He let the symbiote go. Instantly it flung a hundred tentacles at the thing, wrapping it around. Venom was not surprised when the creature wrapped as many around him. But he was very surprised when it effortlessly picked him up and threw him halfway down that tunnel, to land with a bone-bruising crash among the torn pieces of canister.
He struggled to his feet, the symbiote helping him with outflung tentacles that whirled and writhed around him now like angry snakes. The symbiote was not used to being tossed around like this. Come to think of it, neither was he. The symbiote caught his rage, and after a breath or two he could hardly see his quarry for the storm of tendrils streaming out toward the fake-Venom as he headed back toward it.
"How many other innocents have you killed?" Venom hissed angrily. "People who won't be missed because no one knows that they're here and no one cares? How many—" He reached out, directing the symbiote to make the tentacles thicker, stronger this time. He wrapped them around the creature like vines around a tree, exerting an awful pressure to crush, and the tongue lanced out too, meaning to wrap around the head and rip the top of it off, anticipating the sweet brains inside.
Only something else grabbed his tongue, and nearly pulled it right out of the symbiote. The symbiote screamed soundlessly inside him, a feeling like a nail through his brain, a sound Venom had heard in fights before, and had learned to dread. Physical pain was something it rarely felt until it was driven very close to what it could no longer bear.
It was definitely time to worry now. The creature he was fighting still had him by the symbiote's tongue, and was pulling with such brutality that he thought his own head would be pulled off, no matter how the symbiote resisted. It was pulling him toward its fangs, fangs which had had no problem dealing with metal canisters full of nuclear waste. He tried desperately to push himself away, his bones cracking with the strain.
The creature pulled him closer and closer, its tongue flickering out, wrapping itself around Venom's head in a parody of what the symbiote had planned. The pressure began crushing in on him.
Sheer revulsion did what calculation hadn't been able to do, as the symbiote caught his terror and despair. It flung out tendrils to either side, anchored itself to the walls, insinuated other tendrils between him and the creature, and simply pushed all at once, one mighty leverage-breaking movement that shot him right across the tunnel again and into the far wall. He hit hard and slid to the floor, the tentacles unable to react quickly enough to cushion the impact.
The cure's almost worse than the disease, he thought, struggling back to his feet again. There was a roaring in his head, partly the pounding of blood vessels recovering from a moment of much-increased intracranial pressure, partly the rage of the symbiote—occasionally he would hear it this way, frustrated, angry. It pushed him to his feet and launched itself toward the creature.
He tried to stop it, preferring a more considered kind of attack, but the creature's tentacles and the symbiote's were already tangling together. Venom found himself at the far end of an increasingly violent tug-of-war—wreaths and ropes of pseudopodia knotting and pulling. The symbiote had anchored itself behind some cable conduits on the far wall. They were beginning to creak dangerously as the stress of the tug-of-war began pulling them out of the wall. All right, Venom thought savagely, let's finish this!
He began to coach the symbiote, showing it where to put the tentacles around their adversary to best advantage—head, limbs, waist. They pulled. The pains in his joints began again, and the pains in his back, and still they pulled. Venom was braced as well as he could be, as well as the symbiote could manage, but it wasn't enough. He felt the pains as his knees, helping to brace, started to bend forward the wrong way; in his arms, as his shoulders threatened to dislocate; in his neck and upper back, as slowly, slowly, the creature pulled him closer. The pair struggled, as each tried to get another grip on the other's head. Come on! Venom urged the symbiote. Save us! Help me save us! Only you can do this—only we can do this— come on!
Little by little he felt its desperation, its determination to be what he wanted—and little by little they pulled back, an inch, two inches, five. Pulled back toward the wall, began to pull the creature with them. Now! Venom said. Now! While we can, while it's off balance! The symbiote sprouted tendrils edged like knives, ready to tear, to rip—
The other let go. Venom reeled back against the wall again, in a clatter of torn metal and old broken glass. He fell down most ignominiously on his butt.
The creature was standing there, moving away from the wall, now, letting go of its mooring. Its head was up, all those tendrils up too, weaving in the air again, smelling. It looked over at Venom. Dazed, he looked back. The symbiote reached for the thing—
The creature looked at him, then raced away down the almost pitch-black tunnel northward and eastward, toward Madison Square Garden.
Cursing in earnest now, Venom struggled to his feet, feeling like one big bruise. He could feel the symbiote's dejection, disappointment, rage. It had wanted that, whatever that was.
So do I, Venom thought. And shortly we'll have it. He looked after the creature. Worth noticing, though: don't attack it and it doesn't attack you. It loses interest as soon as you stop. And it can be distracted.
Let's go find out by what. Discovering what distracts it may be the key to what will kill it. And once it's dead, then we go after its master: Hobgoblin.
With all the speed they could muster, Venom went down the tunnel after their dark twin.
Spider-Man crept slowly down the passage toward the gratings. The clear, bluish fluorescent light spilling out almost blinded him after the dimness of the other tunnels. He edged silently over to the far wall, hunkered down, and peered through. The grating was more like heavy chicken wire than anything else, and it appeared to have been cemented into the wall. Spider-Man thought they could probably be peeled out of the concrete even by someone without spider-strength. Clearly they had been designed for ventilation rather than security.
He had a bird's-eye view of a room about eighty feet square. Three men, two wearing overalls, the third wearing a shirt and jeans and boots, were talking as they assembled a very large piece of machinery. A welter of pallets and large wooden crates surrounded them.
The spider-tracer wasn't going to be able to tell him anything more. Indeed, the buzz he was getting from the tracer was now as strong as it was going to be: he could see one of the big safes stowed over in the corner, its door pried open, the safe emptied out. Spidey's gaze went back to that big piece of machinery in the middle of the room.
Now what the heck is that? Spider-Man thought, watching them work. The men had several "passive pullers," flatbeds on low wheels, each with a handle at the front and hydraulics attached to the handle: pull on the handle and the hydraulics pushed the flatbed forward to relieve the pressure, a standard "negative feedback" device. One of these pullers held a huge, gray metal box, with wiring and power inputs showing off to one side, which one of the men was trying to maneuver into place in a bay of a much larger installation which stood in the middle of the room. The other two were working at the edges of the main installation, folding doors away from the now-open bay, tidying up cables and getting ready to make connections to the new piece of equipment.
Then Hobgoblin stalked into view. Spider-Man spotted his jetglider sitting off to one side. Hobby looked unusually nervous. "Come on," he was saying to his henchmen, "I don't have all day, here! Or all night. This thing has to be in place and running before one!" What in the world does he want this for? Spider-Man thought.
The henchmen began making placating noises, not that Hobby paid that much attention to them. He just kept stalking up and down, railing at them. Spider-Man settled on the floor of the passageway for the moment to watch the developments and evaluate that big piece of machinery.
It looked like a generator of some kind. Its side doors hung open, showing a little of its guts, and Spider-Man could see what looked like sealed housings o
f a shape that suggested gigantic wound coils, such as you might expect to see in a power station's generators. But he couldn't imagine for the life of him what this had to do with an atomic bomb.
It's not as if an A-bomb has to be this big, he thought, or anything like it. Long ago, in the days of the Manhattan Project before the birth of the transistor, an atomic bomb had to be fairly hefty. But nothing like this. You couldn't have gotten this thing into the Enola Gay with a crowbar. Nowadays, with transistors and highly compacted explosives to drive the two critical-mass components together, an A-bomb could fit in the back of a car or truck. A truck would probably be best: the uranium and other fissile components were so massive, most cars' shocks and suspension would simply give up under such a trunkload.
The man with the puller wrangled a big "add-on" box into approximately the right position, and the other two men were trying to muscle it into the sort of giant "socket" for which it seemed destined, while Hobgoblin kept stalking around the machine, haranguing them and generally getting in their way.
It's only midnight, Spider-Man thought. I wonder what his rush is? Silently he pulled out his camera and its little tripod out of its bag, setting them up. Later, he would move them to whichever grating he finally chose to pull away.
For the moment, a possibility occurred to him. Could it be a hiding place for the bomb itself? This isn't something he could move easily, Spider-Man thought. If the bomb itself is a more reasonable size, it could be hidden somewhere in this structure. You could spend a lot of useful time taking this thing apart, trying to find where the bomb part is hidden.
It was a possibility. Hobgoblin could be awfully clever. He might assume that he was going to be caught and made a contingency plan. He might have seen to it that whoever caught up with him would waste precious time looking for the bomb—time Hobby could use to escape, possibly with a remote-control trigger.
Spider-Man shook his head. It might just be a hiding place, but I can't believe he would have taken this long to set it up. If not that—then maybe it's something else, something he's going to need later. But what?
He watched Hobby's henchmen as they started connecting a new module into the main generator, while Hobby rubbed his hands together and chuckled.
Let's say you've just held the whole city hostage, Spider-Man thought. Blackmailed them into giving you a billion bucks. Then what? Logic says you get as far away from the scene of the crime as you can. Brazil . . . heck, Antarctica. Or the moon. Somewhere you can't be extradited from, somewhere you can't be found. But what if Hobby decided that the best place to go to ground after committing a big crime in the middle of New York City, is the middle of New York City itself? They never catch you, because you don't leave. You make yourself a nice comfy little lair with plenty of food, water, whatever else you consider necessary for life the way you like to live it—including a private generator for power. Using what for fuel, though? And the answer immediately suggested itself: fissiles! Atomic piles aren't the size they used to be, either. So you set up an atomic reactor for your own private use. This is the perfect place. Use a city main as the water for your reactor to heat and push through the generator's turbines as steam, giving you all the heat and power you need.
He looked around quickly, eyeing the walls for signs of pipes or tubes. Sure enough, he spotted in the far wall. There were enough extra pipes to reach the installation in the middle of the room. It could be, Spider-Man thought. Carry out your little blackmail, get paid off, and then just snuggle down under the streets of the city, biding your time until the heat's off. If that was what Hobby had planned, it has its points.
And if not . . . then I have no idea what that generator's about. The thing I need to do is get a good look around inside. But that's not going to happen with Hobby in place.
He looked down thoughtfully at the henchmen and then at the grilles farther down his passageway. He edged along quietly to examine the other gratings. When he came to the third, Spider-Man smiled to himself. Someone had been pulling at it—there was no way to tell when—but one corner had completely separated from the concrete, and all around the edges, the metal had rusted. It would be a simple enough matter to peel it open and slip in.
No sooner said than done, he thought, and he set to work on the wire, very quietly. That chamber below was well littered with pallets and crates and other nondescript machinery, so there would be plenty of things to hide behind.
Slow and easy, he told himself—though at this point his eagerness was getting the better of him. His anger at the sheer, calculated nastiness that enabled Hobgoblin to blackmail a whole city without even twitching made him very eager indeed to come to grips with the man. Nevertheless, he slowed himself down and concentrated on making as little noise as he could. The last thing he wanted to do was give himself away prematurely.
He began peeling the wire back, bending over a few jagged bits of metal that had broken off the grille and now stuck out of the concrete. No sense catching the costume on the way down, he thought.
Hobgoblin had begun to harangue his men again. "Gome on, come on," he was snarling, and the nervousness in his voice was really rather surprising. Can it be, Spider-Man thought, that he's finally realized that he's riding a tiger, and he's suddenly not too sure that he can keep hanging onto its ears? That was possibly something that could be used to Spidey's advantage. Despite having made this bomb, or having had it made for him, Hobby was still nervous of his ability to handle it. He might yet make a mistake . . . something I can exploit. Spider-Man just hoped it wouldn't be the kind of mistake which would leave Manhattan a smoking crater.
With a final small jerk, the grating came loose in his hands. Even as it did, Hobby, muttering something under his breath, stalked off into the next room. Spider-Man smiled under his mask, got up silently, fetched his camera, and repositioned it.
The three henchmen were still wrestling and sweating at the job of fitting the new module into the generator. One of them went around the far side of the big main machine, and while the other two were watching him, Spider-Man slipped through the now-empty opening and let himself down to the floor level on a webline.
Spidey found a convenient pallet loaded with crates and tucked himself behind it, watching the men move.
"Aah, this is crap," the sandy-haired one of the pair wearing overalls said quietly to his companions. "He doesn't need this thing tonight. He's just paranoid."
The other two grunted assent, but quietly. "No use arguing with him when he's like this," said the second one, the man wearing the shirt and jeans. "Otherwise you wind up with one of those little pumpkins stuffed up your nose."
The sandy-haired man went around the far side of the machine again. "Aah," said the third one, "you know what his problem is?"
"He's a raving loony," said the sandy-haired man.
"Nah. You know what he has? A bad management style. Give him one of those executive seminars, he'd be okay."
The second man stared at the third, disbelieving. The first one was still around the far side of the machine, hammering at something with a rubber mallet. While the two discussed management technique and whether a seminar would do Hobgoblin any good whatever, Spider-Man crept closer.
The sandy-haired man in the overalls gave the installation one last desultory whack with the rubber mallet. "The contacts are in," he said, dropping the mallet on the floor. "I don't care if he does want it perfect. It's not going to fit smooth. I think they screwed it up at the factory."
"They did what?" said one of the others.
"They screwed it up, and it's not our fault, I don't care what he says." He sat on one of the crates looking disgusted.
"He'll say we did it," said the man in the shirt and jeans.
"Well, let him. He has a negative attitude," said the second man.
This might have been true, but Spider-Man didn't see any point in waiting for further analysis. He promptly stood up from behind the pallet of crates where he was hiding and jumped the sandy-h
aired man from behind.
There was a brief but utterly silent tussle, at the end of which the sandy-haired man was as well swathed in a web as any fly after the spider's through with it. Effectively gagged, unable to utter a sound, he lay there squirming. On the other side of the machine, Spider-Man heard the man in the shirt and jeans say, "No wonder he keeps getting into trouble at work."
Spider-Man smiled to himself, while busily webbing the first man to one of the pallets, so he couldn't squirm out into sight. Then, crouching down behind another stack of crates, he turned his attention to the other two.
Henchmen, he thought. What the heck is a hench? Is it something you carry around, like luggage? Something to eat? Maybe some kind of animal, if it had a henchman to take care of it?
He slipped behind another pallet and looked at the other two men. They had finished taking the load-puller out from under the new installation, and the one in the jeans and shirt was standing back from it, lighting a cigarette. The other one looked at him with mild reproof and said, "You shouldn't do that in here—You Know Who gets cranky."
"Aah," said the smoker, taking a long drag.
"Besides," said the other man in the overalls, "you said you were giving it up."
"I did give up. Last week."
"You gotta try harder. They say now that if you can go cold turkey for two weeks, you'll probably give it up clean."
"Huh," said the smoker. He looked up at the installation. "That thing still isn't fitting right around the edges," he said. "Hank, where's that hammer?"
He dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, then went around the corner of the generator to where he had last seen the first man. "Oh, here it is. Where's Hank?"
"Probably went off to take a leak."
"He didn't even say anything."
"He's been that way a lot lately," said the man in the overalls. "Kinda short tempered."