She got a tissue out of her purse and dabbed herself dry again. Nerves, she thought. And then, after a few seconds, she shook her head ruefully, catching herself in a lie. Nerves was not what it was about, feeling was what it was about—and there was no need to be ashamed of that.
The cab pulled up in front of a tall old brick building. She paid the cabbie, put herself in order, tossed her hair back, and strode into the building's lobby, smiling and ready.
Two hours later, she felt a lot less ready, but the smile was still there, mostly.
The reception area was typical: full of comfortable, sleek furniture, big sofas curving around to match the lines of the room, gorgeous modern art on the walls, two separate televisions showing two separate channels, and a busy, expensive-looking receptionist working behind a massive and politically incorrect desk of polished teak that MJ estimated would have cost about a year's rent on their apartment.
The audition room where she and the twenty-three other actresses all gathered to meet the production staff was more of the same: state-of-the-art sound and video equipment all stashed away in absolute tidiness behind a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, not a loose cable or wire in sight. Next, the AP ushered them into a big, bright, clean, carpeted rehearsal space, everything brand-new. There was serious money here and MJ was determined to be part of it, one way or another.
The competition daunted her. She looked good—she knew that—but some of these women looked spectacular, with the kind of effortless beauty that suggested they didn't have to do anything to themselves in the morning but wash their faces and toss their hair back out of their eyes. It was not in MJs style to be jealous—not after a first flash of emotion which usually simply translated as, "It's not fair!" and then melted away into rueful and slightly forlorn admiration. At least ten of her fellow auditioners looked like this. The others were all at least extremely good-looking, and possibly better actresses than she was. And here she was, enduring the Curse of the W's, watching them go in before her, one after another. Why the producers would want to look at her in the face of this competition, she couldn't imagine.
She sighed and determined to raise her mood somewhat. How, though, she wasn't sure. She had already read every magazine sitting out here on the Italian glass-topped tables. War and Peace did nothing for her today. The smell of hot coffee in the pot off to one side had been enticing when she came in. Now she was getting sick of it.
She leaned back and looked at the televisions. One of them was showing a large, purple, blunt-faced dinosaur, which was at that moment dancing clumsily and singing a song about how it wanted to be someone's friend. MJ gazed at it and had a sudden bizarre but very satisfying image of herself introducing it to Venom: taking the dinosaur by its pudgy purple hand, turning, and saying very sweetly, "Here, make friends with this.''
The other television was in the middle of a commercial for a used-car dealership, car after car and license-plate number after license-plate number flashing on the screen, followed by the image of the dealer, a man with one of those faces MJ would never buy a used car from. I don't know how he does it, MJ thought. Maybe I'm just suspicious. Must come of having super-villains running in and out of Peter's life all the time.
The screen went mercifully black, then suddenly MJ found herself looking at a card that said, "SPECIAL REPORT." The card was replaced by the image of a news-woman sitting at a desk, an "Action News" logo and the network "bug" in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen. "Reports are coming in of an explosion on the ESU campus in the Village," the reporter said. "Emergency services are responding. Witnesses report substantial damage to the ESU science facility—"
And whatever composure MJ had managed to recover went right out the window.
Peter!
Across town and downtown, Spider-Man was swinging between building and building, scanning the streets frantically for any sign of the dark shape which was his quarry.
That boy really can move, he thought again. One of the most annoying things about having to tangle with Venom was how closely they were matched, in terms of their powers and abilities—and when it came to physical strength, while Spider-Man's strength was proportionally that of a spider his size and mass, the strength the symbiote lent Eddie was another matter entirely. The symbiote's job was to do, literally, whatever its host wanted—and it frequently seemed to bend various physical laws to make it all happen. Having worn the symbiote himself for a little while, he remembered the astonishing feeling of something as light as silk but as strong in its way as a steel exoskeleton—something that flowed around you being as hard or soft, as edged or smooth as it needed to be for the moment's requirements. It looked like whatever you wanted it to look like and became whatever you needed. Without thought, without hesitation—just doing it. Wearing that symbiote, you didn't need a weapon. You were a weapon.
Going through walls would be no problem for Venom. If he wanted to claim he couldn't knock over a train, well, perhaps that was true—but watching him try would be worth the price of admission, and if bets were being taken, Spider-Man wasn't sure he wouldn't put a five on the symbiote, just to be safe.
In the meantime, there was no telling where Venom had gone. Theoretically, since they were both chasing a flying target, Venom should still be out in the open the way Spider-Man was. But if Hobgoblin had gone to ground, there was nothing to prevent Venom from going right through walls, or the ground, for that matter, to get at him.
Either way, Spider-Man's only chance to find them both was to get some height and cover as much ground as he could as quickly as he could. So head for the tall timber and start looking, Spidey thought. There was a good cluster of skyscrapers just west of him, near Columbus Circle. He would go up the old Gulf-Western building, have a look around, and decide his next move before the trail got too cold.
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 with all this background radiation right through lead.
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 times, 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 d
idn'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. I 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.
Ihope, 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 "sniffling" 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.