"Hush, woman." He chuckled, though it wasn't really all that funny; and briefly he told MJ about the evening's confrontation with Hobgoblin, while WNN went on briefly about the new Madonna movie and details of a press conference the Avengers had recently called. "And there was nothing in there," he said at last, "but some big canisters . . ." His voice trailed off.
"Like those you just saw on the news?" MJ said, raising her eyebrows.
"Like those. ... I can't go to sleep," he said, getting up with a groan. "I've got to get those pictures developed and get them in to the Bugle, and I've got to get a look in the morgue—"
"The morgue," MJ said dryly, "is exactly where you're going to wind up if you go out in this condition."
There was no point in arguing with her in this mood, Peter knew. He sat there quietly, thinking about which stock to use for developing the pictures, and drank what MJ gave him. But the decaf coffee was mostly milk, and Peter sat back, just for a few moments. . . .
MJ stood up, smiled, looked at him and shook her head.
"It's the hot milk," she said with satisfaction. "That tryptophan does it every time." She went away to get a quilt to cover Peter, turned off the TV, and then slipped into the kitchen to see about her own pot of coffee.
Peter blinked at the sunshine suddenly filling the living room. He blinked harder. Oh, God, I overslept. "MJ, why didn't you get me up?!" he said. No answer, nor would there be one, he realized. The apartment had that particular empty sound. As Peter sat up on the couch, the quilt fell to the floor along with a note. Moaning a little—the bruises from last night had now had time to stiffen up—Peter bent over to pick it up. "Gone out for Daily Variety and H'wd Reporter," it said. "Had hot tip this morning, might mean work. See you later. Love love love love," followed by a little tangle of X's and O's.
Peter dropped the note onto the coffee table, yawned, stretched, moaned again, stretched some more regardless. The smell of coffee was drifting through the apartment. Just like MJ to have made a pot and left it for me. . . . He staggered to his feet, wandered into the kitchen, poured himself a cup, added a couple of sugars, stirred and drank. When the caffeine buzz starting to hit, he headed down the hall to the bathroom, this time to hunt down the extra-strength aspirin.
Peter took a couple of aspirin and a long drink of cold water, then turned the shower on and climbed in, letting the hot water pummel him into some kind of flexibility again. When he could move without whimpering, he turned the water to cold and let the change in temperature blast him awake. Another fifteen minutes saw him dressed, combed, downing another cup of coffee, and heading for his darkroom.
He turned on the red light and closed the door behind him. He glanced at his workbench, where someone had placed his camera and a plastic-wrapped sandwich on a plate, with a note on top. The note said, "NOW YOU EAT THIS, DUMMY! XOXOXO," and had a lipstick kiss imprint on the bottom of the page. Smiling, Peter unwrapped the plastic and sniffed. Tuna salad: good enough for breakfast.
He spent a few moments hauling down the jugs of developing chemicals and mixing them, getting them ready in the various pans. Then he pulled the string for the exhaust fan to get rid of the stink, and began to break the camera down, pulling out the rewound film. He stripped it carefully out of the canister, dropped the long coil into the first developer pan, and started the timer.
He chomped down the first half of the sandwich while squinting to see how the negatives were doing. In this light, as usual, it was impossible to tell. For him, this was always the worst part of photography: waiting in hope. A picture that seemed useful at first might have inequities of grain, or color, or contrast, which would turn it into so much mud on the printed page. There was no way to tell until you did the contact prints, and in some cases not even then—sometimes you had to do trial blowups of a print in which you were interested to see whether it would really work—and there was that much paper and chemical gone as a result, money down the drain if the picture was no good. One of the risks of the art. . . .
The timer went off. He reached into the bath with a pair of tongs, swished the film around a little, then hoisted it out and dropped it into the fixer. The first glimpse looked good. A lot of the pictures had strong diagonals, he could see that much even now, Whether the fine detail would be good enough, though, remained to be seen. He started the timer again, and waited.
While watching the timer tick its dial around backwards, Peter started on the second half of the sandwich. Venom, he thought. Now there would have been someone to have pictures of. The only problem, for him at least, was that when Venom was in the neighborhood, he was usually too busy trying to keep his skin in one piece to worry about photo opportunities of any kind. If Venom really is in town, though, I'm going to have to deal with him quickly.
Probably soon, too. When Venom suddenly reappeared, it didn't usually take long for him to hunt Spider-Man down—or worse, to do the same to Peter Parker. That had been one of the worst problems of all. Venom knew his secret identity, knew where to find him, and knew where to find MJ. Venom's big, broad-shouldered silhouette was not one he ever wanted to see on his living-room wall again.
The timer went off. He pulled the film out of the fixer, held it up to the red light, and took his first good look at the negatives. "Awright," he breathed. There were some good jumping shots of him, good shots of the Hobgoblin, and nice ones of the two of them. The motion sensor was doing its work. He wondered if he could slightly improve its effectiveness by adding to the motion-control system some routines from the software which managed his spider-tracers. Plant one on the super-villain, he thought, so that the computer keeps him in frame all the time. He was not so egotistical as to care whether he was in those shots, particularly. The city knew pretty well what Spider-Man looked like; it was the super-villains who fascinated them, and in any shot containing both a hero and a villain, it was best to have the villain better centered.
And then he saw something else he had hoped for—one of the first shots in the roll, and as a result one of the last ones he came to—a shot of the robbery actually in progress. "Not bad," he said softly. "This'll get their attention, if nothing else does."
He looked thoughtfully at the big canisters in the photo. One thing the camera was not good at, unfortunately, was zooming. He couldn't really make out much beyond the big warning—radiation trefoil on the side. No use trying for an enlargement, really.
Now then—prints. He pulled a pad close and began scribbling notes. Two, six, seven, eight, nine. . . .fourteen, sixteen . . . eighteen. . . . He marked which of them he would print, checked the ones he wanted as eight-by-tens rather than three-by-fives, then shrugged a bit. A contact sheet, six eight-by-tens, then this one, this one . . . that one. . . . Done.
After that, things moved quickly. Picking the exposures was always the worst part of the work for him. You had to anticipate your editor. Sometimes it was hard to tell what they would prefer: did they want the more carefully composed picture, or the one with more fine detail? The best you could do was pick the best of each, bring a sampling of the others, and a contact sheet. That sheet—which showed a thumbnail of every picture on the roll—had saved his bacon more than once when his editors had chosen a picture that Peter hadn't bothered to make into a print for one reason or another.
He got to work, pulling out his printing stock, setting up the enlarger, cutting the negatives down to more manageable strips of five. The developing took him about another three-quarters of an hour.
The clock was running, now. Two o'clock was the cutoff for the five-o'clock evening edition, and no one would thank a photographer who came in on the stroke of two, just as the big web presses were being prepped. One o'clock would be good, noon better still—but noon was pretty much impossible now. He twitched slightly at the thought of which photographers might have beaten him down to the office with other pictures. Some of the editors at the Bugle in particular felt that a picture in the hand was worth any two in the bush, regardless of quali
ty, but there was no telling which editor was going to make the call on your photos, either. If Kate Cushing was in today, Peter knew she liked to have pictures in early, rather than good—though she wanted them good as well.
Shortly the pictures were hanging up on the little "clothesline" of string. Peter snapped the white light on and looked at them, while fanning them dry with his hand. They were a fairly good-looking bunch. It had been a good first test of the camera's motion control. The camera had gotten one particularly good chance shot, a full-face view of Hobby running straight at the camera without his having been aware it was there. Peter looked at the grinning face, slightly strained out of shape by the speed of the turn Hobgoblin had just made, and thought, That's the one. If she doesn't want that one, I can't imagine what her problem is. Assuming the editor in question was Kate. She could sometimes be a dreadful stickler for quality—not necessarily a bad thing, when you were in competition with all the other newspapers in town, but annoying to the photographer with credit card bills to pay.
Peter smiled as he took down that head-on shot, and two others: one of Spider-Man leaping directly at Hobby, the webline reaching up and out of frame at a most dramatic angle, another of the warehouse floor, Hobgoblin streaking up and out past the camera's point of view, a very lucky shot both in that Hobby could as easily have come up out of any other of the skylights, and that he might also easily have tipped the camera over as he zipped past. Gotta find a way to lower the center of gravity on that tripod, he thought as he took down the last of the prints and flicked its edge with one finger to see if it was still tacky. It wasn't. Peter slipped it and its companions into a compartmented paper portfolio, put that in turn into his leather photo envelope, packed in the negatives as well, and finished the last of the tuna fish sandwich. Payday today, he thought, in as hopeful a mood as he could manage, and headed out to the Bugle.
Half an hour later he was standing in the air-conditioning just inside Kate's office door, while one by one she peeled the photos out of the paper portfolio and dropped them on the desk. "Not too bad," she said, dropping the one with the canisters, and "That's OK, a little dark." Then, with an intake of breath and a smile, "What an ugly sonofabitch he is."
Peter heard the faraway sound of cash registers. He knew that smile, slight as it was. "He won't win any beauty contests," he said.
Kate held up the full-face picture of Hobgoblin. "How did you get that one?" she asked, cocking an eye at Peter.
He shrugged. "Long lens," he said.
The look she threw at him was amicably suspicious. "Since when can you afford lenses that give you that kind of detail without grain? Then again, this is that new ASA 8000 film, isn't it?"
"Six," he said. "I got a price break on it."
"You must have," Kate said. "Buy much of that stuff at the regular prices and you just about have to go into escrow. Well—" She held up the Hobgoblin shot. "This one with the canisters—this is the actual robbery itself, isn't it?"
Peter nodded.
Kate looked sidewise at him. "Enthusiasm is a good thing," she said, "but you want to watch you don't get reckless. What you were doing up on that rooftop, that time of night?"
Peter opened his mouth, thought better of it and shut it again. Kate just smiled. "Long lens," she said. "I remember." Then she added: "Came in with this a little late today, didn't you?"
"As soon as I could."
"Yes, well, I sent someone down to the crime scene already," she said. Peter's heart sank. "And he's back, and the pictures are developed, and already in the system for pasteup. Now I'm going to have to get into the system again and pull them out. You could have saved me some trouble by being a little earlier. I hate that damn new software."
Peter smiled. This was a common complaint all over the Bugle. They had just gone over to a new computer-based pasteup system, and everyone was moaning about the endless inservices needed to learn how to use it, especially since they were used to the old system, no matter that this one was supposed to be so much more flexible and usable. "Anyway," Kate said, "anybody who's out with this 'long lens' in the middle of the night and gets pictures like this, deserves a little over his rate."
She scribbled for a moment on a pad, looked at the numbers, made a change. "Here," she said, "this should help you get some sleep tonight." She reached for another pad, the sight of which made Peter's heart rise again: it was the voucher pad, and you took the filled-out form on it to the cashier downstairs. Whatever she was writing, Peter could see that it was in three figures.
She tore off the sheet and handed it to him, and Peter could see which three figures. He suppressed the gasp. This figure was half the Visa bill, on the spot. "Thanks, Kate," he said.
She waved a hand at him negligently. "You do the work, you get the pay," she said. "The composition on these is a little better than what you've been showing me lately."
Peter said nothing, but was silently glad that the motion sensor was performing as advertised.
"Initiative, I don't mind. Enthusiasm is fine. Just you be careful," Kate said.
"Yes, ma'am," Peter said, and walked out.
He wandered down the hall clutching the voucher, looking at it once or twice to make sure it wasn't actually a typo or a mistake. But she had written the amount both in numbers and words. As Peter went down the hall, he could hear two familiar voices. Had they been anyone else's, he would have called what he was hearing an argument. As it was, when one of the voices belonged to J. Jonah Jameson, the noise going on was merely a discussion. "What the hell am I paying you for?" J. Jonah was shouting out his open door. This, too, was an indication of the casual level of the discussion; for a real argument, JJJ would have been right out into the hall.
"How could you possibly be so obtuse? Here we have the biggest super-villain ever to hit this city, and one of the worst, and you know why he's here."
"I don't, actually," said Robbie Robertson's calm voice. "He seems to have forgotten to fax me his itinerary again."
"Don't get cute with me, Robbie." JJJ emerged into the hall, gesticulating. "All the other papers are going to be all over this like a cheap suit. You know perfectly well that any time Venom turns up, Spider-Man turns up as well, and they begin bashing each other all over this city, trashing buildings, driving the city's garbage-removal budget through the ceiling, and doing all the other kinds of things that make news." He stalked back into the office again, apparently waving disgustedly at the computer. "And we're stuck with two-bit break-ins, and secondhand reporting about flying hooligans zooming around, flinging exploding squash in all directions. We should be coming down a lot harder on this Venom story. It's just not the same as—"
"As the news-worthiness of having the flesh flayed off your bones? No, I suppose not," the answer came back. "But the police are saying that the forensics are looking a little funny. We don't have enough—"
"Funny? Now how can they not look funny when the thing that committed the murder is half psychopathic human and half some kind of mind-reading man-eating amoeba with a bad body image? Yet another little present to our fair city from Spider-Man, let me remind you. I tell you, there is not a garbage can in this town that you won't find the damn webslinger at the bottom of it—"
"There is not enough data to lean really hard on the Venom story," Robbie said calmly, "and I would sooner be late than be wrong. Extremely wrong."
"C'mon, Robbie," JJJ grumbled. "Right is doing it first. And I know it's right. I know it's Venom. I can feel it in my bones. This is some kind of plot between Venom and Spider-Man. I've seen it before. One turns up, and the other turns up, and the city gets trashed. And I refuse to miss the chance to cover it in my paper!"
"With all due respect—" Robbie said quietly.
"Yes, yes, with all due respect, you're not going to do what I say, because I'm not editor-in-chief anymore, and you are."
"Something like that," Robbie said, "yes. You can say what you like about it in your publisher's editorials. But while I'm
editing, I edit. When I don't think there's enough data to set a story on, I let it build up until there is."
"I don't know what this business is becoming these days," JJJ bellowed, coming out into the hall again, with Robbie ambling along behind him, sucking resignedly on his empty pipe.
Peter was standing nearby, leaning as respectfully as he could on the wall nearby—being careful to put his pay voucher out of sight lest JJJ should get a glimpse of it and start going on about his freelancers being seriously overpaid. He couldn't resist putting in his two cents. "But Jonah," he said. "Spider-Man—"
JJJ whirled on him. "And what would you know about it?"
"That Spider-Man wasn't anywhere around there," Peter said. "He was off fighting Hobgoblin when Venom showed up."
"Oh? Who says?
"I saw him," Peter said. "I got pictures of it."
"Did you, now?" Robbie said, his eyebrows going up.
"Hmm," Jonah said. "Think, Parker, use your brains! Don't you know what it means?"
Peter looked at Robbie, who just gave an infinitesimal shake of his head. "No, sir," Peter said.
"It means Spider-Man, Venom, and Hobgoblin are all in it together! Hobgoblin strikes in one spot, then Spider-Man turns up to pretend to fight him, and while they're drawing attention away, Venom is off murdering people on the other side of the city, or committing some other kind of weird crime! Drinking toxic waste, it looks like, for pity's sake. As if that monster isn't enough trouble, without messing with stuff like that as well."
"Oh," Peter said, not able to find much to add.
"Oh, go on," Jonah said, glaring at him and gesturing away between himself and Robbie. "I'm tired of looking at you. You just don't have any imagination, that's the problem. And as for you," he said, turning to Robbie.
Robbie winked at Peter as Peter slid by. For his own part, Peter was glad enough to escape. When Jonah got on one of these rolls, there was no stopping him. He would blame Spider-Man for the federal budget deficit, global warming, and World War II if he kept going long enough.