by Diane Duane
Fischer was glad enough to hear it. He had little liking for, or patience with, scientists. They all knew too much. Stuff that might backfire on you somehow—or stuff that they might find a way to use against you, if you didn’t watch them all the time. That his boss was a scientist as well made his job no easier. He always had to be careful, when dealing with him, to conceal his basic dislike and distrust of the species. And truly, it was no business of his who employed him, just so long as he got paid. For his own part, Fischer was careful to be conscientious about his work, to deliver what he promised, and to make sure that whatever happened, whether his boss’s doing or his own, he didn’t get caught at anything.
The subject was on his mind at the moment, since this particular project was rapidly approaching the get-away-and-don’t-get-caught-at-anything stage. This place, having served its purpose, was ready to be destroyed so that the project and the organization could move on. Unnecessary personnel would be offloaded, and Fischer would likely go on to another job.
He felt eyes on him and glanced up to see Connors favoring him with an expression that was mostly loathing.
“So?” Fischer said. “Is it ready?”
“A few minutes,” Connors said. “One thing, though. Before the insertion, I want this out.” He held out his lone arm.
Fischer glanced at the arm, noting the nearly healed scar where the implant chip had gone in. He laughed a little and shook his head. “Oh, no. I haven’t had any orders to that effect from upstairs. Besides—” he glanced at the machine “—what if it doesn’t work? What if the insertion makes you crazy? What if you get out of control and start trashing the joint? I need some way to manage you. No,” Fischer said, “that’s my little insurance policy. Just in case you get any—” his eyes narrowed slightly “—funny ideas, when your cure starts to take —if it starts to take.”
“You,” Connors said, “are a lot too fond of control.”
Fischer laughed. They had been over this ground before, and he had to admit he enjoyed it. Connors showed his wounds so openly. “It’s all about control, in the end,” Fischer said. “People are just animals, after all. Some of them more so than others.” The pained look on Connors’s face amused him; it was amazing, how some people just couldn’t bear the truth. “Your little accident just made that side of you more accessible, revealed the truth, whether you like it or not. Like everybody else, you need a hand on the leash.”
Connors turned away from the mercenary. “It doesn’t matter,” Fischer said jovially. “For the first time now, because of the implant, there’s a little control over what you do when you change. So if we choose to manage the Lizard a little bit when he makes his appearances, what’s it to you? You wouldn’t be able to manage what he does at all. At least we’ve kept you from killing anybody. You should thank us. I’d think your tender humanistic sensibilities would suffer terribly from something like that. And if we can make use of your changes for our cause—a little cash here, a few weapons there, while you’re running around the landscape with your scales on, destroying things—what does it matter? It’s all going toward your cure, anyway. Without our protection, and our money, you wouldn’t be able to afford the facilities you need for all your little experiments. And the Boss wouldn’t have been able to offer you that hydrogel. He wouldn’t be able to get you any more of it, either, after you lost the last batch. Careless of you.”
Connors turned back and scowled at him. “It wasn’t exactly my choice,” he said. “I was trying to run away. Somebody wanted me to stay and fight Spider-Man, to see what would happen—a little casual entertainment for a slow night, as far as I can tell. You brought it on yourself, and made sure that your lovely Boss thought it was my fault.”
“Control,” Fischer said, and shrugged, and smiled. “We were still working on the retinal readout, trying to clear the pictures up, for later jobs that’ll matter more. If you don’t like it, you can leave—or try to. But if you leave, what happens to your cure, if this doesn’t work? And we’re going to need you for a while yet. The organization has a lot of needs.”
“Like threatening Space Shuttles?” Curt said bitterly.
“Oh, what’s a Shuttle or two? The astronauts won’t be hurt—they’ll have plenty of time to get out. What’s in the Shuttle, our people will probably be able to pick up. A nice bonus, since the real business tonight is further south. If they don’t get it, well, they’ll still have done their job. Every police, Coast Guard, and Air Force unit in this part of the state will be over there. No one’ll have time for something happening out in a swamp when Cape Kennedy is being overrun by ‘bad guys.’” He laughed.
He couldn’t make anything of the look Connors gave him then, but Fischer had better things to do than psychoanalyze half-sane scientists. The machine made a soft ding then, and Connors bent down beside it, opened the little ultrasound compartment, and took out a small cylindrical flask of amber liquid. He looked at it, held it up to the light. The expression on Connors’s face shifted to something Fischer could understand: fear. He’s afraid it won’t work. Or that it will, and that he’ll still be bound to us afterwards.
His problem.…
“Where’s the medium?” Connors said.
“Just a moment.” Fischer went into the next room, tapped in the combination to the lab’s small safe, opened its door, and took out the little metal box. He brought it back in to Connors, opened the box. A small piece of hydrogel, a cube maybe half an inch across, lay there. Connors took a pair of tweezers and lifted the hydrogel onto a glass plate, put it into the microwave, and gave it a minute on full.
Fischer looked at him curiously. He knew perfectly well that microwaves couldn’t affect this stuff any more than anything else did. “Sterilizing it,” Connors said, catching the look. “Be a shame to have the cure work and then get blood poisoning from a chance germ floating by.”
“You sure it’ll take that?” Fischer nodded at the liquid in the flask. “You haven’t tested it before—”
“Oh, it’ll absorb it,” Connors said absently, peering at the rotating table in the microwave. “The molecular structure of the serum is built to exploit the structure of the hydrogel. It’ll lock into it and then disseminate molecule by molecule when it’s implanted, and the fluid pressure around it goes positive.”
Fischer frowned. “Like one of those time-release nicotine patches, huh?”
“Very like. The problem in the past—” it was surprising how dry Connors’s voice went suddenly, when the man himself had so many times been the main subject of the experiment “—has always been with the dosage strategy. Even metered microdosages have been too high. This one, though, will come on demand from serum blood levels.”
The microwave chimed. Connors took out the hydrogel on its plate, took a pipette from a rack on his worktable, slipped it into the cylinder of serum, put his thumb over the top, and lifted an inch or so of serum from the container.
Fischer watched with some slight interest. It was odd, the way it looked. The serum didn’t so much flow out of the pipette as seem to be abruptly sucked out of it, and the hydrogel went instantly from smoky gray to smoky gold.
Connors looked satisfied, showed just a ghost of a smile. “Now that,” he said, “is a good chemical affinity.” He looked at Fischer.
“All right,” Fischer said, and got ready for his part of this business. He was an able enough battlefield medic, having cut and stitched back together a good number of people under circumstances a lot more adverse than this. Connors took off his lab coat, sat down and pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, then pulled over a bottle of Betadine surgical scrub and wet a cotton pad from it. He spent about thirty seconds rubbing his upper arm with the yellowy stuff, from the point of the shoulder to the middle of the biceps, and used the last stroke of the pad to mark a line about half an inch below the shoulder’s point, an inch and a half long, down to the center of the biceps. “Right there,” he said to Fischer. “That long. Half an inch deep. Any longer,
or deeper, and you might hit the brachial nerve—and mess up another site for your damn implant, if it has to be changed later.”
Fischer nodded. From a nearby tray, he laid out a small surgical kit while Connors anesthetized his arm.
Fischer picked up the scalpel. Connors averted his eyes while Fischer worked. Fischer smiled to himself. Typical, that someone who in his time had caused so much bloodshed and mayhem didn’t like looking at his own blood. With very little ado, Fischer pulled the edges of the wound apart with one hand, and with the other picked up the hydrogel with the sterile tweezers from the suture pack and slipped it into the incision, seating it. A moment later he pushed the wound edges back together again, close enough to start suturing the muscle proper, and began to close. Connors shivered once, hard, as the hydrogel went in, then sat still again as Fischer stitched.
“Anything?” Fischer said.
“No,” Connors said, “just reaction to being cut.” But there was something in his voice that made Fischer wonder about that. He got busy with the epidermis, meantime looking around the room to see where exactly he had put the control box for the implant chip. He had seen Connors mistime his estimates of change before.
Fischer finished his needlework, knotted the last knot, and cut the last black silk suture off close. Then he got up and went to find the control box.
Connors sat shivering. Fischer was not at all sure about the way he looked. Could he be having some kind of reaction to the hydrogel? Fischer wondered.
Connors was ashen. Then the shivering seemed to pass off, and Fischer smiled to himself. Maybe it’s just fear, he thought, and turned away.
Then he heard the roar.…
ELEVEN
THE Blackhawk chopper rode low over the ’Glades, followed by a trail of noise from distraught birds and the occasional bellowing alligator.
Through the front window, leaning between the pilots’ seats, Spider-Man watched the moonlit landscape pour by. He said, or rather shouted, to the pilot, “How far does rotor noise travel on a quiet night like this?”
The pilot shouted back, “Oh, in flat terrain like this, maybe a mile and a half, two miles.”
“Okay. I’d sooner the people I’m going to meet didn’t hear me coming, if it’s all the same to you. You suppose you could drop me—” Spidey peered out through the windshield “—oh, about two miles north of here?”
“Mister Spider-Man, sir,” the pilot shouted, “my boss told me to drop you on the moon, if you said you wanted to go there. Hoped you wouldn’t. I’m due for a lunch break in another hour or so.”
“Thanks. You’re a pal.”
“You could,” said the pilot, “tell me one thing before you go.”
“Sure.”
He eyed Spider-Man’s costume. “Don’t you find that a mite inappropriate for this climate?”
Spidey laughed. “Brother, you said a mouthful. But I left my tux at home.”
The pilot chuckled. Several minutes later, he was lowering the chopper gingerly above a small reed island. “I’m not real eager to set this thing down,” he shouted, “on account of I’m not sure I can get her up again. You mind jumping?”
“No problem,” he said, as another of the chopper’s crew pulled the Blackhawk’s door open. “Thanks a lot!”
“Our pleasure, sir. You watch yourself out there, now. There’s things out there with a lot of teeth.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Spidey said, waved, and jumped down into the wind-flattened reeds.
The chopper leaned into a turn and headed south again. Spidey crouched where he landed until the plant life began to stand up around him again; when they did, he did, too, and looked around. He thought he had his landmarks right. He recognized a pattern of smaller hammocks which he had identified as being about two miles south of the main one.
Spider-Man paused a second to put on Murray’s little present, then he got moving. It really had been a long night. He was having trouble summoning up the energy he wanted, but there was nothing he could do about the problem except just keep bounding along at his best pace.
Within a matter of a few minutes, he was distracted by the sight, in the viewer, of a bright, swift, man-shaped figure, with pseudopodia streaming off it and helping it along as it made its way from island to island about a quarter-mile ahead of him. He went after it. It would be pleasant, Spidey thought, to be able to surprise Venom for a change, instead of the other way around.
Spider-Man made his way as silently across the uneven terrain as he could. There was, unfortunately, no surprise. As he got within about a hundred yards, he saw Venom’s head come up and look toward him suddenly, and his jaws open in a huge, fangy snarl.
Venom paused, crouching, and Spider-Man caught up with him and stopped at a safe distance—if there was any such thing. Spidey would have preferred half a continent or so. Venom opened his mouth to speak.
“Congratulations,” Spider-Man interrupted.
This was not what Venom had apparently been expecting. He looked at Spidey and said, “Good news travels fast, we take it.”
“I don’t think it’s all that good for everyone,” Spider-Man said, “but I do know what you stopped them from doing. The Coast Guard said to say thank you—off the record, of course.”
Did that smile get just a little bit less dreadful? Hard to tell. “They’re welcome, we’re sure. But we have other business to attend to, now.”
“Venom,” Spider-Man said, “will you for God’s sake listen to me, just this once? Curt Connors is not to blame here. These people have been using him.”
Venom started moving again. “Life uses us all,” he said, “for its own purposes. If Connors has been used, what better reason to set him free—once and for all.”
“And what about his wife?” Spidey said, going along with Venom, matching his pace, though still at a distance. “And his son? His innocent son?”
They made their way along in silence for a few seconds. “It is unfortunate,” Venom said finally, “but—”
“It’s not just unfortunate,” Spider-Man said bitterly. “If you defend the innocent, you have to defend all the innocent. You can’t pick and choose the ones you like better than the others. What about that young boy, who wants to be a scientist like his dad? What about what his life will become if Curt dies? Think about it. That will be on your conscience, your fault. Not some abstract tragedy. You will have caused that.”
“The greater good—” Venom began.
“It’s an excuse!” Spider-Man shouted angrily, panting a little—the long night was beginning to tell on him. “It’s a reason not to think, not to take the responsibility, to say ‘I don’t care about what’s right, I want to do what I feel like!’ This is a boy who could do anything, be anything, if his father lives—even if Curt never comes home, that hope will be with William for years. If you kill his father, you snuff that out. You end two lives. Murder, plain and simple. One of them is the victim of an accident that’s gone on and on—tragic, yes, but not a criminal. The other is an innocent. Dead at your hands, if not physically, then in essence. And you can’t ignore it. Kill Curt, and you betray everything you claim to stand for. What are you going to tell your people back in San Francisco about that?”
Venom said nothing, just kept going.
“I’m not going to let you kill him,” Spider-Man said. “I’m going to stop you whatever way I can. I may die doing it, but you are not going to kill Curt Connors.”
It took about another ten minutes for them to reach the hammock. They stopped about a hundred yards from it, looked it over. The first words that Venom said, then, were, “It seems unusually quiet.”
“I don’t know for sure that they committed all their people to the two operations tonight,” Spidey said. “I saw about seven, maybe eight people total at the Cape tonight.”
“Is that device of yours any help?”
Spider-Man was trying to discover just that. He fiddled with controls. “No,” he said, “it’s go
ing to be hard to tell until we get inside the hammock, and maybe not even then. The whole place is radiating at about a hundred and five degrees—it whites out anything less.” He shook his head. “We should go in.”
“If we find Connors—” Venom said then, looking at Spider-Man blank-eyed.
“I’m warning you,” Spider-Man said.
“If, however, we find the Lizard—”
“Venom, don’t,” Spider-Man said, meaning it.
Venom slipped past him and headed for the hammock.
Spidey went after. One after another they squeezed between the trees and worked cautiously inward. There was the lab, a little prefab building, temporary-looking. It had no windows, but through the viewer Spidey could see cracks where the heat was spilling out, indicating doors. “That way,” he said to Venom, indicating the left side of the building, where there was a ground-floor door.
They started for it. And then they heard the roar. It echoed, and the right-hand side of the top of the building shook, shook once more, as something hit it. The roar scaled up to a scream.
Spider-Man and Venom looked at each other. Spidey pushed past Venom and made for the right side of the building, bypassing the stairway that went up the outside by shooting a web at the top of the building and hauling himself up. Venom came after.
Oh, please, Spider-Man said to whatever deity might be handling the Everglades on the night shift, please let me save something from this mess! In his present state, after the night’s events, he wasn’t sure he could take Venom. But if he didn’t, Venom would kill the Lizard, kill Curt, for sure.
Spider-Man pulled open the door at the top of the stairs. Its lock resisted him, so he pulled harder, enraged—yanked it right off its hinges, and flung the thing backward behind him, narrowly missing Venom, who was webbing up after him.
The hallway was empty. The source of the crashing and roaring was farther off to his right, through another door. Spider-Man looked both ways, saw no one, and headed for that closed door, hit it feet first, knocked it open and down.