Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

Chapter 16

“Ms. Clavier?”

Sandy wrenched herself out of her unseeing trance and looked up at the delivery girl with Rachel hovering behind her.

The teenager handed her a long white box with a grin, but all she said was, “Sign here, please.”

Sandy signed in a daze, then remembered to say, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, lucky lady.” The kid popped her gum and went out the door.

Rachel was still hovering. “Come on, open it! I’m dying of curiosity!”

It didn’t even occur to Sandy to tell her friend to mind her own business; she untied the ribbon with fingers that felt like sausages. The roses glowed at her like life restored.

“Oh Sandy, they’re beautiful!”

Other co-workers looked up from their desks and exclaimed approval and envy as Sandy lifted the bouquet out of the box.

“Hold on, I’ll find a vase!” Rachel bustled off.

That was fortunate—at least she wouldn’t see Sandy open the card. She slid it out of the diminutive envelope and read:

I’m very sorry, but I can still hope.

Love,

Tony

Sandy’s knees gave way; she sat down harder than she had intended. Maybe it wasn’t over, after all.

“Nothing today, Tony.”

“Nothing?” Tony looked up at Harve in surprize. He had to quell a moment of reflex panic, the feeling that no work meant no pay. He was on salary now, and okay, he might not be earning a commission for fixing someone’s system today, but he wouldn’t exactly go broke, either. “Good!” he told Harve. “I’m behind on correspondence and way behind on filing.”

Harve grinned. “Have fun cleaning up your desk.”

Tony did. He spent the morning pushing documents into folders and shoving them into his filing cabinet drawers. Then, with his desk mostly clear, Tony glanced at the clock, remembering Sandy and wondering if it was time for the next step in his campaign to win her back. It was—lunchtime. Now he could go scouting.

Tony went by Sandy’s office building during lunch hour with a special eye toward the trash cans in the alley. He didn’t notice any roses, so he dared to hope. Of course, that didn’t mean his roses weren’t sitting in a wastebasket somewhere inside the building; but if she didn’t mind having them in sight, there was a chance.

As soon as he arrived back in the office, Tony turned to his computer to check his e-mail.

There it was at the top of his inbox, Sandy’s name next to the word “Roses.” Heart suddenly hammering, he clicked on the link, then read,

Dear Tony,

The roses are lovely—thank you so much. I can hope, too. Let’s get together for coffee after work today and see if we can work something out. At Nepenthe?

Tony’s pulse rocketed; for a moment, he felt as though he were floating. Then the words on the screen came into focus again and he tapped out a confirmation and sat back to bask in the glow of achievement.

When the glow faded a little, Tony reminded himself that all he’d achieved was a new start. If he really wanted Sandy back, he’d have to work out a campaign—but the way he felt right now, if she insisted on sex, he’d agree, scruples or no.

And of course, his whole body thrummed with desire at the thought; he felt as though he were a guitar tuned for her playing.

How about if she had come over to his side and was ready to say “yes”? Or even to keep dating without sex?

An unaccountable wave of depression hit Tony, but at least he knew its cause. He would just have to soldier through and be as good as his former word—and he had enjoyed going to the theater much more with her, than by himself.

But the reminder of the routine they’d shared also reminded him that he was in the office and should at least go through the motions of earning his paycheck. He turned back to the screen just as a window opened, filling the center of the frame.

Only this one didn’t feature a beautiful woman exhorting him to buy something—it showed him the maroon hallway with which he had become all too familiar.

Well, there wasn’t much that had to be done on the job today, anyway—and he needed somebody to share his triumph. He let the image on the screen become more and more real to him until he found himself walking down that moist and infirm corridor beside the reassuring bulk of the stocky priest.

“I’ve got another date, Father,” he said, straight out.

“Very good, Tony! I couldn’t be more pleased for both of you.”

“Well, I don’t know about being pleased for her,” Tony said. “She’s not getting as good a bargain as I am.”

“Oh yes she is—and I do indeed think highly of the young woman. Your opinion of your own worth, Tony, is far lower than the reality.”

“Maybe someday I can believe that.”

“Do! After all, your experiences combatting Finagle and his minions should convince you of some of your abilities.”

“They’re helping a little,” Tony admitted, “but those aren’t the traits that make for a good fiancé, let alone a good husband.”

Father Vidicon smiled. “It takes courage and perseverance to make a marriage succeed, Tony.”

“A marriage, maybe,” Tony said glumly, “but how about a romance?”

“How about it?” Father Vidicon gave him a quizzical look. “Why don’t you ask the young lady?”

Courage and perseverance, Tony reminded himself. He reached out, picked up the phone, and dialed.

It was ten minutes to four when Sandy’s phone rang. She answered it with more caution than hope; after all, she’d had a dozen calls that day, and none had been from Tony.

“Sandy?”

It was his voice.

Sandy sat up a little straighter and felt a smile coming on. “Hi, Tony.” Her voice came out high and thin, and she cursed mentally.

“Hope you had a good day.”

“Well, it was better after a long white box arrived. You’re a dear! You didn’t have to, you know.”

“No, I don’t,” Tony said. “You deserved them. We still on for Nepenthe after work today?”

Sandy tried very hard to rein in her exultation. “Yeah . . . I think I could manage that . . .”

“Okay, then.” Tony sounded massively relieved. “I’ll be there by quarter after for sure.”

Awkward pause.

“That’ll be great,” Sandy said through wooden lips.

“Yeah, it really will,” Tony said in a rush. “See you then.”

“Nepenthe,” Sandy said. “ ’Bye.”

She hung up the phone and Rachel pounced. “Well? Was it him? What did he say?”

“I’m meeting him at the coffee house right after work.” A wave of dread swept Sandy. “Oh Rachel, what if he wants to make the break-up official?”

“What if he wants to make sure it hasn’t happened?”

Tony couldn’t concentrate, his whole body was quivering with elation. He was so filled with energy that he felt he would burst, felt he could go out and build a sky-scraper just to let off tension.

Still, he had to go through the motions of work. He turned to the screen and, for want of anything better to do, clicked on his Internet icon. Its home window opened—but another frame opened on top of it.

Another dratted pop-up ad! Well, he’d at least see what the topic was before he closed it. He gave it a quick glance—then glanced again and read the words the funny little man in the monk’s robe was pointing to:

Want to save the world? Well, you can—or at least, the duty engineer at Interworld’s earth station!

Then, as though he knew Tony had finished reading, the little monk turned to point at a button that said, “Start.”

Tony felt a minute’s burning resentment. Wasn’t it enough that he give the ghostly priest his nights without having to give up his days, too? But he remembered that he might want to be keeping his nights to himself in the near future—well, to share with only one other person who was far from being a monk—and that Father Vidicon just might have been instrumental in smoothing things over with Sandy. For the first time, it occurred to him that he might not be the only living person helping out the saint.

So he leaned back in his chair and let his eyes lose focus as he clicked on “Start.” The picture inside the frame changed to a long room lined with screens that centered around a console, a long room that seemed to become longer as Tony gazed, until it wasn’t on the screen any longer, but all around him, and Tony knew he was inside the earth station, watching invisibly as a ghost.

Ben had had an absolutely lousy morning. The dog had knocked over his food dish, the cat had started in on the drapes, then the dog had taken his own sweet time on his morning walk. So much for the pleasures of house-sitting to escape his narrow apartment for the week.

Then, of course, his car had refused to start, and it had taken the tow truck an hour to get there—pretty fast, for rush hour, but it hadn’t seemed so at the time. Then, of course, it only took the driver a few minutes with jumper cables, and one quick signature later, Ben was on his way, blessing his auto club—but that had axed the errands he’d been planning to run on the way to work, not to mention the leisurely breakfast. He’d had to settle for a biscuit sandwich and a large coffee at the drive-through, both of which would probably be cold by the time he got to work. Then, as he’d driven under the shadow of the huge old satellite dish, he’d heard the roar of heavy equipment and had had the good sense to brake as he came out of the curve, to see the backhoe digging a trench just past the line of smaller satellite dishes. It was going to be a jolly day, all right, with that thing bellowing right outside his window. He turned right at the power company’s transformer that supplied the electricity that ran his earth station and braked as his car rolled down the drive to the double gate in the chain-link fence.

Of course, the lock didn’t want to turn when he put his key in. He jiggled and twisted, though, and it finally gave, grumbling at having to move. He shoved the gate open, went back to his car and drove in, got out to close and lock the gate, and turned to survey his hurricane-fenced enclosure. From this angle, the satellite dishes had turned their backs on him and the long one-story control cabin at his right—a converted house trailer, actually—did leave the view clear for him to look out over the college campus to the island of Manhattan, there on the skyline.

The sight was inspiring, of course, but it was also the reason Ben was here—or that Interworld had its ground station on top of this old mountain (big hill, actually). They had leased the site from the college so that they had a clear microwave path to the Empire State Building, where Interworld had its distribution control center. Stations in New York City piped their signals into the Empire State Building by fiber-optic cable, and there on the Eighty-third floor the signals were converted to microwaves so that they could shoot out here to the earth station. The little microwave dishes on the tower picked up those signals and sent them down long strands of cable into the control cabin, where Ben would punch buttons and turn dials to change those signals back into microwaves and send them through other cables into the feed horn of the big satellite dish, where they would spray into the metal umbrella to be beamed up to Interworld’s satellite twenty-two thousand miles above the equator—and, of course, that satellite and several others would send their signals down to these same dishes to be gathered into the feed horns and piped back into the control cabin to be microwaved to New York, so the people in Manhattan could turn on their cable TVs and see what was happening all around the world. In the early fifties, “Window to the World” had meant dollying a camera over to a window to look down twenty stories onto Forty-second street. Now it meant seeing what was happening on a street in Tokyo—or New Delhi or Baghdad, wherever the news of the world was happening that day.

The thought lifted Ben’s spirits, as it always did—lifted them enough so that the backhoe didn’t seem quite so annoying anymore. He slipped back into his car and parked it outside the cabin. It had taken a lot of convincing to keep the college’s development committee from building the new dormitory between the earth station and Manhattan. In fact, it had taken some pretty strong persuasion to make them realize that Interworld wasn’t just concerned about their spoiling the view—but reason had finally prevailed, and they were building the new dorm over to the side.

Ben stepped out of the car into a blast of summer heat and humidity. He winced and trotted over to the cabin. He closed the door behind him, blessing electronic equipment’s need for air-conditioning, and raised a hand toward the intern he was relieving. “Hi, Gloria.”

“Hi, Ben.” Gloria stood up, slapping her pen down onto the log sheets on the clipboard. “Everything’s boring.”

Ben grinned; for Gloria, “boring” meant “normal.” “Glad to hear it. Hot date tonight?”

“On a Thursday?” Gloria gave him a strange look.

“Hey, anything you do tonight is going to be hot.”

“Sorry to hear it.” Gloria went to the door. “Well, everything’s set for the three o’clock feed. Want me to run it?”

“Nah, I’m here in time.” Ben went to the operator’s chair and sat down to scrutinize the log. “Not that much is set to happen, anyway.”

“Looks like a good documentary coming at 7:00 P.M.,” Gloria said. “Enjoy it.”

“You too,” Ben said absently, and managed a wave just before the door closed. Then he went back to perusing the log. He had two minutes before he had to start the feed, and the dish was already aimed at the Interworld Three satellite. All he had to do was punch two buttons. He looked up at the clock, tracking the sweep second hand with his fingers ready. As the hand hit the top of the clock, he pushed the buttons, then glanced at the monitor—then stared. All he saw was “snow,” the randomly-dancing dots that meant there was no signal coming through. Wildly, he glanced at the meters and saw their needles bouncing merrily—so the signal was going to the dish as it should. Why wasn’t it going up to the satellite?

The telephone rang. Ben snatched it up, snapped, “I know. I’m working on it,” put down the receiver, and ran to the window. One glance at the dish showed him why; it was still set for the horizontal transponder. He hit the manual key to rotate the great bowl to the vertical. Usually he would be able to hear the chain drive clanking, but not with that backhoe’s roar, so he looked—and saw the chain stock-still. It didn’t move, so neither did the bowl. It stayed set on horizontal. The dish was frozen in the wrong position.

Why?

Then he saw the backhoe swinging its shovel around for another bite at the ground—right between the power company’s transformer and the dish. “St. Vidicon, protect us from Finagle!” he called on his way to the door. He yanked it open and pelted out into the summer heat, yelling and waving his arms. Of course the backhoe was making so much noise that it drowned out his yelling, but the driver saw his frantic signals and cut the motor. “What is it?” he called.

“You cut the cable!” Ben called back.

The driver stared, then looked back at the trench and swore.

“Didn’t you see sparks?” Ben panted as he came up to the backhoe.

“Thought my shovel had hit flint,” the driver answered.

“Good thing you have a padded chair,” Ben said, “or you would have found out the hard way. I’ll go call the power company.” He ran back inside, but before he called, he was going to have to figure out a way to get the three o’clock feed up to Interworld Three. He suffered a brief vision of soap opera fans all over the country staring at the snow on their screens and cursing. He would have indulged in it himself, but he prayed to St. Vidicon instead.

Satellite communications weren’t exactly Tony’s forte, but he certainly knew the basics of circuit design, so it only took him a glance or two, and a little eavesdropping on Ben’s frantic thoughts, to realize that if you can’t get a signal where it’s supposed to go by its usual route, all you have to do is figure out a different path. However, that meant he was going to have to put his thoughts into Ben’s head—well, not into, exactly, just around his head where he could pick them up. He hovered unseen next to the racks of equipment, focusing his thoughts on Ben.

They coruscated off like a meteor shower, and a small ugly flat head lifted from Ben’s hair, hissing, “Avaunt, interloper! This brain is not yours.”

Tony froze, staring as the creature’s skin opened to spread a hood behind its head—and conveniently over Ben’s, blocking him from Tony’s thoughts. “What manner of creature are you?” he demanded.

“I am the Serpent of the Single Mind,” the cobra hissed, “and I have filled hisss with one thought and that one thought only—that he must find a way to make the great sssky-facing bowl rotate. Begone, interloper—I’ll not have you dissstracting him.”

“Distracting is scarcely the term,” Tony said. He had already figured out another solution to the problem—but how to get it through to Ben, with the cobra’s hood blocking the way? “St. Vidicon, I could do with a little inspiration here!”

Obligingly, the idea surfaced from his subconscious. Grinning, Tony asked the snake, “How did you get here?”

“Why, by hisss choice,” the cobra answered. “From hisss youth, thisss man ssought to avoid dissstractions when he concentrated his thoughtsss upon a problem—and out of that wish, I grew to sshield hisss mind from any other influence.”

“But only when he’s solving a problem,” Tony reminded the snake. “When he is not, don’t you think you should be letting alternative solutions in?”

“It isss hisss choice,” the snake returned. “If he had wished for solutions that did not follow from a train of thought, each step in its proper order, I would not have arisen.”

“But you know he’s not going to be able to solve this problem by logic.”

“I know nothing of the sssort.”

“Well, take my word for it.” Tony began to move to his right, heading toward Ben’s face. “He’s going to have to think outside the terms of the problem, or he won’t find a solution.”

“What iss that to me?”

Tony stared; then, still sidestepping, he asked, “You don’t care whether or not he solves the problem?”

“Not a bit,” the snake answered. “I exissst to ssshield his mind from distractionss while he thinksss, nothing more. I care only if an unwanted thought should enter hisss mind.”

“How about if the thought is wanted?’

“It issss not.”

“But if it’s an alternative solution to the problem, he will want it.”

“I sssee no evidence of that,” the snake answered. “Ssstop sssidewalking, man! Do you think it will do you any good to ssstand before his eyesss? I assssure you it will not!”

Tony stood in front of Ben. The snake reared up above his forehead, its hood spread, making him look for all the world like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Tony reached out to touch the control panel, reached into it, and jiggled a contact.

Ben frowned as the tally light that showed the transponder link from the Japanese news agency blinked. All he would need right now would be for that link to go dead too! The Japanese network paid well to keep a transponder illuminated to carry the signal from its New York bureau to its Tokyo headquarters twenty-four hours a day whether there was any program to carry or not, just to make sure they weren’t late with a story. Ben didn’t want to think about the rebate Interworld would have to pay if that link went dead. A second’s disruption in the signal now and then wouldn’t be a tragedy; it could be sunspot interference or even just . . .

The tally blinked again; then the dark one next to it blinked on for a second but went dark.

Ben frowned. How could the tally for Interworld Four’s number six transponder light up? It wasn’t scheduled for now. In fact, the dark jewel showed that it wasn’t in use; how could the tally have . . .

His eyes widened as the thought penetrated, and he whirled to check the schedule.

“Wicked man, you have bypasssed me!” the snake hissed, and struck at Tony, fangs dripping.