Iwish I understood it, Peter thought as he made his way down the hall. It's not as if Spider-Man ever really had it in for JJJ. Maybe he was just one of those personalities, like the old king in Thurber, who thought that "everything was pointed at him" to begin with. That Spider-Man should be as well would only help him make more sense of the world. But who knew?
In any case, JJJ had long since made up his mind and no longer had any desire to be confused by facts. Peter doubted any fact concerning Spider-Man was big enough to do anything but hit Jonah and bounce at this point.
At any rate, he had other things on his mind right now. First, that voucher. He took himself downstairs to the accounting offices, and took his turn standing in line at the cashier's armor-glass window. Maya smiled from behind the window, and said, "Long time no see!"
It was her constant tease, one she used with all the freelancers. "Yeah," Peter said. He handed her the voucher.
She widened her eyes appreciatively at the sight of it. "That'll buy some cat food," she said.
Peter chuckled. "We don't have cats."
"I know," Maya said. "Which makes you the perfect home for one of the new kittens!"
"Maya," Peter groaned. "Don't tell me you still haven't had her spayed!"
"I just hate interfering with nature," Maya said. Her beautiful Persian had struck up a nonplatonic and extremely fruitful relationship with a handsome black tom from several buildings over, and periodically escaped, the result being litter after litter of gorgeous, long-furred, mixed-color kittens, with which Maya had populated half the Bugle's employees' apartments. "No, thanks," Peter said gratefully. "We're a no-pets building."
Maya tsked, handing him the cash. "Terrible sort of place to live," she said. "You should move out."
Peter just sighed, but thought, We may have to if Venom finds us again. . . . He headed off.
"I've got a real cute one!" she shouted after him. "Black longhair!"
Peter just waved at her and kept going. He had a lot more than cats on his mind.
He took the elevator back up to the second floor to the Bugle's morgue. These were the archives where earlier editions of the paper were kept. Once upon a time, they had been kept in their original paper format; later, the archives had gone over to microfilm, but over time, even that had proved too bulky. Now both new paper and old microfilm were being stored on CD-ROM, able to be called up instantly from any terminal at the newspaper. At least, that was the plan. Everybody would be able to do that when the new system was completely installed, but at present the installation was only half done and the staff half trained. And there would always be those who preferred to go down to the morgue as a break from being stuck at their desks. Many claimed that this new system was in fact intended to keep them at their desks, where keystroke-activated "smart" productivity monitoring systems buried in the software would keep track of who was working and who was slacking off. Peter had heard of such things at other companies, but he personally doubted anything like that would be brought online at the Bugle. He suspected strongly that JJJ was too cheap to pay for such stuff, preferring to go stalking into people's offices and bug them about their productivity personally.
Peter sauntered into the big airy room. There were only a few people at the scattered workstations. Off to one side, the big mainframe computer sat, making no noise except that of its private air conditioners. The rest of the place, too, was pleasantly cool, the computer's own aggressive air-conditioning keeping the temperature down.
Bob the computer maven wandered over to Peter as he stood looking around. Bob was a big, rugged-looking, handsome Irish guy, another one gone prematurely silver, with a mustache to match, and a big engaging smile. He looked less like a software nerd than anything you could imagine. "You need some help?" he said to Peter.
"Just a spare terminal. I could use a look at today's edition, too," Peter said.
Bob grinned at him. "Why not just pick up a paper?"
"What," Peter said, "and get newsprint all over me?"
Bob snickered. "We could make a software jockey out of you eventually," he said. "Come on over here."
He showed Peter to a spare terminal and handed him a photocopied booklet. "There," he said. "This is the idiot's guide. Control-Fl gives you the main menu. Just page through it and pick the day you want."
The screen in front of Peter was a big handsome one, the size of a full tabloid page. Bob hit the keys for him the first time, and the menu came up on screen: a numbered list of dates, starting with today's and proceeding backwards. "Morning edition okay?" Bob said. "Evening's not out of comp yet."
"Morning is fine."
Bob brought up the page. It appeared in black and white. The front page had a quite well composed but not terribly illuminating photo of the shattered wall in the warehouse, a few canisters still scattered about, all rather dark. A little hurried, Peter thought. If I were him, I would have waited and gone up a couple more f-stops—gotten a little more light.
He pushed the arrow key to turn the "page," looking for the rest of the story. "Give a shout if you need anything," Bob said, and strolled off to see about something else.
Peter read on through the continuation on page three. The language was straightforward enough. Venom was indeed accused of the murder of his friend by a homeless man squatting in the warehouse, the man whom Peter had seen early that morning on the news. The story gave a little more detail: the address of the warehouse; its owner, Consolidated Chemical Research Corp. in New Jersey; and some detail, rather garbled, about what Venom had looked like to the man. The description mostly focused on the tentacles the man saw. That was accurate as far as it went: the symbiote's tentacles looked like strands and long flowing lines, tendrils that came alive and reached for what they wanted.
But the part of it all which still left Peter most confused was that Venom did this at all. Venom had settled in San Francisco and was supposedly protecting homeless people there. The idea that Venom would kill a homeless person, much less any innocent bystander, was hard for Peter to imagine. One of his few redeeming qualities was his belief that the innocent were to be protected at all costs, that life had given them a hard enough run as it was, and that somewhere they needed a protector.
Something, though. . . . Peter paged forward to see if there was anything more about the story but filler. Nothing.
He paged back again. Consolidated Chemical Research, he thought. I could have sworn that CCRC had a sign on that warehouse where I was last night. He pulled out the contact sheet from his portfolio, studied it. Yes, on that photo near the front of the roll, the lens had just caught it. Three letters out of four: CCR. . . . Right, he thought. And the likeness between the canisters, which MJ had spotted: she had been absolutely right.
And here, that weird detail which the homeless man reported in today's story, that he had seen Venom drink the radioactive toxic waste. Peter sat there and shook his head.
Is this some weird nezv taste the symbiote's developed? he wondered.
"How's it going?" Bob said, materializing at his shoulder.
"Not too bad. Is there a way to scan for a specific word or phrase in this thing?"
"Oh, sure. You want to scan for a string? Just take it out of graphic mode. Here." Bob tapped the control key. The screen went mostly blank, except for a C:> prompt up in the corner. Then Bob entered something which didn't echo to the screen—a password, probably. The screen went dark and showed another menu. One option highlighted on it was "string search."
"There," Bob said. "You get, I think, up to sixty-four characters. There are ways to sort for two or three phrases at once, if you want. Just hit this one here and it'll show you the sample screen, with examples of how to enter the stuff so you get what you want."
"Hey, this isn't so bad," Peter said. "Why's everyone complaining about it?"
"Because it's not what they had the last time," Bob said, resigned.
Peter grinned. "That's okay. In five years they'll get used to th
is, and then Jonah will bring in something newer."
Bob moaned. "Don't tell me," he said. "I know damn well."
Peter turned back to the screen and had a look at the help menu. Carefully, because he knew how relentlesslystupid computers were about typographical errors, he typed, "CONSOLIDATED CHEMICAL RESEARCH."
"One Moment Please," the screen said. "Processing Your Request."
The cursor sat there and blinked at Peter for a little while. Then, up came a list of locations in the text archives where the computer had spotted the name. There weren't that many of them. The company was a newish one, as Peter found from reading the articles, mostly from the financial pages: a small company specializing in radioactive materials of various kinds, tailored isotopes for radioimmunoassay, and the medical equipment and so forth needed to handle them. None of the articles contained anything particularly interesting.
The last two entries on the main menu were: (8) Crossindex to Yellow Pages and (9) Crossindex to White Pages. Peter chose the second. The New York phone directory came up, with a long listing of addresses—corporate headquarters in the city, some other office addresses, and then their warehouses. There were four. One was the warehouse Peter had been in last night. The other one was the warehouse into which Venom had supposedly broken.
He backed up to the main menu again, and this time carefully typed, "VENOM."
"Age Of Story?" the computer prompted.
Peter thought. "THREE WEEKS," he typed.
"Incorrect Entry! Please Try Again," said the computer.
Peter frowned. "21," he typed instead.
"One Moment Please," said the computer. "Your Request Is Being Processed."
Peter waited. At least it didn't play music while processing.
Finally, "ONE REFERENCE," the computer said.
Aha! Peter thought. He hit (1).
The screen filled, and the byline made him catch his breath. "San Francisco—A revolutionary breakthrough in snake-farming techniques means that for the first time, the antidote for rattlesnake venom will not have to be given in multi-vial doses, over the course of days, but in a single injection—"
"Oh, phooey," said Peter. He backed out of that story, went back to its menu and the one before that, and studied the search criteria a little more carefully. But there seemed no way to differentiate between snake venom and the Venom Peter had most in mind. What this thing needs is a proper name filter, he thought.
He paused, then typed, "VENOM + SAN FRANCISCO." The computer asked him for days again, and he told it "21."
"ONE REFERENCE," the computer screen said. Peter asked to have that displayed, feeling sure that it was going to be the same snake-venom story.
It was. Peter sat back and looked at the screen. At least, I think I know what this means. He hasn't been sighted in San Francisco at all. At least— He backtracked through the computer's menus to the point where one choice offered was, Crossindex To Other Newspapers/News Services. Peter chose that, and when the program asked him again for search phrases, once more typed VENOM + SAN FRANCISCO.
"ONE REFERENCE," it said, and once again, it was the snake-venom story.
Not a peep out of him, then, Peter thought. No one's seen him or heard from him—not the wires, not the papers.
Which means he really could be in New York. . . .
Or anywhere else, of course. There was no telling, with this dearth of data.
I still don't get it, though. Radioactives. . . .
He sat still and thought for a moment. Radioactives. There was not a lot of radioactive material loose in the city. The stuff in the hospitals—gamma sources for radiotherapy, blood isotope material and so forth—was too developed, too single-purpose, for much criminal use to be made of it. What a crook would want, Peter thought, would be less refined nuclear material, or nuclear material in bulk, or both. And there were only a couple of places in the city, really, where you could get such stuff. . . .
Peter put that aside for the moment. It was simpler to deal with the facts as he understood them. He knew that two CCRC warehouses had been hit in one night, by different people—or entities, he thought—and possibly for different reasons. Both perpetrators had been interested in those canisters of waste for reasons Peter couldn't yet understand. In the case of the warehouse where the homeless men had been sleeping, who or what the perpetrator had been remained unproven. Peter still couldn't believe that Venom was involved.
As for the Hobgoblin—what would he want with nuclear material? Hobby's motivations were something he had studied in the past. They seemed generally to come down to one thing—money. Either he would steal money directly, or he would steal something which he could ransom or sell to get a lot of money, or he would hire himself out as a mercenary for money. Nuclear waste, though? Peter got up from the terminal and hefted his portfolio. It was all very peculiar.
Then an idea, a sort of doomsday scenario, leapt to his mind.A bomb? Plans for atomic bombs were not hard to find: high school students had made them. The Freedom of Information Act made it possible to get all the data you needed except for a few crucial bits of information about critical mass and so forth, but those could be worked out by someone with, in one case, no better than high-school physics. The problem, of course, was the size. A bomb of any real destructive power could not be made very small. But small enough. You could hide a fairly damaging nuke in the trunk of a car, a much worse one in the back of a truck. There was certainly no question that, if he felt like it and had the time, Hobgoblin could build such a thing himself.
Even if he didn't want to, there were enough terrorists, cranky underpaid scientists-for-hire, and disaffected high-school physics students whom Hobby could get to do such a job for him. But why now? It's can't be that the idea just occurred to him. Such do-it-yourself bombs had been in the news for years—either the possibility of them or the actuality. If Hobby were in fact building a bomb, or masterminding one, why right this minute? Why not a long time ago?
Either the talent he needed had just become available— or something else had just become available.
What?
Peter shook his head and waved to Bob, heading out of the morgue. There were still too many pieces missing from this puzzle. What he was sure of, though, was that Venom was not involved in this.
Peter was equally sure, though, that Venom did not like having his name used behind his back. If you mentioned him often enough, he had a way of turning up. And when he did ... all hell broke loose.
Just what we don't need right now, Peter thought. Bad enough to have Hobby messing around with some kind of unspecified nuclear material. All we need is old Chomp-'n'-Drool showing up at the same time.
Still, there were at least two very obvious places where nuclear material, in raw and refined forms, was kept and worked with, sometimes even stockpiled. One was Empire State University, where Peter was working on his doctorate. Half the doctoral candidates in the place were working in some aspect of nuclear physics, having sought out the labs there, widely thought to be the best-equipped on the East Coast. The other place—about which he had heard enough complaints over time, from people who didn't care to have nukes so close to New York City—was the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nuclear subs came there, docked, and were refuelled and defuelled. A visit over there as Spider-Man would not go amiss.
Peter chuckled a little as he walked out of the Bugle offices. The Hunt for Web October, huh? he thought—
Preoccupied with all this information he'd just processed, he blithely stepped off the curb. The blare of the horn practically in his ear shocked Peter almost out of his skin. He jumped back, almost fell over, reeled to one side and clutched a lamppost to keep himself from ramming into it. "Why don'cha watch where you're going, ya dummy!" shouted the voice of the driver of the truck which had almost turned Peter into pate.
He stood watching the truck roar away. My spider-sense should have warned me— But of course, it was gone, still gone, for another eighteen hours at least.
/> Peter muttered under his breath. I'm going to have to be a lot more aware of my surroundings until this clears up. He ostentatiously looked both ways, and crossed the street.
Mary Jane Watson-Parker sighed, settled herself in front of the bathroom mirror, and started putting on her makeup. Her thoughts drifted to the apparent reappearance of Venom. Once, long ago, in one of those earlier apartments she and Peter had shared, she encountered Eddie Brock standing over her. Because he knew Spider-Man's real identity, it had been easy for him to track them down. She found herself wondering whether they were going to have to move again, and if so, how the heck they were going to afford it. First-last-and-deposit on anyplace decent was really out of their reach at the moment, unemployed as she was and with Peter's employment on the sporadic side. But if we have to, we'll manage it. Somehow. She refused to tolerate the idea that a costumed villain—or, in Venom's case, a villained costume—was going to start invading her and her husband's personal space again. If there was something Peter deserved, it was a quiet place away from the bizarre and dreadful people and creatures with whom his work brought him into conflict.
She got out the mascara, fiddled with the brush to get the usual huge blob off the end of it, and began working on her lashes. MJ had become more philosophical about Peter's work over the last couple of years. There had been a time when she thought perhaps married life would steady him down to the point where he wouldn't need his "night job" anymore, where his family life would be enough to make him renounce those long dangerous nights out. Now she smiled briefly at her own old naivete. Peter's commitment to what he did was profound, though he covered that commitment with glib, good-natured street talk most of the time as a distraction. Once MJ had come to realize this, life had become both simpler and more difficult. Simpler, because she stopped waiting for something which was never going to come; more difficult, because now she had to struggle for two. They were a team.
The issue of support came up sometimes with some of the women she knew from her television and modeling work. It wasn't that the men weren't trying, holding down menial jobs while struggling to make it. The women, meanwhile, would gather in one of their occasional kaffeeklatsch sessions, in the back of some studio or off to the side of some photo shoot, nodding and grinning a little ruefully at one another as they compared stories.