"I don't know," said the man in the jeans, taking a long look at the spot that Hank had been working on. "He's never been too big on social skills, has he?"
"Nah. I think it's 'cause'a not having much family."
Spider-Man spun a length of web between his hands, judged the length and thickness of it, and paused.
"Probably. I think he doesn't have much to take his mind off his work—"
Spider-Man leapt. The ensuing struggle was mercifully brief: in a matter of seconds, the man in the jeans was as thoroughly swathed in webbing as the first, and, also like him, fastened down to the back of another of the pallets. Silently, Spider-Man slipped around to the generator.
"I don't know," said the remaining man, looking absently at the stepped-on cigarette. "I think what he needs is something to do besides work. Maybe a bowling league, or a softball team, or something. If he just—mmmf!"
Spider-Man struck a few seconds later, and the third man joined his cohorts, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and stowed behind yet another pallet full of crates. Now then, Spider-Man thought, and he slipped into a new hiding place behind the generator itself.
Hobgoblin's voice could be heard, loud and getting louder, as he came in from the next room. "Look at that," he said testily, "it looks terrible. What am I paying you people for, anyway? Can't you even put simple machinery together straight? Look at that join, it's a mess. And then you stand around gabbing, after what I've paid you. Don't you understand that—Men? Where are you?"
Hobgoblin came through the door. "Where are you?" he demanded. Then he looked around in shock. "I can't believe it," he muttered to himself. "Look at this! This is not a time for a lunch break!" He stalked around—and Spider-Man watched Hobgoblin's face change as he realized it was not a matter of lunch breaks or anything else. He looked up and noticed the window where the grating had been torn out. "They're gone. Where'd they go?" And then his face changed under the mask from confusion to anger.
"Spider-Man!" he hissed. "All right, you two-bit web-slinger, I know you're in here somewhere! Come out!"
Hobgoblin ran for the jetglider. It rose under him, and he began swooping around the room, desperately trying to locate his enemy.
Spider-Man, grinning to himself, cried, "Two can play at this game, Hobby!" He bounded for the ceiling when Hobby was near the floor, for the floor when he was near the ceiling, always using the big installation in the middle as a way to stay out of sight. The effect, Spidey knew, would be utter confusion for Hobgoblin—he wouldn't know which way to turn.
"You've interfered with me for the last time, bug," Hobgoblin shouted, and abruptly, not five feet away from Spider-Man, in transit between a wall and the floor, a flash bomb went off. Warned by his spider-sense, Spidey ducked out of the way easily. It was followed by another, and another a few feet to Spidey's other side. He laughed to himself, though: Hobgoblin was chucking them around randomly, having no clear sense of where Spider-Man was.
"Spiders aren't bugs," Spider-Man called cheerfully as he dodged another flashbomb, "they're arachnids. But then you were never very strong on anything but the applied sciences." A few more flash bombs went off quite close to him. Trying to draw me out, Spider-Man thought as he leapt again. He felt exhilarated. After the time spent tonight walking in dark tunnels, the crouching and the claustrophobia, Spider-Man was glad of an excuse to stretch and move. Flash bombs popped and boomed all around him, but Hobby still hadn't seen where he was. Which was just as well; he had no desire to catch one of those up close, even though they were a lot less harmful than the pumpkin bombs were.
That caution, in itself, was diagnostic. He doesn't want to hurt his generator, Spider-Man realized. He doesn't dare. So long as I stay in here, we're okay.
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 a
nd 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 jet-glider.
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.
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. Fo
ur 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.