Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

Chapter 9

Sure enough, the effects bank’s screen showed Dolores and, along the bottom edge, a green banner with white numbers printed on it.

“Key title!” Beth’s heart soared as she pressed the button. As the phone number appeared on the screen, she said, very softly, “Thank you, St. Vidicon.”

Tony backed away from the heat, watching the ruddy glow turn dark and cease, and looked out with pride over the uneven but solid surface of the circuit, fully repaired now. He wiped sweat from his forehead and realized that his shirt was wringing wet, but that didn’t matter. The break was healed, and that was all that did.

Then he looked up to heaven, where St. Vidicon certainly should be, lifted his soldering gun in salute—and was amazed to see it turn transparent, then disappear.

Of course—he didn’t need it now. Grinning, he called out, “Thanks, St. Vidicon.”

He was quite surprized when a huge voice echoed around him, saying, “Only Father Vidicon, Tony, please!” But as the voice spoke, the silvery mist seemed to thin and fade away, the voice reverberated less and less, and Tony found himself facing the good priest, who was saying, “I haven’t even been declared a Beatus yet, let alone a saint.”

“The Church’s declaration doesn’t send you to Heaven,” Tony countered. “Your own actions have done that.”

Father Vidicon smiled, amused. “Then my actions can’t have been completed yet, for this certainly isn’t Heaven!”

Looking around, Tony saw the familiar blood-red curve-sided hallway and knew the humidity wasn’t going to do anything for his sweat-soaked shirt. He turned to Father Vidicon to ask, “What next?”

“Whatever I meet,” the priest said, “but you have your own life to live while I keep searching for adventure—and be compassionate with that young woman; she’s more fragile than she seems.” He raised a hand in blessing or dismissal, Tony wasn’t sure which, but before he could protest, the hallway seemed to dim, and he found himself staring at the reflections of the streetlight on the ceiling of his bedroom.

He sat bolt upright and called out, “All right, I know when I’m not wanted! But call me when you need me, okay?”

Then he realized the picture he must present, sitting up fully dressed in his bed and calling out to someone who wasn’t even there. Maybe it was just as well he lived alone.

Why did Tony still feel nervous when he phoned Sandy? If only they worked in the same office . . .

“Hello?”

“Sandy?” Tony licked lips gone suddenly dry.

“Tony!” she said, delighted. “I wondered when I didn’t hear from you over the weekend.”

“Could I have called that soon?” he asked, surprized, then realizing how callow he sounded, rushed on. “Uh, I’ve got two tickets for Two Against the World Saturday night. I was wondering if you’d care to go with me?”

“Only if you ask me out Friday night, too.”

Tony’s pulse ratcheted. “Uh—yeah! Thanks. Great!” He swallowed. “Dinner and dancing?”

“Lovely!”

“Talking about yourself again?” Tony bit his lip. “Sorry—that just slipped out.”

“Even better that way,” Sandy said, amused. “But I can’t think I’m pretty, can I? Not if beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“Wish I were beholding you right now.” Tony’s thoughts raced, trying to find a topic. Then he remembered Father Vidicon’s advice. “How could you ever think you’re NOT pretty?”

“Bless you,” Sandy said, her voice warm, “but not all of us made it to homecoming queen.”

“Thank Heaven!”

“You didn’t like the homecoming queen?”

“Oh, she was nice enough,” Tony said, “but kind of . . . shallow, you know?”

“All too well,” Sandy assured him. “You mean you didn’t ask her out?”

“We didn’t exactly run in the same crowd,” Tony said, “but I did try to make conversation with her one time. Talk about uphill work!”

Sandy chuckled. “Easier talking to me, huh? At least I understand computerese.”

“Yeah,” Tony said with fervor. “I know why you took your first course—but how’d you get interested in computers, anyway?”

“Why?” Sandy’s tone hardened a touch. “Not very ladylike?”

“No, I’ve met quite a few women in the field,” Tony said. “I always wonder how we stumble into it, though. With me, it was video games.”

“Oh.” Sandy sounded taken aback. “Well, I had one date with a computer nerd, and of course all he could talk about was his machines—but it sounded kind of interesting.”

“And the rest is history, huh?”

“Scarcely.” That warm chuckle again. “I’m still taking classes.”

“Well, of course,” Tony said. “Who isn’t? Which one are you in now?”

Half an hour later, he hung up the phone, dazed to realize how easily the conversation had flowed. Maybe Father Vidicon had had some social experience, after all.

“What’s the matter, Tony?” Harvey Chane asked.

Tony looked up from his e-mail in surprize—and guilt. “Oh, nothing, Harvey. Why would you think there would be?”

“When I see you staring at the screen for five minutes at a time between bouts of keystrokes, I’d guess you were preoccupied.” Harvey sat in the chair beside Tony’s desk. “Woman trouble?”

“No, not really.” The thought of Sandy was a welcome relief. “She said she’ll go to the opera with me Saturday night.”

“Glad to hear it.” Harvey fidgeted, apparently uncomfortable with the topic.

Tony waited.

“I heard Jane Harr had a chat with you last night,” Harvey said.

Tony should have realized word would get back to his bosses. He wasn’t the only one who stopped in there after work, of course, and the servers loved gossip, which meant they went through the serious topics very quickly and had to get picky to have anything to talk about. “She sat down while I was reading, yeah.”

“Made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

The thrill of guilt amazed Tony. “Oh, no. I refused it.”

“But it’s open, huh?” Harvey’s mouth tightened. “How much did she offer?”

“Uh . . . no definite figure . . .”

“Percentage, eh? Well, whatever it is, Tony, we’ll beat it. How much did she say?”

“Uh . . .” Tony felt his face growing hot. “Well . . .”

“Come on, tell old Harve! We don’t want martyrs here.”

Tony thought of St. Vidicon and felt even more guilty. “Okay, she offered me fifty percent.”

Harvey leaned back and whistled. “Ninety thousand!”

“I said no,” Tony reminded him.

“And I appreciate it,” Harvey said slowly, “but I did say we’d beat it. Okay, Tony, you just got a raise to an even hundred thousand a year. Think that’ll hold you?”

“You don’t have to . . .”

“Oh, yes I do,” Harve said. He stood up and managed a grin. “Can’t have you working at a loss, can we? And we sure don’t want to lose you.” He held out a hand. “Congratulations, Tony.”

Tony shook it, in a bit of a daze—but not so deep that he didn’t remember to say, “Thanks, Harve.” Then, as he watched Harvey walk back to his office, he muttered, “Thank you, St. Vidicon!”

“I had nothing to do with it, Tony!” the saint assured him.

Tony was physically in his bed, but his dream-self was in the maroon hallway with St. Vidicon.

“Well, you did, sort of,” Tony said. “You arranged for the companies to call Bald and Chane for a troubleshooter.”

“Fortunately, their computer people were listening.”

“I can’t really take credit for those repairs,” Tony said, “when it was you who gave me the power to go inside the circuits.”

Father Vidicon shrugged. “That would be like giving your high school physics teacher credit for your trouble-shooting, because he’s the first one who taught you anything about computers. I may have sent you there, Tony, but it was you who outsmarted the gremlkins.”

Tony felt warm at the thought. “Well, I wanted to thank you, anyway. Guess I’ll say good night, now.”

“No you won’t!” Father Vidicon looked up, shocked. “I’ve had another call for help!”

“And you’ve got your hands full here.” Tony nodded. “After what you’ve done for me, it’s the least I can do. Who and where?”

“His name is Tom and he’s in the control room of a nuclear power plant. None of his controls are responding and he’s afraid of a meltdown.”

Tony swallowed thickly, but before he was done, he found himself floating ten feet off the floor in the nuclear control room.

Tom was alone on duty, but he was on the phone. “I don’t know what’s gone wrong, but the water’s pouring out, and the controls won’t respond . . . Oh, there’s definitely power, my board’s lit up well enough. It’s just that none of the controls will do anything, that’s all!”

Tony didn’t have much doubt that he would be able to fix the controls, just as he had in the television studio. In fact, he suspected he’d find little gremlkins in its circuitry just as he had inside the television switcher—but first things first. He drifted through an inner wall and found himself looking down into the reactor chamber. The water was indeed flowing out and the fuel rods were beginning to glow.

Childhood conditioning took over—if it was radioactive, it had to be dangerous—and Tony winced, then reminded himself that radiation couldn’t hurt a soul.

On the other hand, how could an immaterial soul close a valve?

The same way an electrical current could, of course. Tony jumped into the valve to trace its controls.

“What do you here, mortal?” the glowing creature asked. “This is no place for your kind.”

Tony squinted against the glare and made out a shape that was more or less human, bald and with huge eyes, shaped more like a baby than an adult. “What are you?”

“I am the Spirit of Entropy, and only your fellow mortal Maxwell had the sense to think of me—though he did term me a ‘demon,’ which I most certainly am not,” the creature answered.

Tony could understand why, and he felt a chill. Maxwell’s Demon was a force for chaos, whether it knew it or not. “Why are you letting the water flow out?”

“Because it and the fuel rods were both merely warm,” the Demon answered. “Water should be cold and plutonium hot. I seek to restore the natural balance.”

“If that plutonium gets too hot, it’s going to blow up and take the whole island with it!”

“It would not have done so,” the Demon countered, “if you mortal folk had left it in the ground where it should have been. Indeed, it would not have existed if you had not tinkered with the uranium from which it came.”

Tony frowned. “You can’t think you’re trying to restore the natural order!”

“The natural state, aye,” the Demon answered, “which you foolish mortals have sought to reshape into forms more convenient for you.”

“There’s a paradox here.” Tony frowned. “By restoring what you think of as order, you’re making chaos.”

“Order emerges out of chaos, as some few of your scholars are beginning to note. I govern that process—but you have interfered with it.”

Tony watched the water running through the valve and felt sick at the thought of the dropping level in the pool and the heat the fuel rods must be generating. “If you let the plutonium explode, you’re not exactly going to be creating order!”

“On the contrary, I shall,” the Demon said, “after a few centuries.”

“But you’ll kill hundreds of people with it! Thousands, as the radiation cloud settles!”

“The earth will absorb it all.” The Demon seemed quite happy about it. “The land will regenerate, the waters flow clear again.”

“Yes, in a thousand years or so!” Tony’s mind raced; he knew there was no use in fighting this creature by physical force. It could turn any form of energy into any other.

Come to think of it, though, he wasn’t physical at the moment—and a soul wasn’t energy, though it could certainly generate a lot of it. He dived at the Demon, crying, “I can’t let you kill all those people!”

He cupped his hands to close them around the Demon—but just as he swung them together, the creature disappeared. “You cannot think to imprison me,” its voice said from above and behind him.

“No, but I can do some work while you’re out of the way.” Tony seized the metal and began pulling.

A blow rocked him, and he shot back against the side of the valve. “Foolish mortal,” the Demon scolded. “Did you think to staunch the flow so easily?”

“Seemed logical, yes.” Tony picked himself up and braced himself for another try at making moving parts move.

“You cannot,” the Demon said, “for I’ve welded metal to metal, and you would have to exert enough force to break the weld.”

Tony felt sick. How could a virtual ghost wield that kind of power?

By strength of spirit, of course. Tony felt himself warming at the thought. He might not be a strong man himself, but he had St. Vidicon behind him, and the saint drew on the greatest source of strength in existence. Tony stood up, straightening his necktie. “What do you expect to get out of this?”

“Get?” The Demon’s tone was confused. “Why should I ‘get’ at all?”

“Everyone does. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t do anything.”

“I am not human, foolish mortal.”

“You don’t have to be,” Tony said. “Everything living works to gain something—otherwise there’s no point in doing anything. A wolf chases a deer to get food. The deer runs to stay alive. Two bucks fight to try to scare each other away from a doe. To live is to strive—strive to gain.”

“But I am a spirit, not a living creature,” the Demon reminded him. “I do what I do because I wish to.”

“But why do you wish to?”

“For satisfaction,” the Demon answered, “satisfaction at seeing the world as it should be.”

“Forest fires? Floods? Creatures burned or drowned?”

“Even so,” the Demon confirmed. “All things die. It is better that they die as they naturally would. Water and fire balance one another. All the world seeks balance.”

“And you, being part of the world, find satisfaction in that balance,” Tony said slowly, “even if it comes after horrendous destruction and suffering.”

“The trees and grass will triumph.”

Then Tony had it—genetic mutations. “Yes, but what kinds of trees and grass will those be? For maybe my kind shouldn’t have made plutonium, but we did, and if you let it explode, its radiation will cause so many mutations that the plants will never return to their natural forms!”

But the Demon had the answer to that one. “Eons are nothing to me, and over thousands of years, the mutations that weaken the species will disappear as their owners die young, and those that strengthen the species will prosper.”

“And create a whole new species?”

“Thus has it ever been,” the Demon assured him. “Thus will it ever be. What if a few roentgens of radiation hasten the process by a few thousand years?”

“And the deaths, the suffering and destruction of those weaker ones, doesn’t bother you?”

“Destruction is progress toward balance,” the Demon said. “Suffering is part of existence.”

“Well spoken, for a creature who doesn’t suffer.”

“I suffer most shrewdly, when the world is askew.”

“But here there is harmony,” Tony argued. “The heat of the plutonium balances the coolness of the water. They share that heat and turn a turbine, which makes electricity to do work for people. If it didn’t balance, there would be fires and explosions.”

The Demon was silent, energy snapping in a corona around it.

Inspiration struck. “Here, I’ll show you.” Tony strode over to the shaft. He put his arms around it and pulled. Of course, it didn’t yield. “Give me a hand here, will you? I can’t turn it alone.”

“To what purpose would you move it?” the Demon asked slowly.

“To restore the balance within the tank,” Tony said. “Radiation is a small thing, but it can throw others out of balance amazingly.”

“That is why I shall remove this generator.”

“No you won’t,” Tony said. “You’ll unleash an unholy amount of radiation, vastly more than Nature supplies. But fill the tank again, and the power plant will keep that radiation in balance.”

“But when it is spent? When the fuel is exhausted? What then shall you do with the residue? How shall you prevent its radiation from contaminating the world?”

“By burying it deep in the earth where it came from,” Tony said. “That’s where you think it should have stayed, don’t you?”

“Indeed.”

“Then you shouldn’t have any problem with its being returned there. First, though, we have to soak up the worst of its radiation and make it safe to return.” Tony threw his weight against the valve. “Want to give me a little help?”

The Demon hovered, silent except for the snapping of its corona as it watched him.