MJ sat down and started dunking the teabag in her cup again. "I keep thinking of gremlins. Or tribbles. What if feeding enables it to breed?"
Peter shuddered. "Don't even suggest it. If that thing reproduces, we've got real trouble on our hands. Can you imagine a bunch of those things running around, eating everything radioactive in sight? And the most obvious place for them to start would be the hospitals, looking for X-ray isotopes."
MJ dropped her teabag onto a nearby saucer. "You're so good at imagining the nasty things," she said, "and no good at all at imagining the good ones! There's a definite problem there."
"We'll deal with that later," Peter said. "But its metabolism . . . Everything has to get energy from somewhere. We tend to think of living things getting energy from food, or from sunlight if they're plants. But what if you had a life form that started out one way and was forced to adapt? To change from what we think of as normal sources of nutrition," he eyed the sandwich again, "and resort to a direct transfer of raw energy."
He stood up, paced around the table, then sat down again. "I'm not even an ordinary biologist, never mind a xenobiologist. This stuff isn't my strong suit, and it's giving me a headache. But radioactivity I know a little about. If there was a life-form that has the physical structure of a living nuclear reactor—" He shuddered.
MJ looked at him sympathetically. "Then maybe you need to ask for advice from somebody who does know about that kind of thing. Try Reed Richards. He's always been able to give you some sort of answer before. Why not now?"
"Because right now I don't even know if he's in town. And there's so much other stuff to do. I've got to do some more checking into these CCRC people, and then there's Venom, and there's Hobgoblin—"
"It occurs to me," MJ said, "that if Venom runs into this whatever-it-is that looks like him, there's going to be an almighty ruckus."
Peter nodded grimly. "Yeah. Probably right in the middle of the city, as usual. And in broad daylight. Venom doesn't wait for anything if he thinks the moment's right. Patience isn't something he's good at. And then I have to go after him. I can't just stand by and watch him waltz through and not do something about it." His voice trailed off and he rubbed at his shoulder, still sore from where he had gone crashing into the wall earlier on.
MJ saw the gesture. She walked around behind him and started rubbing his shoulders. "Do you know," she said conversationally, "how many tubes of Ben-Gay we've gone through since we got married?" Peter looked at her, completely confused. "Eighty-six," she said. "Deep Heat, Mentholatum, you name it. Every time I go to the grocery store, I have to buy more. The guy in the Gristede's asks me if I put it in my tea or something."
Peter's only reply was a groan of ecstasy as his wife rubbed the kinks out of his shoulders. He poked at the sandwich, decided not to waste it, and demolished it in about three or four bites.
MJ ceased the shoulder rub and said, "Your spider-sense still isn't back, I take it."
"Nope. It's possible I just got a really heavy dose of whatever Hobby was using last time."
MJ looked at him sadly. "You think that it's gone for good," she said. "At least, that's what's worrying you." He looked at her and she smiled a little, one-sided. "Do you seriously think you can hide that kind of thing from me at this point? I can recognize your 'brave face' at fifty paces. Wait a little longer and just watch your step. That sense is so much a part of your powers that when everything else is still working fine, I can't imagine it's going to be gone for long."
Peter smiled back at her. "It doesn't necessarily follow," he said, "but for the moment, I like your explanation better than any of the ones that I've got. And as for Hobby, he will strike again. If he doesn't do it tonight, it'll be tomorrow. And I can't do anything about tonight, because if I don't sleep, I'm going to fall over."
"You got that right," MJ said. "You are not leaving this house, no matter what happens between now and 8 A.M." Her eyes glinted. "I have plans for you."
"Oh, boy!" Peter said, and meant it, even though he was still somewhat distracted. "Anyway, as for Hobby. I really doubt that he's going to get any more stuff from any more warehouses. Anybody who's running an illegal trade in radioactives in this town will have noticed what's been happening, and they'll have slapped extra security on whatever they've got. So I think we can rule out CCRC or anyone else like them. Which leaves the legal sources." He frowned slightly. "They'll be raising their security levels too, but increased security hasn't stopped Hobby in the past. And I doubt it'll stop him tomorrow. Or the day after. So I'm going to have to do some patrolling myself."
"Do you have a good guess as to where he's going to be?" MJ said.
Peter nodded. "The only big legal nuclear research facility in New York right now is at ESU. There's enough material of the kind Hobby will want on campus for him to try making a grab. There's always somebody on the inside who'll talk about where things are for money, or fear . . . Hobby has a gift for finding people like that. If he doesn't know already where something is, he's going to find out soon."
"And what kind of luck are you going to have at finding out where things are?" MJ said.
He yawned, and stretched until his joints went click, then grinned at MJ. "Oh, I'll do all right. Tomorrow I'll stop by the lab, chat with some people, pick up on the gossip, hear what's going on."
"And do a little judicious inveigling of information?" MJ said.
"Oh yeah. I'm sure I can find out what I need to know. Because Hobby will turn up. I'm sure he will."
MJ was sipping her tea again, and looking thoughtful. "What about Venom?" she said.
"One thing at a time, please! I don't think it's a headache at all. I think my brain hurts."
"That's it," MJ said, pushing the teacup to one side. "A nice hot tub for you, and your sore head, and your sore muscles. And I'm getting in with you."
"Ooh!" Peter said, grinning at her. "Lucky me!" He got up, wincing at the bone-deep aches he had been trying to ignore, and followed her down the hall.
Next morning, after checking the papers and the news to make sure that nothing untoward had happened during the night, Peter betook himself to the groves of academe.
Empire State University was located in Greenwich Village. The main building was an old structure, full of little rooms tucked off into odd nooks and crannies. One tiny broom closet into which Peter had found his way looked down through a small window over at the Science Building. There were endless ways for a Spider-Man, or other unauthorized person, to sneak into or out of ESU's campus, if that person knew where those ways were. And if you were expecting someone who didn't know the ins and outs, you could make their welcome a very interesting one, indeed.
The new annex out back was not nearly so architecturally inspiring as the main building, built as it was during a period when being functional was deemed more important than being stately, but it too had its advantages. Over his years of study, Peter had had plenty of leisure to observe where its ducts went, which grilles led into which part of the air-conditioning system, what roof spaces gave onto rooms through utility traps or openings to attic storage space. A clever and determined person could stay out of sight and out of mind for a long time up in those empty spaces—moving from place to place, keeping an eye on things. That was what Peter had in mind for Spider-Man. But first, he had some things to take care of which Spider-Man couldn't manage with impunity and Peter Parker could.
He headed up the big marble steps, through the front hall and the body of the main building, finally on out the back door to the little square which separated the main building from the annex.
The annex was all very sixties-academic—plate glass, aluminum, and solid blocks of color. Somebody with a strange taste for modern art had erected, in the middle of square, something which purported to be a stainless steel Tree of Life. The science students claimed that, on moonlit spring nights, coeds danced around it scattering ball bearings. At most other seasons of the year, the thing was festooned with toilet pap
er. Everyone hated it.
Peter went up the shallower set of steps by the science building, paused by the bulletin board inside the front doors, and looked to see if anything interesting had been posted. This time of year, between the active semesters, there was nothing much to be seen but some outdated flyers about parties, and a university directory of Internet e-mail addresses that had probably been out of date by the end of the week it had been posted. Far down on one page of it, someone had scribbled, FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL PI 3 -1417. . . .
Peter went off to the right, where a stairwell led to the classrooms on the second floor, and a door in the wall stood underneath it. This was where the Nuclear Physics department was, for the simple reason that most of the equipment was too heavy to be put any higher.
The door under the stairs was not a swinging door, like most of the others in the building, but required a key to open. Peter pulled his key out of his pocket and let himself in. All the instructors and doctoral and degree students working in Nuke had the keys: they weren't exactly difficult to lay hands on. But that door was a boundary of sorts. Here the construction of the building changed, got abruptly heavier and more solid. Walls were thicker, and in the hall behind the door a wall jutted out into the corridor, covering two-thirds of its width from the left side out. About five feet further on, another wall did the same from the right side. It was good old-fashioned radiation. Should some kind of accident occur inside, radiation couldn't just stream through the door and out. The construction and look of it was very fallout-shelterish, and every now and then it brought back Peter's childhood memories of crouching under his desk at school with his hands over his head during atomic war drills. What was the old song? "Duck and Cover?" A lot of good it would have done us at ground zero, he thought as he went past the baffle.
He headed on through to the classroom and lab area. The place was utterly quiet. It felt that way even in mid-semester. The machinery here didn't need heavy air-conditioning: most of the machines had few or no moving parts. But the whole place, clean and light and bright as it looked, held a slight edge of threat, of silent power, usable by some, misusable by others, waiting to see which way it would go.
The door at the very end of the downstairs hall was the one Peter was heading for. It, too, was locked. The same key opened it as had opened the outer door.
He put his head in. As he'd hoped, lights were on, shining on the big closed cabinets, the blocky silent machines. "Hello?" he said.
"Yo!" came a familiar woman's voice from the back. "Who's that?"
"Peter Parker."
"Good lord, the wandering boy returns!" the voice half-sang from the back of the room. A cheerful face with blonde hair drawn tightly back in a ponytail peered at him around a room divider.
"Dawn," Peter said. "How're you doing?"
"Not too bad," Dawn said. "Catching up on work—" She put unusual emphasis on the word as she grinned wickedly at him. Peter was hoping that Dawn McCarter—no, Dawn Luks her name was now; he kept forgetting she was married, though it had been more than a year—would still be around working on her dissertation. She was a doctoral candidate in Nuclear Physics, and had one of the quickest, brightest minds he had ever seen, able to move within a second from a learned discussion of supercollider physics to going "ooji-ooji-ooji" at her new daughter. Speaking of whom, he noticed Dawn's baby girl sitting in her carrier on the floor, waving a pink-and-white star-and-heart chew-toy in front of her face, and occasionally giving it a good gumming. "I see you got stuck with the baby this time," he said.
"Ron's deep into work-on-the-computer mode. The kid could drop dead in front of him and he wouldn't notice. Since I'm just polishing off the dissertation work, I figured I'd take her in here for the next week or so. God knows we can't afford a sitter on our stipends. How's MJ? What's she up to, these days?"
"Just fine. She's doing the audition circuit right now."
"What brings you in?" she said. "Didn't think I'd see you until the fall."
"Oh, well, I'm supposed to be meeting with my advisor, but he's running a bit late."
Dawn laughed. "So what else is new?"
Peter wandered around the room. There was a lot of big, bulky, expensive, and difficult-to-move machinery in here. One large installation on the side, a glove-box with three sets of waldoes for working with sensitive material behind leaded glass and concrete. Next to it, a big lead safe for storing radioactive material, with a smaller one beside it; various light sensing equipment here and there; and over in the far corner, about twenty feet away, the thing he was most concerned about, and which Dawn was working with: the casings and materials fabrication unit. After all, you couldn't just carry nuclear material around in a lunch-box, you had to build containers according to the requirements of the sample in question, to handle its specific level of radiation, and to suit the application for which it was to be used. It was a combination isolation box and machine shop, all very compactly made. The whole thing was no more than four feet square, and it had occurred to Peter that, if Hobby were going to steal something at this point, this might very well be it. It would be difficult to move, but far from impossible.
Dawn was busy inside it at the moment, putting the final touches on a small lead-lined carrier box. "For sushi, right?" Peter said, looking over her shoulder through the leaded glass.
"Idiot," Dawn said affectionately. "Here, amuse the rugrat while I'm working on this."
"Hey there, gorgeous," Peter said, hunkering down beside the baby, "how ya doing?" The baby took the chew-toy out of her mouth, looked at it thoughtfully, and offered it to Peter.
"No, thanks," he said, "I'm trying to cut down." He let the baby grab his finger in her fist and shook it around a little. She gurgled.
He turned back towards the blond. "So how goes the dissertation, anyhow? It was something to do with transuranic superconductors, wasn't it?" As he stood up from beside the baby, he palmed one of the spider-tracers from his pocket and stuck it unobtrusively near the bottom of the fabricator unit.
"Yeah," Dawn said, not actually looking at Peter, engrossed as she was. "Most of the papers were saying the lanthanide connection wasn't turning out to be very productive ... so I decided to try some of the higher transuranics, and see if sandwiching them together with one of the higher-temp superconductors would produce any results."
"Which one were you playing with?" While he spoke, Peter wandered away from the box and headed over to the safes.
"Americium, mostly."
Peter grinned. "Why don't you just try holding water in a sieve? As I recall, that stuff has a half-life shorter than your kid's attention span."
Dawn grunted. "This is a problem. With a ten-hour half-life, you might well invent a revolutionary superconductor compound, but if you go to lunch at the wrong time you miss it, and the results are dang near impossible to replicate. Oh, well, if that doesn't work—" and Peter saw her grin "—I might try something simpler, like cold fusion.
Peter chuckled. "I can see your point. Well, I hope it works out," Peter said. "You've got to graduate from this place before she starts her freshman year, or people will talk. Anything new in here?"
"Not that I've seen," Dawn said absently. "They took out most everything but the project stuff in there."
"So I see," Peter said, his eye falling on a series of little lead canisters all labeled "americium tetrafluoride." There were enough canisters that Dawn wasn't likely to miss one of them, and each was small enough that it would get the attention of anything that liked radiation. Fighting down a twinge of guilt, he palmed one of the canisters, and tucked it in his pocket without Dawn seeing.
Then he leaned over and placed two more tracers on the shelf containing the canisters and on the bottom of the bigger safe. "So, Dawn," he said, "when are you going to come have dinner with us?"
"Oh, Pete, you know how it is," she muttered, still intent on what she was doing in the fabricator. "It's all I can do to drag Ron away from the computers—or his baby daughter."
She smiled. "Maybe you ought to make a date with her."
"Better not," Peter said, straightening up. "MJ would get after me for chasing younger women. Listen, if I don't see you before then, I'll see you when classes start again, huh?" He waved at the baby. "Bye, gorgeous!"
"Urgle," she commented as he shut the door behind him.
A short while later he was changed into his spider-suit and entered the ducts of the science building. He had leisure to think about a lot of things as he moved stealthily from place to place, checking the ducts to see that they were as he remembered them, peering into this room, out that window. How he really needed to call Aunt May, how he had forgotten to pick up the Woolite again, about many other things. But none of them could quite take his mind away from the little lead canister webbed at his waist. The skin under it itched.
He knew, of course, that there was no possibility of the substance in the canister causing the itch. The canister was solid, the radioactivity inside was fairly low. Nonetheless, he imagined he felt it.
Very slowly, afternoon shaded into evening. Offices started to be locked, lights began turning off, and people went off to dinner. Thinking that a view from outside might be wiser than a view of the inside, Spider-Man took this opportunity to make his way cautiously out of the ducts and back up into the main building, into the little broom closet that looked down on the annex. Its grimy window, when you pushed the sash up, would be more than big enough to let him out. Inside it, he couldn't be seen. He waited there, while the shadows lengthened and leaned toward dusk—