“Yeah.” He took off his glasses and peered at her. “I heard about that. Some guy on the web this morning got his neck chewed.”
“That was in the script,” Sarah said smoothly. “He was playing the fly. I wasn’t speaking literally. What I mean is, I have a kind of web which is territory I regard as mine. I built it and I guard it. Anyone comes near, he’s in for a shock.” Just then Don Rigden surfaced in her thoughts, and the concept of the web grew a little more firm.
“You built this web yourself?”
“It’s the lines I put out to the world,” she explained. “I started as a kid, with my relationship to my parents and family. Then I had to build a second line for school, and another for high school, and then one for college. I have a line for my graduate studies, another for leisure activities, and I just started one for TV. Some get broken and need repairing, but they’re all interconnected and they make this structure that is my life.” She looked at him and smiled. “Can you buy it?”
“Fascinating. So you see yourself guarding all this?”
“I keep it under control, yes. When something new touches it, I get signals. I study the vibrations, so to speak, and I know what I have to deal with.”
“Like the next meal?” suggested Dohn with a grin.
“A spider doesn’t actually eat its victims,” said Sarah seriously. “It sucks them dry.”
“Christ,” said Dohn, “I like that, but I don’t think I can use it. We don’t want you to sound too sinister. You don’t really think of people like that?”
“If you want to survive in the world, you have to know who can help you and what you want from them,” answered Sarah, and she meant it. “Let’s take you as an example. You landed in my web this morning. From the signals I get, you’re not here to begin the courtship ritual. Right?”
“That wasn’t in my plans, no. I’d be a little uneasy about getting away afterward.”
“So I take a look at you,” said Sarah. “Spiders are very discriminating. There are many insects they won’t touch, like beetles, mites, woodlice, ants. If one gets caught in the web, they jettison it. But I can see you have something I want, so I approach you.”
“What’s that? What is it you want?’’
She laughed. “A good write-up, Mr. Dohn. Guarantee that and you might get away.”
That afternoon she left the NBC building early and called in at the department to see how her stand-in was coping. It turned out that she had gone home early, but Bernice informed Sarah that the girl was doing a terrific job. “She’s here early each morning to check the spiders, and she stood in for Don Rigden a couple of times when he was busy with that Amnesty International thing. You heard about that? He did some Spanish dance with that brown-haired coed who used to follow him around a lot. Meg-somebody. Anyway, she had no track record as a dancer, but Don must have rehearsed her pretty good, because their dance was a show stopper. Pretty little thing. Nice body. You must have seen her around.”
“Meg Kellaway,” said Sarah.
“That’s her. There’s a lot of talk that she and Don broke up after the concert. Isn’t that sad? I mean, just when they should have been on a high. He is a moody guy. Since you took off, we’ve had hardly a civil word out of him. I thought the new girl might turn him on, only she’s a little too religious. She talks a lot about joy and inner peace and she has this saintly smile all day long. I figure she isn’t his type.”
“Is Jerry around?”
“Golf afternoon, sweetie. Listen, Jerry’s got a great idea. He’s going to throw a party for the start of the new semester. Saturday, September sixth. I know it’s a long time off, but get it in your diary’.”
“What’s it in honor of?”
“Our link-up with TV. He plans to open the academic year with an exhibition of the sets from Havelock Sloane’s spider special. You know Jerry — he doesn’t miss a trick! He’s inviting Mr. Sloane and Gregory Laz and all the big guns from NBC. It’s sure to get a lot of coverage. He told me to make sure you keep the date free. You’re our VIP these days. Now tell me all about the filming you’ve been doing.”
When she finally got away, Sarah went to the araneology lab and let herself in. It was quiet there. She sat on a stool in front of the case containing the Lasiodora klugi they had named Pele. But her mind was full of the news she had got from Bernice. Jerry’s party was the perfect answer to a problem she had worried at fruitlessly for too long, how to persuade Ed to take her out again. It was ideal, an occasion they each had a strong reason to attend. And there was time to work on it, meticulously plan the way she would disarm him and show him she was his, and he need never again treat her like some patient with a crush on her analyst.
She already had a few ideas. His last words to her that afternoon in Central Park had been “I want to meet Spider Girl myself.” Okay, so he was interested. Maybe even a little excited. She would not make the mistake of rushing into this. She would keep him in suspense. Aside from that, she wanted to size up the possibilities for herself. She could already see that if she handled this badly, she would lose all credibility. The interview with Harry Dohn had been a useful experience, but half the time she had not known what she would say next. She had to decide exactly who Spider Girl was, how she behaved, dressed, and talked. Soon there would be more interviews, including the Today show, when each word she said was definitive, like carving a statue out of stone.
She watched Pelé retreat into the cavernous hole at the bottom of the cage. She had always felt a certain sympathy for this particular spider. It was a single specimen that had already outlived all the others in the lab. It had been there when she first saw the place as an undergraduate, back in 1976. She had observed two of its molts, and it was probably fully mature now, but there was no mate for it. How and why it had been acquired by the department she had never discovered, because it had never been used in the research program. It was just a mascot, the one resident of the lab with a name of its own.
Without any clear purpose in mind, she lifted the lid off Pelé’s case and picked up a stalk of grass with a budded end that the spider could get its fangs into. Jean Henri Fabre, a French entomologist revered among araneologists for his pioneering work with spiders, had once described the way to coax the black-bellied European tarantula from its lair by using a spikelet with a fleshy end. She speculated idly whether the method would work with a Brazilian mygalomorph, and inserted the stalk into the shaft, twisting it to resemble prey, a curious bee, possibly. It seemed Pelé was not fooled. She kept it there, trying various stabbing movements, but she could not feel the slight resistance that would have indicated success. The old spider was not to be drawn.
Maybe only a young female would tempt him out when he was not hungry. Maybe he was past caring.
She heard a door open at the end of the lab, and she withdrew her hand and closed the lid of the case. Don Rigden had come in. He was in a warmup suit. There was a tennis racket under his arm.
“Sarah, it’s great to see you. I had some typing to pick up from Bernice and she told me you were in. How’s the world of TV?”
“Hard work. So much rehearsing. I hope to be through in another week. I’ll be glad to get back to normal living.”
“Like appearing on the Today show?”
She shrugged. “News travels fast in this place. I don’t have to ask who told you about that. I heard from the same source that you had a big success at the Amnesty International thing. I wish I had known about that. I like dancing.”
“Really? Have you done any yourself?”
“Only as a kid. It stopped when I was so high.”