Spiderman 1 (8 page)

"Now that's a doomsday attitude to have, Jonah."

"It's realistic." Jonah sounded uncharacteristically self-
pitying, even morbid, as he said, "I wonder . . . when the dinosaurs were sinking into pits, their days of glory at an
end
...
I wonder if they made the same kind of howls of frustration that old-time, ink-under-the-fingernails newsmen
make as our medium goes straight down the tubes."

"You're being much too hard on yourself, Jonah. And you're forgetting something."

"Oh, yeah?" Jonah shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other without using his hands. He just rolled it
over from left to right, smooth as pudding. "And what might
that be?"

"All you need is one big story. Just one. Something to fire
the attention of New Yorkers. If it's a big enough story, people will seek out information on it anywhere they can get it."

"You may be right," said Jonah. "The question is, what sort of story would be big enough?"

"I don't know, Jonah. I'm just a dumb scientist, not a
media genius, like you. It's the oldest commandment of
showbiz: Give the people what they want."

"What the people want are short, punchy stories with no
depth. Black and white, good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains."

"So what's the problem with that?" asked Osborn.
J. Jonah Jameson laughed contemptuously, settling back
into his chair with the air of someone who was very much in
his element, both physically and philosophically. "And here
I thought, Norman, that you were a man after my own heart.
Don't you know? There are no heroes. Not anymore. If you
want greatness, and great men, crack a history book and
look at the founding fathers. There were great men. Men of
conviction. Men willing to put themselves on the line. They
put their names to the Declaration of Independence, know
ing that they were signing their death warrants. But they did
it because they believed in something. That's gone

now.You
know what killed heroism, Norman?"

"No, but I suspect you're going to tell me," Osborn said

dryly.

"This whole Internet thing. With people having no respect for copyrights because they're busy stealing entire printed works off downloads, or going around ranting and
raving at each other, striking from hiding behind names like
'Fuzzydice' or 'The Destroyer' or 'Bobl123' or similar non
sense." Jonah was waving his cigar around, ashes flying all
over. One of the attendants, long used to Jameson when he
went off on a rant, was busily sweeping the ash into a dustbin. "How much impact do you think the Declaration would have had, Norman, if it had been filled with signatures like
'Deathscream' or 'Hoppybunny27'?"

"Not very much," Osborn allowed. "But to be fair,
Jonah ... why should anyone want to be a hero, in this day and age fostered by your own media. Whenever someone
does something heroic, the newspapers grab ahold of him
and dig and dig until they find some sort of dirt, and then splash it all over the front pages. Why should anyone want to make themselves such a target?"

"If you're a hero, you don't think about what might happen if you take a risk. You just do what needs to be done," Jonah retorted. "I've tried to live my life as scrupulously as possible, Norman. You can't go around bringing down cor
ruption if your own hands aren't clean. People want to in
vestigate me, let 'em. I have nothing to hide. But do people follow my example? They do not. No heroes anymore, as I
said. Don't blame the messenger for the message."

Osborn kept telling himself that he shouldn't be baiting
Jonah this way, but he was apprehensive enough about the
meeting he had to get to, and the old windbag was starting
to grate on him. "So what is the message you're getting out there that you shouldn't be blamed for? That nobody's good
enough to withstand public scrutiny, no matter how well-meaning their actions may seem."

"Exactly," Jonah said with an emphatic wave of his cigar, sending more ashes tumbling. A couple danced on the lapels
of Osborn's jacket, and he brushed them away. Jonah didn't
seem to notice. "That's exactly it."

"Funny," said Osborn, scratching his chin thoughtfully as
he rose from his chair. "I seem to remember a man who lived
about two thousand years ago who had a touch of the heroic about him. A lot of people looked up to him. A lot of people didn't. So tell me, Jonah
...
if a man of that caliber of hero
ism showed up today, would you be listening and learning
from him? Or would you be first in line to crucify him?"

A number of men had been listening to the exchange, and

there was a collective guffaw when Osborn said that. Jame
son fired looks around, and the laughter was quickly silenced
as they went back to their own newspapers.

"That's not funny, Norman," Jameson said quietly.

"No. It's not." He patted Jameson on the shoulder.
"Jonah, I hope—for your sake—you get your hero, and you
get your story, and you get your circulation numbers back
up. God knows we still need newspapers and heroes ... and
you need someone to tear down."

"Or build up," he added quickly.

"That's up to you, isn't it?"

And as he walked out of the men's club, Jonah called
after him, "Mark my words, Osborn: The closest we come to
heroes these days is some schmuck with bad timing who
falls into it by accident!"

"Jonah," Osborn called over his shoulder, "I think you
may just have defined 'hero' for the ages."

III.

THE ACCIDENT

It was the smallest of the small. It tended to stay away
from the others, daunted by the disparity in size. While the
others moved in leisurely groups, clumps of mandibles and black furred abdomens, the smallest
—
the runt
—
kept to itself. Food was plentiful, and the larger ones got most of it,
simply because they were bigger and didn't hesitate to hog
it. The smallest of the small got the leftovers. As a result, in
addition to its diminutive stature, it had a lean and hungry
look about it.

So while all the others would sit around, fat and con
tented, the smallest of the small explored every nook and
cranny of their home, endlessly and meticulously studying
every centimeter. It did not do so out of any sort of plan or
long-term strategy. It did so because it had nothing else to
do to pass the time.

As a consequence, it was the only one that discovered the break in the seal.

It found the break purely by accident, as it moved around
the edges of the grillwork that covered one of the air vents.
It wasn't a break that a normal creature its size would have
been able to exploit . . . but this was not a normal creature.

The creature pulled experimentally on the edge of the
seal, and its strength was sufficient to bend it ever so
slightly, in the place where one of the screws hadn't been
driven in as tightly as it should. The others, fat and content
as they were, did not notice what the smallest was up to.

They did detect the slight vibration of the small metal grill-
work overhead moving, but the vibration abruptly ceased
and their attention immediately wandered. They gave no
further thought to it, to its source, or to the smallest of the
small . . . which was no longer there.

As he entered the Columbia Genetic Research Institute,
Peter Parker didn't know where to look first. The laboratory
was cavernous, lined with instrumentation the nature of
which he could only guess. He saw some stuff that looked
vaguely familiar ... even a bit similar to things that Peter had worked with. But the equipment he'd used was on a
much smaller scale than what he was looking at now.

The domed ceiling was so tall it was hard to believe that
the building contained it, and the equipment itself was
shined to within an inch of its chrome life. Peter's camera
was hanging around his neck, the nice sturdy Konica his
aunt and uncle had gotten him for Christmas. "Too bad
we're not Jewish. I could have gotten you a Konica for
Chanukah!" Ben had said cheerfully, prompting a moan
from Peter and an annoyed thump on his chest from May.

The tour guide, a thin, black-haired Asian woman, was
guiding them past a large exhibit on spiders. "There are
more than 32,000 known species of spider in the world," she
intoned, managing to sound both important and deathly
bored at the same time. The thirty-three students on the trip
responded to Mr. Sullivan's get-over-here gestures by
crowding into a circle around their guide, who didn't even
appear to notice that anyone was paying attention. "They are
in the order Aranae, which is divided into three suborders:
Mesothelea, Orthognatha, and Labidognatha. All spiders are carnivorous, ravenous eaters who feed on massive quantities
of protein, in liquid form, usually the juices of their prey."

Peter, however, was getting severely distracted from such
riveting topics as spider juices. Instead he was keeping an

eye on Mary Jane, who was joking around with some friends
of hers. He was still stinging over the way he had fumbled the ball, yet again. He had fallen into a depressing routine: trying to talk to her, perhaps getting out a few words of no
consequence, before folding faster than a tent without a center pole. It was a pretty crummy way to go through life, par
ticularly when it concerned a girl as important to Peter as
M. J. was.

But that could change.
He
could change. All he needed to
do was make that resolution, and decide that he was going to
start doing things differently. Yes, yes, that was it. That was
all he had to do. And it was going to start with Mary Jane.

"Arachnids from each of the three groups possess varying strengths which help them in their constant search for
food," the tour guide informed them.

Yes, that was it: M. J. was a sort of food to him. Soul
food. Food that could provide him emotional nourishment, if
he could only get himself to try her. Well, he was going to do it, that's all.
Just do it,
like they said in that stupid com
mercial.

He took a deep breath to steady his pounding heart, then took two steps toward her. That was as far as he got before Flash Thompson, with a timing bordering on the supernatural, swept in while Peter was still a good two yards away,
stepped in behind her, partly obscuring her from view. He
put his arm around her, nuzzled her neck. Peter gulped
deeply, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. Well, that was certainly all he needed to see.