Marvel Classic Novels--Spider-Man, page 55
I’m off my game, he thought. That’s the trouble with fighting robots— without anyone to hurl wisecracks at, my rhythm’s off. ‘‘At least with Spider-Slayers, there’s someone to talk to,” he said just to hear his own voice. He spun around, swinging backward, to call out to his pursuers. “How about it, guys? Anybody listening? Watching? You may now gloat!” But the cablebots remained silent except for the increasingly disturbing whine of their reels and the occasional pff-whizz of a razor disk firing.
One thing’s for certain, though: They’re definitely herding me away from Jonah. That certainty gave him a new sense of resolve. So why am I letting them? Stop being reactive and do something.
He veered south at Madison Avenue, looking for a good place to lure one of the robots into an ambush. A moment later, he realized his course change had been motivated by the fact that he was a block from the Library. He didn’t want to lead any more killer robots there. But the surge of anger that came with that thought heightened his resolve still further.
He led the robots down Madison for two more blocks, dodging razor disks, then veered west and climbed toward the top of 425 Fifth Avenue, a slim yellow-and-blue tower with vertical white stripes, looking like something put together with a giant Lego set. This was the tallest building in the immediate area and relatively isolated, so to get up to him, the robots would have to anchor their cables on the tower itself. That gave him his chance. They’ve been sabotaging my lines, so I might as well return the favor.
As soon as one of the robots’ compact grapples snagged the building and dug in, Spidey hopped down toward it. He sprayed web fluid up and down its length, coating it thickly for several yards’ worth. As the robot reeled itself up the cable toward him, it soon began reeling in the coated portion, and the whirring noise dropped swiftly to a low, grinding pitch as the webbing blocked the reeling mechanism. Spidey took a moment to put a new cartridge in each webshooter, then coated the grapple in more webbing and tore it free from the wall, letting it drop. The robot fell, catching itself lower down with another two cables, one on the Lego-set tower, the other near the top of 260 Madison Avenue, a lower white building half a block to the east. But the webbed cable continued to hang uselessly below it, twitching as the reeling mechanism struggled to clear the obstruction.
Spidey headed downward to where its next cable was anchored and repeated the procedure there. The second cablebot was trying to get a bead on him, but he stood his ground. The damaged robot (or its controller) had apparently learned from its mistake, for now it stopped reeling toward the webbed cable and retreated in the other direction. Spidey crawled along the cable, dodging razor disks as he sprayed more webbing along its length. The robot fired a fourth cable to strike the Mercantile Building to the north and released the grapple of the second, letting the cable fall in hopes that Spidey would go with it. He caught himself with a webline anchored directly to the new cable, swinging up to perch on it and repeat his maneuver. Obligingly, the robot repeated its response as well, and with only one cable left, it plunged downward. The robot avoided slamming into the side of 260 Madison by firing a jet of air, but Spidey had already swung into position and was webbing the last cable, firing right down to where it was reeling in before it could stop and reverse course. That motor ground to a halt in turn. Only two of the motors were jammed, but the remaining two cables couldn’t be reeled in fully, and thus couldn’t be aimed and fired. The cablebot was immobilized.
Now what? Ahh. On the rooftop below were several of the small wooden water towers that were a trademark of the Manhattan skyline. Tearing its last grapple free, Spidey swung the robot back and forth and finally hurled it at one of the tanks, where it smashed through the conical roof. The bright flash and crackling noise from within proved that it hadn’t been designed to go underwater. “Yes! One down, baby, and I’m coming for you!” he cried in defiance as he bounded free of the other’s razor disks.
But when he headed toward its nearest anchor point, about halfway up the Mercantile Building, the remaining cablebot unhooked it and fell away, retreating to the west. “Ha! You better run away! Nobody beats Spider-Man in my town! Accept no substitutes!”
But the sound of shattering glass silenced him. The cablebot had not been retreating, simply moving over to the next building, the Fifth Avenue Tower, a glass-walled condominium thirty-three stories high. It had fired three of its four cables through the glass and was sending a barrage of razor disks across the building’s face, causing a cataract of broken glass to fall toward the condo’s ninth-story sundeck and the street beyond.
Spidey had only seconds to save the residents and shopgoers below. But he was half a block away. The only point in his favor was the air resistance slowing the falling glass, but that was a small favor. He kicked off the wall of 260 Madison as hard as he could, coming down on the intervening roof, and flew straight at the falling glass, firing web-nets ahead of him. The webbing snagged most of the glass, and he swept his right shooter over to extend and attach it to the condo’s facade, so that the mass of webbing and glass swung in and struck the wall. The impact cracked more glass, and Spidey’s own landing on the net a moment later worsened it. Still, the webbing held it together. “Yeah! Didn’t see that coming, did you?” he crowed at the cablebot.
But the mechanism was descending, firing its grapples through more windows and yanking them out again to send more glass at Spidey and the people below. He looked down, realizing that a few people were lying there, hurt by the shards of glass he hadn’t managed to catch. The old Spider-Man might have been paralyzed by guilt at being too slow, but today, Spidey instantly quashed any such thoughts and concentrated on the task at hand, spraying a quick websling to span the street above him. The falling glass sliced through some of its strands, but most of it held. He poured on more webbing to catch the rest, then rappelled down to the sundeck to check the wounded.
But he heard the familiar whine of the cablebot descending and knew he was about to come under attack. The robot had put civilians in danger to distract him, leaving him vulnerable for the kill. But he wasn’t going to fall for it. No piece of fishing tackle with delusions of grandeur gets the better of Spider-Man. He picked up a patio table and used it as a shield. “Anyone who can move, get the injured inside!” he shouted as razor disks thunked into the table. When the barrage halted and he heard the cablebot reeling to a new position, he flung the table at it like a discus, leading its motion. Air jets puffed out at the table, but it had much more inertia than a webline and was only partly deflected. It still hit hard enough to rattle the cablebot.
The mechanism recovered and came to bear on Spidey, firing a grapple right at him like a harpoon. Must be out of disks, he thought as he twisted away and caught it in midair, webbing up the cable with his other hand. But the next cable shot was aimed at the civilians, who were still dragging the wounded to safety. Spidey caught it in midflight with a webline and yanked it to a halt.
“That does it,” he growled. Jameson had really crossed a line, deliberately targeting innocents as pawns in their personal feud. Spider-Man was burning with rage now. Luckily, he had a handy target.
Spidey scooped up several of the larger pieces of glass lying on the deck and flung them one by one at the cablebot with all the force of his fury. They weren’t as sharp as the razor disks, but they hit harder. The cablebot suffered some lacerations to its shell but kept reeling up and away. Spidey grabbed more glass fragments and kept up the attack, leaping several stories up to the roof across the street. The robot tried firing a cable at him once more, but he leaped clear and tackled it bodily, pounding it with his fists. At first it was a wild release of anger, but then he targeted his efforts, widening the cuts in its shell with the wedge of his knuckles, then using his fingers to tear them wider until he could reach inside and rip out the thing’s guts. One of its cable reels gave way and let out all its slack, while the other was jammed and frozen, so the robot swung down and slammed into the corner of the Mercantile Building, this time with no air jet to cushion its impact. Spidey rode down with it and kicked both feet against it as it hit the wall, crumpling it further. He planted his soles on the wall, got a grip on its cables, tore them free, and let the dead machine drop into the courtyard below.
By now the police and paramedics had arrived, the latter rushing into the building to see to the wounded. Spidey jumped down and intercepted a pair of them. “I can get you up there faster, folks,” he told them. “Hang on to your stretcher!” They got a good grip, and he lifted the stretcher with both of them on it in one hand and clambered up the glass wall to the sundeck. “Watch your step, there’s glass everywhere,” he advised as he put them down.
Looking back down toward the street, he noticed a camera crew setting up on the scene as well. He went down the wall, clinging with just a couple of fingers so he slid down faster, and alit in front of the reporter. “Are we live?” he asked. “I want to make a statement before this gets distorted.”
The reporter nodded. “Just a sec,” she said, turning to the cameraman, who signaled her a moment later. “Thanks, Diane. We’re live at the Fifth Avenue Tower, where the battle between Spider-Man and two spider-like robots has just concluded. Amazingly, Spider-Man himself has just agreed to give this reporter an exclusive statement about this incident. That’s right, you heard it here first.”
Spidey stepped forward before she could get in more self-promotion. “Thank you. I want to make it clear what happened here before certain self-interested parties put their own spin on events. These robots attacked me while I was following up a lead on the prior robot attacks. They were clearly designed to target me personally, using cables to duplicate my moves and powerful air jets to deflect my webbing. When I defeated one of them, the other began shattering the building’s windows, putting civilians in danger to distract me. I’m afraid some injuries were sustained despite my best efforts, but as you can see, I put my own safety on the line to protect the people of New York.” He turned to show off his slashed flank and leg to the camera, as well as the bruised knuckles under his torn gloves.
“How dare you?!” Spidey and the reporter spun to see a distraught middle-aged woman running toward him. “You big-shot heroes and your fights up in the sky, don’t care what falls down on us folks below! My husband’s dead! Look at him!”
Stunned, Spider-Man followed her gestures to where the paramedics were bringing out a stretcher bearing an occupied body bag. “The glass fell and it cut him and it cut him so bad . . .” She shuddered, losing her voice for a moment, and Spidey reflexively moved forward in sympathy. But the woman hardened at his approach, and shouted, “Cuz you, Mister Big-Shot Hero, was too busy crowin’ ’bout how unstoppable you is! You was boastin’ when you shoulda been seein’ what that thing was about to do to us!”
“Spider-Man, is this true?” the reporter asked.
“No,” he said, then repeated more forcefully, “No. I’m sorry for this woman’s loss, but she’s not remembering clearly. I acted as soon as I possibly could, and I prevented most of the glass from reaching the ground. I know you want to blame me, ma’am, since I’m the one here. But the one who killed your husband is the one who built those robots. And I swear to you—I will find him and make him pay.”
“Get away from me,” the widow snarled. “Just get away.” She went to be with her husband’s remains.
Spider-Man turned to the camera. “Do you hear me? I know you’re watching, and I know you’re going to try to turn this against me. But it won’t work, do you hear? You’ve crossed the line, and that changes everything! I know who you are, and I’m going to prove it to the world! One way or another, you’re going down!”
EIGHT
A GREAT BIG BANG-UP
THE next morning, the following entry was posted in The Wake-Up Call:
A number of commentators to this journal have complained that I devote far too many entries to my “obsession” with Spider-Man. Some have even gone so far as to make rude insinuations about the “real” reason I spend so much time thinking about the wall -crawler. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if it were Spider-Man himself making those statements. Here on the unfortunately named Web, it would be easy enough for Spider-Man to harass me anonymously. I accept that, and take solace in the fact that at least here, he can’t shut me up by force. (People think that webbing of his is some gee-whiz crimefighting tool, but I can report from long experience that the little punk routinely uses it to play cruel practical jokes on unsuspecting journalists, often invading their private offices to leave little “surprises” on their chairs, if not physically assaulting them with the stuff and putting them in danger of asphyxiation.)
But I’m getting off the subject. The fact is, I would love to be able to talk to you about anything other than costumed creeps with adhesive fingers. There are plenty of other things I have to say to the good people of this city, this country, and this planet. I’d be delighted to share my positions on what the mayor, the governor, and especially the president are doing wrong, why this once-great country is headed down the tubes, and what exactly needs to be done to get today’s youth to straighten up and fly right. I’d love to spend my time talking to you about real heroes, the police officers, firefighters, and private citizens who go out there and protect people without hiding behind superpowers and fetish accessories—people who just do their jobs with no interest in fame or glory. I’ve made every attempt to discuss those ideas on this forum when I could.
It is Spider-Man himself who has made that impossible. He’s continued to disrupt this city with his ongoing feuds against mad scientists and costumed freaks, and in the past week matters have escalated further with these robot attacks. Again and again, Manhattan’s citizens and properties have been placed in danger, and Spider-Man has been at the heart of every incident. If he’s not engineering them personally, he’s undoubtedly provoked them as part of one of his many ongoing rivalries.
But this time he’s taken it to a deadly extreme, his latest battle causing a cascade of broken glass that cruelly took the life of Paul Berry, a recently retired electrical engineer who’d made it good in life and was just starting to enjoy his sunset years along with his wife, Iona. Sadly, this is far from the first time that innocents have lost their lives to Spider-Man’s feuds. But rarely has he been so callous and opportunistic about it. Rarely has he been so ready to exploit an innocent man’s death to serve his own twisted agendas.
If you watched the news last night, you saw Spider-Man jumping in front of a camera, determined to put his spin on the incident before anyone could take the time to assemble the facts. He claimed that the person behind the robot attacks intended to “twist” the facts of the incident against him. This just a day after he intruded on a press conference held by me and insinuated that I had some connection to the robot attacks.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Spider-Man’s true agenda has now become clear, and it shows just how warped he’s become. He intends to accuse me, J. Jonah Jameson, of being the mastermind behind these attacks. He wants to discredit his most stalwart critic, and isn’t above exploiting the death of a human being to do it. This is the action of a hero?
True, I admit there was a time when I participated in a small number of robotics experiments aimed at the humane capture and unmasking of Spider-Man. On the majority of those occasions, there were outstanding warrants for his arrest, so I was simply doing my duty as one of New York’s leading citizens. And I never endorsed or participated in an attack on anyone other than the wall-crawler himself.
It is Spider-Man himself who has escalated things in recent days. No longer content to play obnoxious pranks on me, he now seeks to frame me for a series of lethal attacks on our city, attacks he himself is responsible for in one way or another. This new belligerence, this new tactic of exploiting the press to libel his opponents, this increased contempt for human life—it points in a direction I’m frightened to contemplate. Spider-Man has always been obnoxious, irresponsible, a two-bit punk intoxicated with power. Now, though, he seems to be growing more and more unstable, more and more dangerous. I fear for my own safety now, and that of my family.
But don’t think I’ll back down. I’ve faced thugs, gangsters, spies, assassins, and monsters in my career, and never let them stop me from doing the job of a journalist. I’ve always been ready to give my life in pursuit of the truth, and if I’m taken down for having the courage to tell the truth about the menace that is Spider-Man, then I can’t think of a more honorable way to go. But better men than he have tried to take down J. Jonah Jameson, and I’m still here. And I intend to stay here, telling it like it is and putting bullies, cowards, and criminals in their place, for a good long time to come.
So you think you can take me, Spider-Man? Go ahead and try it.
“Maybe I should start posting replies on Jameson’s blog,” Peter told MJ that night, in that brief window of time between her return from rehearsals and his departure for his spiderly duties. He was already changing into his costume, and MJ took the opportunity to admire his lithe, muscular form—though she privately winced at the fresh cuts and bruises that adorned it, a routine sight that she still had never gotten used to. “Not anonymously, but as Spider-Man. I could prove to him it was really me by reminding him of some private de tails or something—like that time I webbed him to his office ceiling. Or that other time I webbed him to his office ceiling.” He paced across their small apartment, requiring MJ to dodge out of the way. “If I post from a different library branch each time, it’d make it hard to track me down by ISP.”
“Should you really be bothering with that when you should be out investigating?”
“I have to stop letting Jameson monopolize the press. This time I’m going to get my side of the story out there and keep it out there. Let people see the truth for themselves.”
