The people on the sidewalk just kept streaming past him. It was lunchtime, and they had more important things to pay attention to than a reluctant super hero, had they even recognized one in his street clothes. Peter let out a long sigh, squared his shoulders, and walked into the bank.
He made his way through the soulless cheerfulness of the front of the bank, filled with gaudy posters shouting about mortgages and favorable interest rates, and went to the customer service counter. For all the attention anyone paid him for the first five minutes, he might as well have stayed outside. The young woman who finally came over to him did so with the air of someone engaged in much more crucial matters than serving a customer. "Yes?" she said, and popped her bubble gum.
"Mr. Woolmington, please?" Peter said.
"He's out to lunch."
This chimed well with some of Peter's private opinions about the man, but he was hardly going to say as much in public. "Can you tell me when he'll be back?"
"Dunno," said the young woman behind the counter. "This afternoon sometime." She turned away.
"Can you take a message for him, please?"
Popping her gum in a manner which suggested she had been a machine gun in an earlier life, the young woman said, "Yeah?"
"Please tell him—" Peter had a powerful urge to say, Please tell him that Spider-Man was here to see whether his debt-consolidation loan's been approved yet, or whether he has to get one of the Avengers to cosign for it. He restrained himself. "Please tell him Peter Parker stopped in to see if there was any news on his loan approval."
"Uh huh," said the young woman, and she turned away again.
Peter watched her go, then walked back out to the street again, feeling—actually, a little grateful. He was so sure the answer was going to be "no" when it came, that not finding the guy there to give him the bad news was a blessing, in a way.
He walked on down 48th Street toward Fifth Avenue, hands in his pockets, staring at the sidewalk—as much from self-defense as anything else. No matter how much you fined people for not cleaning up after their dogs, it never seemed to help much.
Banks. . . . Peter thought. This had been just one more of many situations in his life lately which had made him wonder whether being able to invoke the inherent cachet of superherodom openly would be any use. Or, would it just make matters worse? There were some heroes who functioned without secret identities, and when you saw them socially—if you did—they seemed to be managing okay. All the same, Peter suspected their answering machines were always full when they got home from heroing, or even from doing the shopping, and the thought of how much junk mail they must get made him twitch. Even without anyone knowing his own secret identity, Peter got enough to make his trips to the recycling bins a trial for anyone, super hero or not. And when you added MJ's endless catalogs to the pile. . . .
He smiled slightly as he crossed Madison and headed on along toward Fifth. Mary Jane Watson-Parker was quite a celebrity in her own right—or had been, until she had left the soap opera Secret Hospital. Even before that, she had been well enough known for her modeling work. As a result, every mail-order house in the country, it seemed, sent her notifications of its new product lines . . . and she went through every one lovingly, pointing and oohing at the goodies.
But, of late, not buying from them. Things had gotten—well, not desperate, but tight. It was easy to forget how lavish money from TV work was until you lost it. Until then, MJ had spent some months persuading Peter to lighten up a little, to go ahead and spend a little money, buy himself that jacket, eat out more often. Peter had resisted at first. Finally, because it made her happy, he had given in—gotten used to enjoying himself, gotten used to having more funds to work with, gotten out of the habit of dreading the time the credit card bills came in.
And then, just as he had gotten used to it, it had all changed.
Now the mailbox was once again a source of uneasiness. The rent on the apartment, easy enough to handle on the combined incomes of a minor TV star and a freelance photographer, had now become a serious problem. Breaking the lease before it expired so that they could move somewhere smaller and cheaper was proving near impossible. So was keeping up the rent on just a freelancer's salary. They had some savings: not a huge sum, but it would last a while. MJ was out there getting every interview and audition she could scrape up. She was getting depressed, too, at not having been hired for something else right away. But Peter, just as nervous about it all as she was, had been purposely staying cheerful, trying to keep her spirits up and prevent her from getting discouraged. At the same time, he desperately wished there was someone to keep him from getting discouraged.
Being a super hero is all very well, he thought. I just wish it paid better.
I wish it paid, period!
He stopped at the corner, waiting for the light, while around him people hurried across anyway, daring the oncoming traffic. Whether heroing paid or not, he had to do it. Just as he had to take pictures, because he loved to, whether he got paid for them or not. Just as he had to study science, whether there seemed to be a job in it for him later or not. The old habit, the old love, went back too far, was too much a part of him now to let go.
He just had to make everything work together, somehow.
The light changed. Peter crossed, heading up Fifth to West 49th, then over to the shop where he usually got his photographic supplies. He had a couple of hours' work in the darkroom before him. Usually he tried to wind that up before MJ got home from her day out and complained about the smell of the developing solution (as well she might). It wasn't always easy. Darkroom business had become a lot more complicated, and more expensive, since the Daily Bugle's front page had gone color. Now a photographer who aspired to lead-story work had to be able to manage quality color processing at home—a one-hour place wouldn't cut it. And color chemicals were four times the cost of black-and-white.
Nothing he could do about it, though. Peter swung into the store, waited a few moments: Joel, the owner, was busy trying to sell a guy in a leather jacket a large and complicated camera case. After a few minutes the guy shook his head and went off.
"Hey, Petey," Joel said, "you need a camera case?"
Peter snorted. "That thing? With the plastic hardware on it? It wouldn't last a week."
They both laughed. It was an old game: Joel would push something useless at Peter; Peter would push it back. Then they would gossip a while. Peter had learned not to cut the gossip short—Joel sometimes knew about potential news stories in the area, and once or twice Peter had been able to bring in hot pictures to the Bugle as a result, before anyone knew anything about the news story in question.
"Hey," Joel said, bending down to rummage under the counter for a moment. "Got that gadget you were asking me for."
"Which one?"
"Wait a sec." Joel vanished below the counter, and things began to appear on it: rolls of film, brushes, lens caps, lens hoods, and lots more small pieces of equipment. After a moment he came up with a little black box with a clear plastic lens on the front.
"Strobe slave," Joel said.
"Got one already," Peter said. It was a useful accessory for a photographer, a second flash cabled to his camera and "slaved" to the first, so that they went off together. That way you could add light to a dark scene, or fill in unwanted shadows from the side.
"Not like this, you haven't," Joel said. He picked up the little box and turned it to show Peter a tiny secondary lens on the side. "Wireless. It goes off when your flash does by sensing sudden changes in the ambient light."
Peter picked it up and looked at it thoughtfully. He had been thinking about some improvements to his present rig. "Any way you could hook a motion sensor to this, you think?"
Joel nodded, pointing to a jack socket on the back of the slave flash. "One of my other customers did something like that. Nature photographer. He picked up one of those passive infrared things, you know the kind—the doohickey that turns on your outside lights when s
omeone gets close to the door. Saved him having to watch the birdie so much." Joel chuckled. "The bird moves, the camera takes its picture before it flies the coop."
Peter smiled. "I can use this. How much?"
"Forty."
He sighed, did some hurried addition in his head and pulled out his credit card. "Okay. And give me another package of three-by-five stock and a bottle of three-fifty, would you?"
"No problem." Joel went back to the shelves, came back with the gallon bottle of developer solution and the photo paper. For a moment he worked at the cash register. "Your lady find work yet?" he said.
Peter shook his head. "Still hunting."
"Hmm. You know, I have a guy comes in from the network place around the corner, the studios for the daytime stuff. Yesterday he told me they're hiring actors all of a sudden. Some kind of high-class soap, he said." Joel chuckled. "Is there such a thing?"
"You've got me. But I'll tell MJ to check it out." The cash register dinged. "Sixty-two thirteen," Joel said.
Peter winced and handed his credit card over. "Did the price of the three-fifty go up again?"
"Yup. Another four bucks. Sorry, Petey." "Not much we can do, I guess," Peter said, as Joel swiped the card through the reader.
"Don't I know it. The distributor says he can't do anything since the manufacturer's raised his prices . . ." Joel sighed. The reader beeped twice: Joel looked down at it, then raised his eyebrows. "Uh oh. They declined it."
Peter swallowed. "Didn't get the payment yet, I guess." "Wouldn't be surprised. Did I tell you I sent my sister-in-law in Brooklyn a birthday card two weeks early, and it didn't get to her until two weeks afterwards? I ask you. You'd think we were in Europe or something. Come to think of it, I get letters from my cousin there faster than I do from Cecile."
Peter dug out his wallet and produced the necessary cash, noting sadly that this process left him with the munificent sum of one dollar and sixty cents. "Yeah," he said. "Here you go."
"Right." Joel handed him his change. "Hey, Petey—" Peter turned, already halfway to the door. Joel waggled his eyebrows at him. "Don't let it get you down. It can only get better."
Almost against his will, Peter smiled. "Yeah. See you, Joel."
"See you."
All the same, as he walked on down the street, it was hard for Peter to see any way that things would get better any time soon. There's only one thing, he thought, that's going to make it seem worthwhile.
Tonight. . . .
The apartment was empty when he got there. It was big and roomy, with a nice enough view of the skyline, and a slightly less impressive view of the next-building-over's roof, about ten stories below their own and in this weather well covered with people in bathing suits trying to get a tan through the smog. The apartment's big windows let in plenty of light on white walls and a polished oak floor. There, as in some of MJ's show-business friends' apartments, it might have stopped, finding not much else to shine on. But unlike them, MJ had no patience with the presently fashionable minimalist school of decorating which considered one couch and one throw rug "enough furniture" and left the place looking barren as a Japanese raked-sand garden. Mary Jane Watson had been something of a packrat—though in the best possible taste—and Mary Jane Watson-Parker remained so. Her tastes ran more toward Laura Ashley than Danish Modern: big comfy sofas and chairs to curl up in, cushions scattered around, lots of bookshelves with lots of things on them—vases, bric-a-brac old and new (mostly old), and lots of books. It made for a comfortable and welcoming environment, though it was a pain to keep properly dusted.
Dusting, though, was not on Peter's mind at the moment. The new strobe slave was. Peter made his way back to the darkroom, unloaded the developing chemicals and the paper, and went back out to the front of the apartment to see what the answering machine had for him. Two invitations to subscribe to the New York Times (which they already did), one offer to clean their carpets (there weren't any), two anonymous please-call-this-number messages (probably bill collectors: sighing, Peter took the numbers and wished the machine had thrown one of its occasional fits and lost the messages). No offers of work, no parties, no sudden legacies, no good news.
Oh well. Tonight. . . .
Peter got up and went back to the table where he had dropped the new strobe slave. It was often difficult to take decent pictures when you weren't behind the camera, but in front of it as Spider-Man. It was tough to pay much attention to f-stops and exposure times when you were duking it out with some bad guy. It was the devil to keep the camera pointed at the action when you were swinging by your webline from one rooftop or another. Also, criminals, both the elite supervillain types and your ordinary garden-variety crooks, were generally not very amenable to staying in the camera frame while you were having it out with them. Peter had been trying to find a solution to both of those problems for some while.
Now, though, I might have one. On the table, left over from where he had been fixing MJ's sunglasses the other night, was a set of ultra-tiny screwdrivers which he also used for jobs like maintenance on his web-shooters and getting the faceplate off the microwave when its LEDs failed. Now he picked up the third-largest of the group, undid the screws on the bottom and sides of the strobe, and carefully pried the backplate off, taking a long look at the insides. It was a fairly straightforward array, though some of the soldering on the chip at its heart was slapdash. A transistor, some assorted diodes, all labeled for a change; an LED to tell you when the gadget was armed; the light sensor; and a bypass circuit to take it out of commission when you had some other triggering mechanism jacked into the input.
Fair enough. Peter had one other piece of hardware which would communicate with this readily enough, with some programming. Miniaturization had worked enough wonders of late, but there was one that not a lot of people but researchers in the sciences knew about. To take up less room on the lab benches, some bright guy in the Far East had taken a whole PC computer motherboard and worked out how to fit it on a board the size of two cigarette packs laid end to end. That, with enough RAM chips, was enough machine-smarts to run a fairly sensitive motion-control apparatus—and that was what Peter had been working on for a while now. The Engineering Department at Empire State University had assumed that one of the doctoral candidates was doing a little good-natured slumming when he came down to pick their brains about the fine points of motion control programming. Privately they thought that the guys up in Nuclear Physics were getting twitchy about handling the radioactives themselves, and were trying to teach the computers how to do it for them. They could hardly have suspected the real purpose of Peter's visits. Pretty soon, though, he would have something of considerable use to a photographer who was also a crimefighter. Bit by bit, he was building a camera which, with the right motion sensor attached, would turn by itself to follow the action taking place around it, and which could be remotely triggered, and which (if the aforesaid crimefighter got too busy) would follow his movements and fire at preset default intervals. Once this creature was built, his bosses at the Bugle would have fewer complaints about the poor composition of Peter's shots compared to other photographers'.
And his credit card company would be much happier with him.
For half an hour or so he fiddled with the slave strobe. The actual movement-controlling hardware, the guts of an old portable telescope's cannibalized and much-altered clock drive, had been ready for a while. All Peter had needed was a suitable actuator. This new slave would do fine until something more sophisticated came along. The afternoon shadows moved across the apartment, and finally the windows lost the sun. Peter barely noticed, finishing his adjustments to the slave itself and then going to fetch the system's moving parts and the camera itself. It was his best one, a Minax 5600si, with an extremely advanced automatic exposure- and shutter-control system—which it would need, when its owner was hanging by synthesized spiderweb from the top of some building, swinging after a crook, tens or even hundreds of yards away. The camera screwed i
nto a little platform with a ball-and-socket joint able to yaw, roll, and pitch. That, in turn, screwed into the top of a small collapsible tripod which had the motion-control motors and the teeny PC motherboard, each bolted to one of the tripod's legs in a small shockproof case. The whole business, when collapsed, would fit comfortably into a backpack or one of the several elastic pouches that Peter had built into his costume over time.
Finally, there it all stood, ungainly looking but theoretically functional. He took the camera off its stand, popped off its back, rooted around in a nearby desk drawer for some of the time-expired film he used for tests, loaded the camera, and seated it on the stand again.
The instant the camera was turned on, it whirled on the stand. The camera's inboard flash went off as it took his picture, and another one, and another, and another. . . .
"Oh jeez," he muttered, "cut it out." He stepped away, trying to come around the setup sideways to turn off the slave. Unfailingly the camera followed, taking pictures as fast as it could wind itself, about one per second. The flash was beginning to dazzle Peter. He jumped over the table and took a few steps further around it. The camera tried to follow, fouled itself on its own motion-control cables, and got stuck, still taking picture after picture, its motor making a pitiful and persistent little hnh, hnh, hnh noise as it tried to follow him right around the table. Peter reached out and caught the tripod just as it was about to fall over.