oh yes. And there are no super villains tearing the joint up, and no crime—”

  “Are you sure this is Earth you’re talking about?” said Peter, raising his eyebrows at her. “Gimme that mayonnaise.”

  “Nothing for you until I’m finished,” she said, standing with her back to the refrigerator door, blocking his way. “Think about it. Just—” She put out one hand and pushed him back, then waved a finger under his nose. “Go on, try it. Stand still for a moment and imagine it. One whole day, just one, when everything’s all right.”

  He stood still, and tried, and found it a bit of a strain. “All right,” he said. “So?”

  “Well, don’t just imagine the events. Imagine how you’d feel.”

  Peter looked at her and shook his head. “I have to confess,” he said, “that I don’t have a clue. I don’t believe that it’s ever going to happen.”

  MJ sighed and moved away from the refrigerator. “You’ll never get there,” she said, “because you can’t—or won’t—see all of that as something worth imagining. My money says that if it ever actually got that quiet, you’d go nuts. I’d give it about an hour, and then you’d go out into the street and shanghai the first super villain you saw and beg him to start a fight with you.”

  “I’d do no such thing,” Peter said. “I’d sleep. For about a week, and not get up. I presume this wonderful world we’re imagining means I don’t have to go into work?”

  MJ shook her head. “Oh, no. I know you better than that. Work? If you didn’t have to do it, if money didn’t drive you to it, you’d dance into it. You’d be all over this town, taking pictures of everything that moved—and everything that didn’t. The film bill alone—”

  “A-ha!” Peter said triumphantly. “Something to worry about. Now give me the mayonnnaise.”

  “Here,” MJ said in a lordly manner, stepping away from the fridge and getting a loaf of bread. “Take your mayonnaise.” She handed him the jar, which hadn’t been in the refrigerator after all. “Listen to me, tiger. You’re missing my point. I really think sometimes that the way you keep yourself busy, the way there’s always something or somebody to run after, always something important to do, is just that. A way to keep yourself busy so you don’t have to stop and think about things.”

  “Like what?” Peter laughed. “Is that bologna still in there?”

  “Forget the bologna… it looks like a science experiment.”

  “Let me see.”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” said MJ. “Certainly not just before you eat.”

  “All right then. What is else is there?”

  “No more salami. We’ve finished that. Some sliced chicken?”

  “Okay.” He rooted around for it, noted the bologna in passing, rolled his eyes, and shut the fridge again. Then he went over to the counter and started constructing his sandwich. MJ got out a cup, filled it with water, and put it in the microwave to boil. She spent a silent moment rummaging in the cupboard and then said, “I’m thinking about the creature on the sub.”

  Peter nodded, spreading mayo on the bread. “So am I.”

  “They wouldn’t tell you where they found it?”

  “Nope. The captain said it wasn’t dangerous.” Peter laughed. “Well, not in so many words. He implied it, or at least let it be implied. I don’t know about you, but I would normally call something that could go straight through the hull of a nuclear submarine close enough to ‘dangerous’ to make no difference. I think they’re worried. And if it was in that warehouse, and if it killed that homeless guy, then it’s already meeting my usual definition.”

  MJ paced in front of the microwave. “He did say that the thing wasn’t radioactive.”

  “So he said.”

  “Then how did it make that hole in the hull? And in the wall of the warehouse, and in the f
loor there.”

  Peter had been chasing around those questions as well. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Radiation alone can crumble concrete like that after a few years.”

  “But how can this—whatever it is—do that without being radioactive?”

  Peter shook his head. “I’m thinking that Captain LoBuono’s higher-ups were economical with the truth when they briefed him on what he was carrying. It may not be radioactive all the time, just under certain circumstances—and I can’t even begin to guess what those might be.” Peter’s voice trailed off as he tried to put the jumble of theories into a coherent form. “Maybe it’s immune to radiation, the way snakes are supposed to be immune to their own venom.”

  MJ raised her eyebrows. “Not my favorite word just at the moment,” she said. “He is here, then?”

  “Oh, he’s here, all right. Though he didn’t seem particularly interested in me.”

  MJ sniffed. “I suppose we should be grateful for small favors.” The microwave went off. MJ got her cup, put it on the counter and started hunting through one of the cupboards for a teabag. “What gets me,” she said, dunking the teabag up and down and watching the way the hot water darkened, “is this thing looking like Venom. If it really is the same thing that got out of the sub.”

  Peter made a wry face as he took a bite of his sandwich. The face had nothing to do with the way it tasted. “It gets Venom, too, from the sound of it. But I suppose it’s not entirely unlikely. From what the others tell me, there’s an awful lot of bipedal, more-or-less humanoid life in this arm of the galaxy.”

  The others was his blanket term for the various super heroes, super-powerful beings, and all the other oddities in and out of costumes that he ran into during the course of his work as Spider-Man. One theory was that one species, many, many millions of years ago, seeded this part of the galaxy with similar genetic material. All the carbon-based planets, anyway. Some others, among them Reed Richards, said that there was no need to postulate a species ex machina—that for carbon-based life, the bipedal pattern was merely logical and tended to recur. Whatever the reason, the approximately upright bipedal form with bilateral symmetry was common enough that he had grown used to seeing it in the most unlikely places. And maybe he was growing used to seeing what he expected to see.

  “My problem is, I need to know what this thing wants. And what to do about it.”

  “If it’s the same thing that came out of the sub,” MJ said, “then what it wants seems to be radiation. But why would something that wasn’t radioactive itself be attracted to a radioactive source?”

  “I’m not sure,” Peter said. He took another bite from his sandwich. “I keep thinking of the train worker who said the first thing it tried to do was gnaw the canister open. Then there was the homeless guy from the warehouse, who claimed he saw it licking the stuff up off the floor.” He caught an escaping dribble of mayonnaise with his finger and popped it in his mouth, then looked at his finger as if it held the secrets to the universe. “Biting and licking—like I’m doing with this sandwich! Maybe it wants this radioactive material to eat.” He looked at the chicken sandwich, still dripping mayo from the two big semicircular bites he had taken out of it, and felt his appetite suddenly disappear. He put the remnants down and wiped his fingers on a paper towel, then folded his arms and leaned back in the chair so that its front legs left the floor. “It’s an interesting question,” he said. “What kind of creature eats radioactive material, but doesn’t hold any detectable trace of radiation in its body?” He thought a moment. “ If it doesn’t. Captain LoBuono said that it had to be kept sealed away with radiation because of its habits.” He looked sideways at MJ.

  MJ sat down and started dunking the teabag in her cup again. “I keep thinking of gremlins. Or tribbles. What if feeding enables it to breed?”

  Peter shuddered. “Don’t even suggest it. If that thing reproduces, we’ve got real trouble on our hands. Can you imagine a bunch of those things running around, eating everything radioactive in sight? And the most obvious place for them to start would be the hospitals, looking for X-ray isotopes.”

  MJ dropped her teabag onto a nearby saucer. “You’re so good at imagining the nasty things,” she said, “and no good at all at imagining the good ones! There’s a definite problem there.”

  “We’ll deal with that later,” Peter said. “But its metabolism… Everything has to get energy from somewhere. We tend to think of living things getting energy from food, or from sunlight if they’re plants. But what if you had a life form that started out one way and was forced to adapt? To change from what we think of as normal sources of nutrition,” he eyed the sandwich again, “and resort to a direct transfer of raw energy.”

  He stood up, paced around the table, then sat down again. “I’m not even an ordinary biologist, never mind a xenobiologist. This stuff isn’t my strong suit, and it’s giving me a headache. But radioactivity I know a little about. If there was a life-form that has the physical structure of a living nuclear reactor—” He shuddered.

  MJ looked at him sympathetically. “Then maybe you need to ask for advice from somebody who does know about that kind of thing. Try Reed Richards. He’s always been able to give you some sort of answer before. Why not now?”

  “Because right now I don’t even know if he’s in town. And there’s so much other stuff to do. I’ve got to do some more checking into these CCRC people, and then there’s Venom, and there’s Hobgoblin—”

  “It occurs to me,” MJ said, “that if Venom runs into this whatever-it-is that looks like him, there’s going to be an almighty ruckus.”

  Peter nodded grimly. “Yeah. Probably right in the middle of the city, as usual. And in broad daylight. Venom doesn’t wait for anything if he thinks the moment’s right. Patience isn’t something he’s good at. And then I have to go after him. I can’t just stand by and watch him waltz through and not do something about it.” His voice trailed off and he rubbed at his shoulder, still sore from where he had gone crashing into the wall earlier on.

  MJ saw the gesture. She walked around behind him and started rubbing his shoulders. “Do you know,” she said conversationally, “how many tubes of Ben-Gay we’ve gone through since we got married?” Peter looked at her, completely confused. “Eighty-six,” she said. “Deep Heat, Mentholatum, you name it. Every time I go to the grocery store, I have to buy more. The guy in the Gristede’s asks me if I put it in my tea or something.”

  Peter’s only reply was a groan of ecstasy as his wife rubbed the kinks out of his shoulders. He poked at the sandwich, decided not to waste it, and demolished it in about three or four bites.

  MJ ceased the shoulder rub and said, “Your spider-sense still isn’t back, I take it.”

  “Nope. It’s possible I just got a really heavy dose of whatever Hobby was using last time.”

  MJ looked at him sadly. “You think that it’s gone for good,” she said. “At least, that’s what’s worrying you.” He looked at her and she smiled a little, one-sided. “Do you seriously think you can hide that kind of thing from me at this point? I can recognize your ‘brave face’ at fifty paces. Wait a little longer and just watch your step. That sense is so much a part of your powers that when everything else is still working fine, I can’t imagine it’s going to be gone for long.”

  Peter smiled back at her. “It doesn’t necessarily follow,” he said, “but for the moment, I like your explanation better than any of the ones that I’ve got. And as for Hobby, he will strike again. If he doesn’t do it tonight, it’ll be tomorrow. And I can’t do anything about tonight, because if I don’t sleep, I’m going to fall over.”

  “You got that right,” MJ said. “You are not leaving this house, no matter what happens between now and 8 A.M.” Her eyes glinted. “I have plans for you.”

  “Oh, boy!” Peter said, and meant it, even though he was still somewhat distracted. “Anyway, as for Hobby. I really doubt that he’s going to get any more stuff from any more warehouses.
Anybody who’s running an illegal trade in radioactives in this town will have noticed what’s been happening, and they’ll have slapped extra security on whatever they’ve got. So I think we can rule out CCRC or anyone else like them. Which leaves the legal sources.” He frowned slightly. “They’ll be raising their security levels too, but increased security hasn’t stopped Hobby in the past. And I doubt it’ll stop him tomorrow. Or the day after. So I’m going to have to do some patrolling myself.”

  “Do you have a good guess as to where he’s going to be?” MJ said.

  Peter nodded. “The only big legal nuclear research facility in New York right now is at ESU. There’s enough material of the kind Hobby will want on campus for him to try making a grab. There’s always somebody on the inside who’ll talk about where things are for money, or fear… Hobby has a gift for finding people like that. If he doesn’t know already where something is, he’s going to find out soon.”

  “And what kind of luck are you going to have at finding out where things are?” MJ said.

  He yawned, and stretched until his joints went click, then grinned at MJ. “Oh, I’ll do all right. Tomorrow I’ll stop by the lab, chat with some people, pick up on the gossip, hear what’s going on.”

  “And do a little judicious inveigling of information?” MJ said.

  “Oh yeah. I’m sure I can find out what I need to know. Because Hobby will turn up. I’m sure he will.”

  MJ was sipping her tea again, and looking thoughtful. “What about Venom?” she said.

  “One thing at a time, please! I don’t think it’s a headache at all. I think my brain hurts.”

  “That’s it,” MJ said, pushing the teacup to one side. “A nice hot tub for you, and your sore head, and your sore muscles. And I’m getting in with you.”

  “Ooh!” Peter said, grinning at her. “Lucky me!” He got up, wincing at the bone-deep aches he had been trying to ignore, and followed her down the hall.

  * * *

  NEXT morning, after checking the papers and the news to make sure that nothing untoward had happened during the night, Peter betook himself to the groves of academe.