by Diane Duane
Spider-Man hared off along 57th Street, high up, swinging from building to building, surprising office workers and window cleaners and the occasional peregrine falcon. As he headed westward, he got another twinge, the slightest buzz, from the spider-sense. Trouble ahead—
The sense was vaguer, more prolonged, and more directional than usual, possibly a side-effect of its slow return. This is the right direction, then, he thought, and didn’t bother stopping when he came to the area south of Columbus Circle. He just kept going west. The sense twinged him again, more sharply, as he continued, and Spider-Man kept heading that way, as much for the pleasure of the returned feeling as anything else.
He paused near the corner of one building, and swung out in a partial arc, like a pendulum, to see in which direction the “buzz” was strongest. Straight west—okay.
He continued that way. The buildings weren’t as tall here—mostly apartment buildings, pretty nice ones, with rents he didn’t even want to think about. At Eleventh Avenue he swung out again, looking all around him—
The spider-sense jolted him, hard. He looked down toward the West Side Highway. At the end of Fifty-Second Street was a horse corral, and near it he saw something black moving, heading for the street. Something two-legged, shining, dark, heading toward a manhole cover.
Not Venom! he thought in triumph—Venom would not have triggered the spider-sense. Instantly he let go of the present line of web and dropped down, cannonballing, his arms wrapped tightly around himself so he would fall faster. A couple of stories above ground, he shot out another webline, caught a streetlight pole, and swung across toward the fleeing figure. He dropped to the ground just in front of it.
It was black. It shone. It looked humanoid, but not quite. The blackness was total, except for the pale, moonlike patches on its head, very much like the eyes on his or Venom’s mask. That blackness was not a suit or clothing of any kind. It was the creature’s skin, gleaming in the late sun like ebony polished to a high gloss, and it was actually very beautiful. It was bipedal and had arms, but there was something tentative about the hands. The fingers were lithe like tentacles, but sharp-looking like claws.
For only a second it crouched there, looking at him. Then it leapt, to tackle him—
Spider-Man jumped sideways, leaping for the nearby streetlight pole. The creature came down hard where he had been, but not as hard as Spider-Man had expected. From its body, tentacles erupted, slapping the ground hard and absorbing the shock as expertly as any judo enthusiast would. It bounced to its feet again, casting around it to see where he had gone, lifting its blank-eyed head with the kind of “sniffing” motion that the railroad workers had described.
Its eyes may not be so good, Spider-Man thought. Could that be one of the reasons it prefers the dark? It doesn’t need to see, so much? Or maybe—if it’s radiation-sensitive, maybe the presence of the normal background radiation from sunlight and so forth, at ground level, bothers it—
It leapt at him again, and this time came at him with tentacles and talons both, aiming right for his middle. Spidey jumped straight up this time, pulling his legs up hurriedly as it shot by underneath him. He shot a webline up onto the nearest building and gained himself some altitude, watching his frustrated adversary hit the ground again, roll, and come up to its feet again, “looking” to see where he had gone.
I’m really not sure it’s not blind to visible light, Spider-Man thought. Or else as far as it’s concerned, there’s so much ambient light, even this late in the day, that whatever it uses for optics are overwhelmed.
His spider-sense stung him hard, so hard that he simply let go of the webline he was holding and dropped. This was just as well, for right past Spider-Man, whizzing through the air, the creature came plunging past him in a superb and unlikely leap from ground level. Whipping tentacles and claws both lanced out at his waist en passant. In midair he twisted aside, cannonballing again to fall faster, then shot out web and caught another light pole. Recovering, he saw the creature slam into the wall of the nearest building, clinging there a moment as if stunned.
Three times was too frequent a hint to miss. It wants the canister, Spider-Man thought, leaping away from the light pole again. It must be really sensitive to the isotopes I’m carrying to be able to pick it out right through lead with all this background radiation.
The creature dropped down from the building, “seeking” him again. The thing’s a living Geiger counter, Spider-Man thought. What on earth are its insides like—or off Earth, rather. He peered down at it thoughtfully from his light-pole. And more to the point, now that I’ve got it, what do I do with it?
Its head turned blindly toward him, and it started for him across the street. Traffic, which until now had been crawling by at the easy pace New Yorkers use while rubbernecking, now screeched to a halt as the shining black creature scuttled across the road. Horns blew, and the creature threw its head up and produced a high, piercing soprano roar, a bizarre sound to come from inside a chest so big. It threw itself at the foremost car, a cab, tearing at it with tentacles that suddenly flew from all parts of its body. Pieces of bodywork came off—fenders first, then the roof of the cab, and the hood—and from inside the cab came the indignant yell of the cabbie and the scream of a passenger.
Uh-oh, Spider-Man thought, and leapt down from his streetlamp perch, shooting web two-handedly. The webbing settled over the creature, wrapping it—or trying to. It reared up from the cab, roaring again, and shredded the web all around it, turning and twisting to try to see where the stuff was coming from. Spidey danced around, keeping the webbing coming, and yelled to the people in the cab, “It’s a write-off, folks, better get out while you can!”
They did, erupting out opposite sides of the cab, front and back. The elegantly dressed lady in the back, seemingly unhurt, vanished down the nearest side street at high speed, without wasting a second. The cabbie, though, stopped nearby and yelled, “What am I going to tell the insurance company?!”
Spidey shook his head as he kept laying webbing over the creature, which was shredding and shedding it as fast as he spun it. “Don’t think they’ll buy ‘act of God’,” he said. “Listen, just get away, this thing’s—”
The “thing” abruptly spun into a whipping vortex of activity, throwing off web faster than Spider-Man could lay it down, and at the same time reached out to the cab again with a whole new batch of tentacles, longer and thicker than any it had produced so far. It wrapped these around the cab, and without any apparent effort at all, simply picked the car up and looked around for something to fling it at.
That blank gaze fixed on Spider-Man. The creature heaved—
Spider-Man needed no hints from his spider-sense this time. He simply leapt the biggest leap he could manage off to one side, grabbing the distraught cab driver as he passed, hitting the ground and bouncing again. Behind the two of them, the cab hit the side of the nearest building with a tremendous crash, shattering into enough pieces to stock an auto parts store. The cab’s gas tank ruptured in the process, spraying gasoline all over the place, and the gas promptly caught fire.
The honking and beeping and shouting from the backed-up traffic further on down the street got louder. The fire spread over the asphalt of the street, though mercifully not very far, and burned enthusiastically. In the midst of all this the creature stood, some of its tentacles clutching its head, others whipping around it, as if the noise and commotion were all simply too much for it. It “looked” at Spider-Man, and some of the tentacles reached out toward him indecisively.
“Uh-oh,” he said, putting the cab driver down. “Mac, you’d better get out of here—I don’t know what my buddy there’s going to do next. There’s a phone down the street. You’d better call 911 before this spreads—”
“No problem,” said the cabbie, and got down the street in a hurry, looking glad to get away. Spider-Man turned his attention back to the alien creature. It was staring all around it, and “smelling” as well. Several time
s, its pale gaze came back to him, but it made no immediate move.
The noise of horns got louder, and the creature looked more distressed, twisting and turning. It really doesn’t like it out here, Spidey thought. Maybe the noise. Maybe the background radiation. And it really wants the isotopes, too. But it seems to be learning from experience. It can’t just take them by frontal attack—
The creature turned and headed uptown, away from the noise and the flames and smoke. Spidey went after it cautiously, not wanting to lose it, not wanting to let it do any more damage, but wanting to see where it was headed without himself influencing its decision, if possible. It looked over his shoulder at him, then stooped to the ground, produced more tentacles, and used them to heave open the manhole cover it had been approaching when he first saw it.
That’s the ticket, Spidey thought and headed after it in a hurry. He didn’t want to lose it in the sewers, either. At least down there it was less likely to endanger innocent bystanders.
The creature vanished down the manhole head-first, its tentacles helping it go. Spider-Man followed it down, though not too closely—he was acutely aware of the danger of the thing turning suddenly, in a tunnel too tight for him to maneuver in, but in which it would have its tentacles to help it. He could still clearly hear the rustling sound of it as it made its way downwards and onwards.
As he entered the manhole and headed down the ladder along its side, he heard more scuffling as the creature headed off southward along the connecting tunnel which the manhole met. Spider-Man followed, listening hard, letting his eyes get used to the darkness, and waiting to see if his spider-sense warned him of anything.
No warnings, nothing but the faint sound of the creature making its way downtown. Down here, where the city sounds didn’t wash it out, he could hear another sound, a sort of soft moan, repeating itself at intervals of several seconds, and decreasing with increasing distance. Is that it breathing? he wondered. Or doing something else? I don’t have any proof that the thing’s metabolism cares one way or the other about oxygen—or any other kind of atmosphere, for that matter. And with its fondness for radiation—
At the bottom of the manhole, Spider-Man stopped and looked around. This wasn’t access to a sewer line, as far as he could tell. Among other things, it didn’t smell like it. This was a general access tunnel, one of the “utility” tunnels that honeycombed the island just ten or twenty feet under the sidewalks and streets. They carried all kinds of utilities, sometimes several kinds together in separate conduits in one tunnel—steam, electric, cable TV, phone lines, water mains—never giving away their presence or location except by occasional plumes of steam. This tunnel, as far as he could tell, carried phone and cable. Bundles of waterproof-sheathed cable conduit ran down the sides of it, with occasional “spurs” vanishing upward through the ceiling of the tunnel, to buildings that they served. Here and there, very occasionally, were faint lights meant to guide the utility workers who toiled down here, in case their own lights failed. Down toward the southward end of the tunnel, he could hear the faint scrabbling sounds of his quarry hurrying away.
He followed a long way. The creature seemed unwilling to let him get too close. When he sped up a little, it did too, increasing its pace until he was hard pressed to keep up with it. The creature took its turns at great speed—right, left, left and down, down again, right, right—and Spider-Man quickly lost any sense of direction. All he could do was follow. I’m never going to be able to follow my path to get back out, he thought. / should have brought a ball of string, like the guy in the fairy tale. But he doubted he could have gotten a ball of string big enough—he’d have to head upward, instead, and pop out of a manhole cover somewhere else.
I hope, he thought, for the creature was heading deeper and deeper, going down a level every few minutes. I think it knows where it’s going, he thought. And that may mean something bad for me. It’s a bad move to fight on ground of your enemy’s choosing.
Ahead of him, dimly seen down the dark length of the tunnel, the creature paused, looking both ways. Confusion? he thought. Or is it tired? Or—It was making that “sniffing” motion again, hunting something. Down under his feet, Spidey started to feel something: the faint rumble of a train. They were near one of the subways. We’ve come a long way east, he thought. Maybe south too.
He headed for the creature, trying to be stealthy about it—running along, half-crouched, on the ceiling of the tunnel rather than on its bottom.
Then his spider-sense hit him like a club in the back of his head just as the tentacle came slithering out of the shadows at the bottom of the tunnel, reached up, snagged him by the leg, and pulled him down.
The next few minutes were like a nightmare of being attacked by an octopus—except that once you’ve webbed up eight of an octopus’s tentacles, theoretically the nightmare is over and you can leave. This creature produced more tentacles each time Spider-Man webbed up the ones attacking him. It had apparently decided that cutting the webbing was a waste of time and was now simply working around it instead. The tentacles swarmed over him. As fast as he could throw them off or web them down, more emerged to hold and pull at him—and at the canister webbed to his waist.
And he realized all of a sudden that he couldn’t move at all: the thing had him thoroughly tied. It shredded the webbing on its imprisoned tentacles, and then one tentacle flashed in, developed an edge, and slashed down—
The webbing holding the canister parted, though not completely: for a moment the canister dangled. Another pair of tentacles snatched at it, and the canister, not designed to take such stresses, fell apart, clattering to the tunnel floor. One of the little packets of americium isotope fell out.
Somewhere nearby a train’s rumble began, got louder. The creature roared too, that high piercing roar again, released Spider-Man, and leapt on the fallen canister.
Not with Dawn’s science project, you don’t! thought Spidey. He jumped straight at the creature’s face. The fangs parted—though not to bite, to roar—and then more tentacles whipped around and hit Spider-Man broadside.
It was like being hit by a train: Spidey was lifted off his feet and flew straight across the tunnel. His head, side, and right leg crunched into the far wall and bounced off. In a blaze of pain, Spider-Man slid down to the floor, unable to stop himself or do anything but lie there, wheezing, and in agony from trying to breathe, having to breathe.
The creature clutched at the isotope packet, bent over it and stuffed it into its maw. Get up, get up, get up, Spider-Man could hear one part of his brain ineffectively exhorting his body.
He managed to lever himself up onto one elbow, then wavered to his feet. The creature froze in what might have been a moment of after-dinner digestion and paid him no mind. Spider-Man shot a quick line of web at the first half of the canister, then at the second half, and pulled them to him. Then he shot one last line of web at the remaining packet of isotope just as the creature turned its head slowly, beginning to come out of its moment of assimilation.
He quickly sealed the isotope back into its canister, rose unsteadily, and fled down the tunnel, not sure where he was going, not caring, as long as it was away from that.
The soprano roar went up behind him again, but Spider-Man kept running. The sound of trains grew louder, drowning out the roar behind him. He plunged through the dimness, every breath a stab in his side, stumbling, clutching his ribs. Broken. Has to be at least one broken.
That roar sounded behind him again, closer. Desperate, Spider-Man ran for the trains. Can’t let it get the rest of this stuff. If it gets it—if it finishes it—it might just go on with me—as an hors d’oeuvre—since I was so close to the radioactives.
The roar seemed to be fading in the increasing roar of the trains. He could hear no sound of pursuit. He fell down once, got up and staggered on, but not far. Then he fell again and couldn’t get up, no matter how the back of his mind yelled at him. His whole side, from head to foot, was one long line of pain, wh
ich washed the thought out of him, left him sitting, then lying, helpless, on bare cold concrete, in the dimness, which grew darker…
…went black.
EIGHT
MJ stared in horror at the TV screen. It cut to a game show, in which a well-dressed woman turned over letters in a row, while contestants tried to guess the words of the phrase they spelled. Normally MJ was of the opinion that this game was intellectually challenging only to those with IQs lower than that of a banana slug. Now, though, she stared at the impending words and couldn’t make head or tail of them. Peter! she thought.
She hoped for some kind of continuation of the bulletin, but nothing came. An explosion at ESU—she knew what the science building there looked like. Maybe not as solid as the main building, but solid enough. Not something you could blow up easily. He was right, she thought. He knew Hobby was coming. Sometimes I wish he didn’t have to be so—
She looked around nervously. There were fewer women in the reception area now than there had been before, but not that many fewer. Obviously a lot had been asked to stay, possibly to do a second reading, maybe even to read for some other part. That happened sometimes. It might happen to her. She couldn’t leave now. She hadn’t even read for the first time yet.
At the same time, even if she was free to leave now, what could she do? There was no telling exactly what had happened over there at ESU, and nothing was to be gained by her shooting off in that direction without a good reason or a plan. She would be much smarter to sit still and bide her time. Peter would be annoyed with her if she just ran out of an impending audition because—
“Ms. Watson-Parker?”
“Here,” MJ said, standing up, the mask of the professional falling into place—though not with the usual assured slam. She followed the AP toward the audition room, feeling a lot less excited about it all than she had been just a few minutes before. I wish I’d never seen that bulletin, she thought—then smiled at herself, a little ruefully. If he can be a hero, she thought, you can too, even if only by staying at your post.