by Diane Duane
But—and he grew thoughtful as another flash bomb zipped harmlessly past—there may be no point in staying, since I don’t have any proof the bomb is here. And if it’s not here, I’m wasting my time.
Hobgoblin was wheeling and screaming around, now, with much more animus than usual. “I’ll get you! I’ll get you and squash you like the bug you are, arachnid or no damned arachnid—!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Spider-Man called brightly, continuing with his evasive maneuvers, “the same old song. You couldn’t hit your own mother with a flyswatter. Did you have a mother? Jeez, she must be embarrassed—!”
Hobgoblin was not amused. “I’ll show you—”
There was a sudden crumbling noise from off to one side of the room. Hobby paused in mid-glide, hovering, staring at the wall. Spider-Man, momentarily hiding behind another tall pallet-full of crates, peered around to see what was happening.
The wall was bulging in a very unnerving way. With a sound like a gunshot, a big crack appeared in the concrete, in the place where the bulge was most pronounced. The bulge got bigger, and the crack spread, starfishing out from what seemed like an impact point, a place where the wall was being hit, and hit hard, by something from the outside.
The concrete floor began to vibrate faintly. The other walls thrummed in response, and the thrumming slowly rose to a rumble like distant thunder. The crack stitched wider under the repeated blows from outside, multiplied itself up and down the width of the wall. Then—smash!—all at once, the wall fell in.
Hobgoblin threw a couple of flash bombs at something big and black pushing through the rubble, but they had no effect. Another smash! and broken concrete and pieces of steel-reinforcing rod came raining down into the room, leaving a great hole into blackness.
Through the hole, striding out of the darkness, came Venom. Not now! Spidey thought. Not again!
Spider-Man glanced up at Hobgoblin. The jetglider slowly backed away.
“You!” Hobgoblin snarled at Venom. He seemed to be trying hard to sound outraged, but his nervousness showed much too clearly. “Get out of here before I put an end to your nuisance once and for all!” He hefted a pumpkin bomb, but didn’t throw it.
Venom stood there, arms folded, while the symbiote’s tendrils writhed about him, and the symbiote’s tongue licked the air and reached toward Hobgoblin hungrily. “If you could do anything about us,” Venom said calmly, “you would have by now. Which means you can’t do anything about us. Or won’t.” He eyed the big lump of machinery in the middle of the room. “And if this is what we think it is—we believe we know why you won’t, and can’t, do anything.”
Up until now, Spider-Man had been avoiding being seen by Hobby, mostly to see what the crook might do next, where he might lead him. Now, though, it occurred to him that if he didn’t do something quickly, Hobgoblin would shortly no longer be a factor in this or any other equation. He leapt out from the wall, where he had briefly been hanging upside down behind yet another stacked-up pallet, and landed between Hobgoblin and Venom. “Listen,” he said urgently, “Venom, if I were you—”
The symbiote turned on him with considerable scorn. “You are not us,” he said. “Something for which we give thanks, morning and night. You had your chance to be us, and you blew it. Now stand back and let someone deal with this”—Venom glanced at Hobgoblin with the kind of look someone might give a carton of sour yogurt—”this thing who can do the job properly.”
Hobgoblin’s jetglider lifted suddenly, as if he were about to soar away. He never had a chance. The tendrils flung out at him like ropes, caught the jetglider in several different places, anchored to it, and dragged it closer while Hobgoblin fought to get away. Other tendrils sought out and swathed Hobgoblin’s hands in steely bands, making the flinging of bombs or the activation of energy gauntlets impossible.
“For you,” Venom said, “we have only one desire. Besides ridding the world of you, but we’ll get to that shortly. We want to know about this creature which is running about the sewers and tunnels of this city, impersonating us and killing innocent people in our likeness. A simple enough business, it must have seemed to you. Distract attention from yourself by presenting what ill-informed people consider another so-called ‘super villain’ so you can continue your schemes uninterrupted. Meantime, blameless men and women are terrorized and killed. It’s all just a game to you, of course. But now”—grinning, Venom pulled the jetglider closer, while its engine screamed in protest and useless resistance—“now the reckoning time has come. You’ve outdone yourself this time, Hobgoblin. You’ve created a creature sufficiently robust that even we have a difficult time subduing it. So you are going to tell us everything we need to know to destroy it. If you’re quick, we will be fairly merciful, and we’ll be no longer about eating your probably slightly rancid and tasteless brain than necessary. If you waste any more of our time, though, we will start by tearing your arms and legs off.”
Spider-Man’s first impulse was to let Venom go ahead, but there were more important matters to be dealt with. “Venom,” he said, “wait a moment. I take it you’ve met up with your lookalike down here somewhere—”
“Met it—” A look of annoyance passed over the fanged face. The teeth gnashed as the symbiote expressed its partner’s frustration. “We met, yes.”
“You came away with your skin intact, but not your ego, I can see that. Listen to me! Good as Hobby here is at stuff like bombs, hasn’t it occurred to you that what you ran into is, well, beyond his expertise?”
“This is difficult to say,” Venom said, looking at Spider-Man with a slight glimmer of interest, “but we must confess we haven’t exactly made a study of this thing’s ‘expertise.’”
“Then think about it,” Spider-Man said. “I don’t think what attacked you, what attacked me, has anything to do with him. It’s not even from here.”
Venom suddenly looked even more interested, a dismaying effect on that sinister face. “We take it you refer to an origin a lot further away than the Five Boroughs.”
“It’s not from Earth.”
“Is this some project of yours that went astray?”
“I can’t take credit for this one,” Spider-Man said, shaking his head.
“Who then?”
“Look,” Spider-Man said, “I can’t discuss it now. But it’s nothing to do with him. There’s more important business of his to deal with at the moment.”
“Yes,” Venom said cheerfully enough. “Rending him limb from limb sounds like a good place to begin.” The tendrils began to pull. Hobgoblin screamed.
“No!” Spider-Man launched himself at Venom, trying to web as many of those tentacles as he could, and pull them away from Hobgoblin. The tendrils, though, just kept welling out between the strands of web. “Venom, he’s got a bomb down here somewhere, and we have no way to know how it’s supposed to be set off! He may have some kind of dead-man switch hooked up to his lifesigns, or God only knows what else he’s managed. But if you kill him now, there’ll be no way we can be sure of how to deactivate the thing!”
Venom looked at Spider-Man, though the pressure on Hobgoblin did not appear to decrease, and Hobby’s screams continued. “Believe me,” Spider-Man said, “if we could stick him and his little tinkertoy bomb in the same garbage can, shove them off the planet together, and let them blow, do you think I wouldn’t do it? But his finger is on the trigger of an A-bomb, and millions and millions of innocent lives are at stake!” Spider-Man came down hard on the word innocent. “This is not the time to go around eating people’s brains!”
There came a sudden shriek of the jetglider’s engines as they pushed the glider, not back, but forward. All the tension went out of the straining tentacles, and Venom, suddenly pulling against no resistance, fell backwards.
The screaming jetglider engines almost rammed Hobgoblin into the ceiling of the big room. He ducked barely in time, recovered, dove down low, and zoomed off past Venom again—then out through the hole Venom had made in the
wall.
Venom staggered to his feet and stared, astonished and enraged. Then he whirled on Spider-Man. The tendrils reached out menacingly toward him, and Spidey got ready to web as many of them as necessary to keep them from closing around his throat, or doing any rending-limb-from-limb on him.
“This is the second time you have interfered in our vengeance against this wretched creature,” Venom growled. “We should kill you now, but if we waste time with you, we’re going to lose him. You may assume, therefore, that our next meeting will be our last.”
“I’ll save a spot for you on my dance card,” Spider-Man said. “And whatever you do, if you want to save this city’s life, don’t give in to your little urges. You need Hobgoblin, alive and functioning, to disarm that bomb.”
Venom threw him a furious look and swarmed out after the swiftly retreating whine of the jetglider.
Spider-Man hurried back up the wall and through the opening he had made, recovering his camera and packing it away. Those flash bombs should have given it good light cues to go by, he thought. Hope they didn’t fool the strobe into overexposing. We’ll see…. But if there’s any New York City left tomorrow morning, these are going to look brilliant in the afternoon edition.
Meantime, Spider-Man had an idea. It might take some doing to set up. If it worked, though, the results could be excellent… and the main problem was to get the results fast. This was, as he had pointed out to Venom, a gamble, one for millions of lives. In this case, though, it was better to gamble than to do nothing.
Spider-Man plunged back toward the subway tunnels, the way he had come, in pursuit of the last best chance to save New York.
ELEVEN
THE next two hours moved with dreadful slowness and terrible speed.
Spider-Man knew he and his quarry were going to have to find their way back to the underground generator, so he took care to remember his route, marking it with spider-tracers. Several times, where numerous train lines crossed, his spider-sense warned him of an express coming up behind him, unheard because of the omnidirectional clatter and thunder of its brethren. Then he would leap to the ceiling, clinging to it while the metallic juggernaut shrieked and sparked as it passed, inches from his back. There was a certain grim humor in it. New York City might be about to end at five thirty in the morning, but until then, the subways would keep running.
The whole thing was a longshot, of course, but most of the creature’s appearances seemed to be on the west side rather than the east. Perhaps the creature found the middle of the city too populous, too dangerous, too full of machinery and trouble. He was beginning to feel for it, in a way. Here it was, alone in a strange place, confused, frightened, alone. It was more analogous to a lost animal than anything else; it hadn’t shown much evidence of high intelligence. Most likely on breaking out of the sub, it had headed straight for open water and had been borne southwards by the prevailing currents where the East River emptied into the harbor. Then eventually it had struck up the far side of the island, westward, coming to a sewage outfall or another entry into the tunnel system. From there it could easily have sought out or stumbled into one, then made its way further underground, where the ambient radiation was less.
As Spider-Man made his way through the tunnels, he again mulled over the creature’s bizarre physiology, for exploiting that physiology was now his best chance. The creature was sensitive to very small amounts of radioactive material. Its reaction to the little canister of isotope he was carrying was evidence enough of that. It had sensed that clearly, even through a lead container. And there, he thought, lie the possibilities.
Spider-Man paused at the junction of two tunnels. Too many of these tunnels looked alike, the only differentiating characteristics being the graffiti on the walls, and sometimes the smell.
He pulled out another spider-tracer. Spider-Man had five or six more tracers left. He leapt up onto the ceiling and slapped this latest tracer there, where it gave off the usual tiny reassuring buzz to his spider-sense.
Spider-Man came down to the floor again, paused. All right, he thought. This should be—what? About Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth. So, about four or five long blocks further west, a few more up. A good way to go yet.
He started working his way westward again. He was into the utility tunnels again, something for which he was profoundly grateful—the noise of the trains got on his nerves. Still, there would be more interesting things to watch for in the next while. What time is it?
He checked his watch. One forty-eight. Four hours… less! This is not great. His mission depended on speed, and here he was crawling around in tunnels. Spider-Man desperately wanted to be up in the clear air, swinging on a webline, out where he could see where he was going. But you can’t always get what you want. But hopefully, he thought with a small grin, I’ll get what I need.
His mind started drifting as he trudged forward. I had promised to get something for MJ, he thought. What was it? He laughed ruefully as he ran upside down along the ceiling of a tunnel whose floor was littered with rubble. Woolite, that was it. I promised I would bring some back. Even down here, among all the dreadful smells, he was acutely aware that his costume needed washing again.
He stopped at a big intersection, looking around. Aha, he thought. Faintly he could hear train rumble again, possibly one of the Broadway lines. We’re in the neighborhood.
He turned left, slapping another spider-tracer high on the wall, and continued. Another two hundred yards on, an archway opened before him, and he gazed through it into the tunnel where he fell unconscious before. He remembered some broken concrete rubble off to one side.
That’s the ticket, he thought. Now then!
Spider-Man began retracing his steps with more certainty. These were the tunnels in which he had lost the creature. He followed the path of his escaping bounds and leaps, recognizing a splash of spray paint on a wall here, a dropped cigarette box there. Everything was surprisingly clear in his memory, despite his weary and battered state at that point. But he was feeling a little less battered now. Weary, yes, and he could do serious damage to a steak. Twenty hours of sleep would be nice, too.
Whether he was ever going to get any such things, of course, was another matter. But it was nice to think about, down here in the dark, amidst the stench, on the trail of something which could probably wad him up like a ball of paper and slamdunk him through the nearest wall.
That’s an interesting question, he thought, as he made his way through the ever-more-familiar tunnels. The creature’s strength is all out of proportion to a normal life-form that size. To determine the cause, of course, the creature itself would have to stand still for analysis, and if there was one thing Spider-Man had noticed, standing still was not high on its list of things to do.
Like a hummingbird, he thought. It’s got to eat all the time to keep going. Its intake of residual and background radiation must be very carefully balanced against its intake of harder, more concentrated sources of radiation. Too much of one or the other might have serious consequences.
He reached one of the tunnels he had passed through before and stopped. Torn-up metal lay around in strips and shreds. He picked up one piece and fingered it thoughtfully. It reminded him of the metal of those canisters which had been stolen from CCRC. He lifted it to his face and sniffed, but caught nothing more than a vague chemical smell.
Something made a scratching sound not too far away. Spider-Man stopped, listening, and softly put the piece of metal down. A rat? he thought. But it was not a rat. It sounded like it might have been underneath. Below me somewhere?
Well, he thought. Let’s see. Spend a few minutes here: then if that doesn’t work, I’ll move a little further on, try again. All the same, the thought of having to do this six or eight times frightened him. He had wasted enough precious minutes finding his way back here.
Spider-Man chopped the thought off. Slowly he reached to the canister webbed to his belt. There was no time to rig any protective gear for himself an
d there was no realistic way to calculate radiation dosage. And there was hardly time to go back to ESU to get a lead apron.
He unscrewed the canister. There inside it lay the little glass capsule, very innocuous-looking. Americium isotope wasn’t something you could carry around in lumps; it was enough trouble making it in thousandths of a gram, and half the time you wound up cutting it with talc so you could work with it at all. No matter. No time to worry about it.
Slowly he held up the open canister—and stood there with it open, feeling his skin begin to itch.
Somewhere, below him, came a rustle. Then another.
It can’t really make you itch, he reassured himself. Nonetheless, he swore he could feel the stuff burning through his hand. It was ridiculous. His hand was protected by the lead container. Radiation escaping from the end of the canister moved in a straight line. It did not go around corners; otherwise that concrete shield back at ESU would have been useless.
Spider-Man stood there in the darkness, waiting for the creature to hurry up and take the bait. He grew impatient, and muttered, “Oh, come on.”
And to his surprise, his spider-sense began to tingle. He turned, looking for the source.
There was a stairway leading downwards, off to one side of the tunnel. Many tunnels had these. Spider-Man had been ignoring them, by and large, trying to stay on one level and not confuse himself too much. Now he saw something come wavering up that stairway. A snake? As far as he knew, the New York sewers and tunnels were not famous for snakes.
After that first one came wavering up another of the long, sinuous shapes: not a snake at all, but a long black tentacle. The rustling grew louder as more of those dark tentacles came whispering up out of the stairwell to the lower level. And behind them, the larger shape, dark, humanoid, bigger than a human—
For a moment Spider-Man’s heart clenched, as he thought he was looking at Venom. No, it’s bigger than Venom!
It paused near the top of the stairwell, holding the two sides of the opening with its arms, crouched down, staring at him with those pale patches of eyes. Slowly Spider-Man held up the little canister with the americium inside.