Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

Chapter 18

The drummer hit a triumphant lick topped with a cymbal crash and the lead singer began his chant:

Nodding her head with the beat, Randy presided over the middle class of the city hearing from its angry youth—and about time, too.

Riding Randy’s data stream, Tony shot through the gate she had opened into the automation computer. Ahead, he could see the other gate, the one she had closed to stop the flow from the music service. Now the problem was opening the one and closing the other, and he certainly couldn’t do both at the same time; they were gates of digits, and he only had two hands.

But he knew someone who had more.

The gate that held back the music service was only a quadratic equation; Tony wrenched the factors apart and the digit-encoded music flowed. It collided with Randy’s stream. Digits toppled one upon another, making for utter confusion.

Keening like an ambulance, the Centimanes dived into the maelstrom, its hundred hands sorting bunches of digits and righting others. It would take the creature only a second or two to straighten them both out. Tony had no more time than that to figure out how to shunt Randy’s data stream away from the transmitter.

In Randy’s room, the band froze, staring at the radio, which was emitting a blast of static that drowned out the band’s music. “They’re trying to jam us,” she called over the roar. “I’ll set up another gate!” Her fingers flew over the keys.

“Jam!” the drummer cried, and tore into a solo. The rest of the band cheered and added their throbbing notes to underscore his beat. The drummer topped his lick with a cymbal, and the bass took up a solo of his own.

Ahead, another gate materialized, but Tony shot through it before it could close and grabbed ones and zeros, assembling them into an algorithm that blocked it open. He swam on, searching for the output to the transmitter.

There it lay ahead, with Randy’s data stream flowing through it! He rocketed on, formulating the equation that would divert hip-hop.

On the other side of the gate he circled back, fighting the current flow, and set his shoulder to the gate as he recited the code to shut it. Inch by inch, the gate began to close.

With a roar, the Centimanes slapped tentacles onto the gate, pushing against Tony. “The flow must not be impeded!’

“Why not?” Tony shouted. “It wasn’t here in the first place! This gate is only shutting off the data stream that was intended to flow through this circuit!”

“I care not for was—I care for is!”

Tony gave a recursive curse and, while it was circulating between himself and the Centimanes, ran his hands over the gate, sensing its form, translating it into code in his head. When he had it, he worked out the countercode and recited it as he proceeded to take the gate apart bit by bit.

It took only nanoseconds and left him staring at the Centimanes through a snow-storm of ones and zeros that the Centimanes automatically righted and spaced as it demanded, “What have you done, mortal?”

“Eliminated the gateway,” Tony said, “and the invading music with it. This circuit is as it was designed, creature. Keep it well!” With that, he withdrew his spirit-extension and found himself staring at the screen, fingers poised over the keyboard.

A hand slapped Tony’s shoulder. “You did it!”

Tony frowned, looking up at a strange, middle-aged beefy face. “Sure. Kid stuff.”

“I want the kid who did that stuff!”

“Uh, Tony Ricci,” the announcer said hesitantly, “this is Josh Largan, our owner.”

“It’s not that easy to trace a hacker,” Tony said, “especially after I’ve cut ’em off. Why would you want the kid, anyway? Didn’t really do that much damage. There’s no need to get her in trouble.”

“Trouble?” Largan bellowed. “I want to hire her! Any kid who can break into this computer, can figure out ways to keep other kids out—and at a quarter of the price I have to pay you!”

Tony was only too glad to pack up his laptop and head for the door—after all, he had a date that night.

The negative side—or maybe very positive side—of being back together was that Tony was much less inclined to resist temptation, if it meant hurting Sandy’s feelings and maybe losing her. Sandy, on the other hand, was much less inclined to offer that temptation, or to push for anything more than petting. The result was mutual confusion and growing frustration.

Basically, Tony’s approach was not to seek what wasn’t offered, and Sandy wasn’t about to offer anything that he would probably reject, no matter that he wanted it badly but was trying not to take advantage of her.

On a silvery Saturday, they went to roam the city, kicking through the snow, gossiping, stepping into coffee shops whenever the chill crept in, laughing over the newspapers at a bistro, strolling through three different museums, walking along a sidewalk lined with artists’ pictures and pointing out several to remember, then going to another bistro to compare notes about the pictures they’d thought worth comment—but not exchanging those comments where the artists could hear. Museums, shopping for knick-knacks and paintings, talk and laughter and the occasional kiss made up a day Tony knew he would never forget.

When they arrived back at her apartment building, he said, “We’re still on for the movies tonight, aren’t we?”

“Of course,” Sandy said with a smile.

“Okay, I’d better run home and change.” Tony gave her a quick kiss. “Six-thirty?”

“Yeah . . . sure.” Sandy sounded surprized, maybe disappointed, but gave him a kiss back—only this time, it lasted a bit longer, and when Tony backed away, she seemed more cheerful.

He went home, changed, picked her up, and had an evening that would have rivalled the day if Sandy hadn’t kept glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes as though wondering if he were still there. Trying to reassure her, he held her hand whenever she wasn’t eating popcorn, and it seemed to help a little.

They came out, happily dissecting the movie, but when Tony started to turn into their favorite club, Sandy held back, and said, “I don’t think so. Not tonight.”

“What?” Tony looked back surprized, then said, “Okay, then. Home?”

Sandy nodded, and he flagged down a cab. He kept asking her opinion of one aspect of the movie after another but received very short answers; Sandy seemed very nervous for some reason, and Tony started feeling as though he were in her way. When she turned the key in the lock of her outer door, Tony said, “Guess I’d better go, then. Thanks for a wonderful day.”

“What?” Sandy turned, astounded. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“If I’m invited,” Tony said. “I’m not assuming that I’m welcome every night.”

Sandy stood staring at him for a moment, then said very softly, “Thank you, darling. You were right; this is one of those rare evenings that should end here.”

Tony forced a smile, making it as warm as he could, and kissed her on the cheek—only she moved her head, and his lips met hers instead. It was a long and lingering kiss, but when it ended, Sandy pressed a finger over his mouth, whispered, “Good night,” and was gone through the door.

Tony stood staring at the doorbell for a few minutes, sorting out his confusions, then turned and went down the steps. He was surprized to find the taxi still there. He leaned down to the window and asked, “Are you free?”

“Sure am,” the driver said. “I always stay to make sure my fares get in their doors. Pays off sometimes, too.”

“This is one of those times, I guess.” Tony slid into the back seat and gave her the address.

It was a cold, crisp December night. Outside the large building the snow sparkled on the ground, falling through the air like the pearl white seasonal sequins that would be heavily discounted in the next few weeks. Inside the building the white of fresh, sterile paint made the cold hallways even colder as Beth headed toward the studio once again.

As she opened the heavy metal door, one that always reminded her of a high-security bank vault, she was greeted with a blast of hot air. She took a deep breath and inhaled the heady scent of blue and pink gels baking over blazing lights, black cables freshly uncoiled, and the sweet aroma of canned coffee and melting duct tape.

Ah, there was nothing like the smell of Christmas, and to Beth the Christmas holidays always began with the WBEG Winter Pledge Drive. Yes, there was nothing like begging for money to get you into the true spirit of the holidays. That reminded her to make a mental note to call her mother when she got home.

She stepped into the studio and promptly sneezed as the searing heat of the lights for the set warmed her in an instant. She’d been going back and forth all day—and most of the week—between the warm control room, the cold hallways, and the hot studio. Something was clearly wrong with the heating controls in the building. Add that to the long list of things that were not working consistently, and it was amazing they were still on the air.

Dodging phone volunteers and camera crew meandering back to their positions from the break between the breaks, and nimbly navigating around the dozens of cables strewn across the floor, Beth finally arrived at the cameras and began checking the tally lights for any improvements.

“Seven minutes till the break,” a tall man with a bushy red mustache called out, then looked over at her. “Any luck?”

“You tell me,” Beth replied. “Did they work last break?”

He shook his head, then readjusted his headset and turned the volume up on the remote pack clipped to the waistband on his jeans. She sighed and turned back to the camera, slipping on the attached headset.“Mac?” she asked, pressing down the TALK button.

“Yo,” he replied, slightly out of breath as if he had just run into position. He probably had. She could hear the distinctive crunch of potato chips on the other end. “Put up Camera Three.”

She glanced at the monitor and saw the same image as the one in her viewfinder, but the red tally light wasn’t lit. She looked over at the other cameras and noticed a red light on Camera One. Well, that tally light worked, but by all explanations it shouldn’t.

“Punch up Camera One,” she insisted. A moment later the image of a close-up on a telephone flashed onto the monitor—but the tally light lit up on Camera Three. She shook her head sadly. What was going on? The tally lights, like everything else, had been acting up for the last three days, and the engineers were working around the clock to fix the problems for tonight’s breaks. The problem was, they couldn’t find a problem. It defied explanation. The equipment only seemed to work when it wanted to. That was really nothing new in the TV industry, in this station in particular, but it was usually a little more reliable than this.

Suddenly the chatter in the room died down as a short man in a bad toupee entered the room, followed by an entourage of assistants. Beth took a deep breath, took off the headset, and marched over to him as Bill, the tall mustached man, helped him settle into the comfortable, Victorian-style armchair on the mock-library section of the set.

“Mr. Halloway, I’m Beth Grady, your director for the pledge breaks tonight.”

The man smiled at her in a polite, distant manner as his assistants and Gerald Mann, the producer, began to fawn over him and get him ready.

Mr. Halloway was the newly-elected mayor and had built and won the election on his “Education for All” platform. He had openly touted the pedigree and excellence of the local PBS station, WBEG, and therefore had insisted on being the cohost for the Saturday conclusion of their Winter Pledge Drive. The other host, Stanwick Sage, a WBEG employee who oversaw production of a local show, was sitting on the round central podium surrounded by pledge gifts. He was a pro at keeping the pledge breaks quick-paced, entertaining, and on track. The mayor appeared to have none of those qualities. Beth doubted he could write a speech himself, let alone remember it.

That was why the little technical inconveniences such as reversed tally lights and malfunctioning TelePrompTers, were a major problem now, and why Beth was sure her pet ulcer had developed a sister. The mayor was less than an amateur at live television and had been very hostile to the idea of looking foolish in any way.

Beth glanced at the phone volunteers and shuddered slightly, wishing there had not been a mistake with how the groups had been assigned. The local Bankers’ Association was supposed to be here, but instead they had somehow gotten switched with a new group of some sort of sci-fi fan club. All the volunteers were wearing black cloaks with large green eyes painted on the backs.

Now, Beth had nothing against sci-fi fan clubs or dressing up to be on television. She liked to role-play herself and attended sci-fi/fantasy conventions whenever she could. WBEG welcomed their support as much as that of any group in the community—last night, the phone volunteers had been the Doctor Who fan club for WBEG’s annual marathon, a very entertaining and nice bunch of people. Most of them had dressed up as characters from the show, several had tripped over very long scarfs either they or someone else was wearing, and one man had even tried to bring along his small schnauzer, dressed in tin foil and named K-9. Compared to them, green-eyed cloaks were tame, but there was something about the group that gave Beth a very uneasy feeling—as though they were watching her and waiting for something. Maybe it was the green eyes on their cloaks. That was what she told herself as she headed back to the control room. The volunteers could wait, and the producer could deal with the mayor—she had a break to run.

“Three minutes to air,” Mac told her, as she dashed into the control room, realizing halfway down the hall how close they must be to air time. She threw on the headset and plopped down in the director’s chair. It retaliated for the abuse by rolling backward into the wall. She grabbed the edge of the table and slid the chair back up to it, then flipped a bunch of switches, pressed a few buttons, and spoke into a small microphone.

“Ready in Master Control?” she asked.

Static answered; then a smooth voice, low and cool, spoke.

“Ready.”

Beth frowned, trying to figure out who the engineer was, since it was obviously not Fred, the high-pitched computer nerd who’d been scheduled. Shrugging it off, she glanced at Mac, who sat behind the switcher, fingers poised above the buttons and twitching from too much coffee. “Ready?”

He nodded. She checked with the CG and Audio operators, then flipped on the permanent TALK button on her headset. “Ready in the studio?”

“Ready,” Bill replied.

“One minute till air,” she announced, looking at the red numbers on the countdown clock ticking away. “Whenever you’re ready, go ahead and give it to us, Master Control.”

There was an almost imperceptible flash in the image on the program monitor, one of ten monitors that were set up at the other end of the room across what the crew affectionately called “the Grand Canyon,” empty space between the control desk and the monitors.

“We’re hot and live with thirty seconds to go!” Beth declared. The nerves were killing her. She was so nauseous she was afraid she might throw up, and gripped the cool surface of the table for support.

“Fifteen seconds.”

She closed her eyes and silently offered up a prayer to St. Vidicon to keep the equipment working until they were off the air. Luckily it was only a six-minute break.

“Um, Tony—I could use a little help here . . .”

“Whassamatta?” Tony swam up from the depths of sleep, saw St. Vidicon’s face, and tried to remember that he always felt refreshed after one of these errands. “Who’s in trouble now?”

“Beth, that young television director you helped last June,” St. Vidicon said. “Her equipment is rebelling again.”

“Gotcha, boss.” Tony stood up, looking around him at the maroon tunnel.

“Oh, and—you might need this.” Father Vidicon pressed something into Tony’s hand. A quick glance showed Tony it was a rosary. “Uh, thanks,” he said, and stuffed it into his pocket, then spread his hands. “How do I get to the TV station?”

“Like this,” Father Vidicon said, and Tony felt the floor drop out from under him.

“Ten seconds.”

Under the table, Beth’s leg was twitching anxiously.

“Ready open mike, ready cue talent, ready fade in one,” she called. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . Open mike, cue talent, fade in one!”

They were live and on the air. Whether or not they stayed that way was up to the good Lord and St. Vidicon.

Flashes of light and miniature glowing squiggles flew past, the speed increasing. Finally there was an explosion of light and a pyjama-clad man tumbled to the floor of a pitch-black tunnel.

Hold on to your gigabytes and pass the Pepto—Tony had a new assignment.

He got to his feet and immediately fell down again as the floor moved beneath him. He looked down and saw, covering the floor of the tunnel (and taking up most of the corridor), four huge cables, each the width of a sidewalk and all moving around under his feet. They started to sway and jump more and he scurried to stand, bracing himself against the flexible rubber-coated wall. Then he realized that the tunnel was no longer completely dark and that each cable was a different color—red, green, yellow, and blue. He looked down the tunnel for the source of the light, but before he could pin it down, the cables began to shake violently, the red one in the middle shaking most of all. He gripped the walls for support and waited to see what new monster was savaging the world’s technology this time.

He didn’t have long to wait. A line of men and women, only as tall as his waist if that, appeared. They were dressed in brightly-colored long-sleeved shirts with coordinating trousers and vests. On their heads were pointed hats, the tips of which glowed as though they encased light bulbs. They looked like garden gnomes—like the tacky plastic kind you see in your neighbor’s yard—only they had to be much smaller and were moving very quickly. In fact, they were running. Each one was carrying a giant letter, white and faintly glowing. The first one was capitalized and eventually Tony glimpsed a period running to catch up with the rest of the sentence. There seemed to be hundreds of them, racing through the tunnel and trying not to panic as a comma slipped and fell. Tony rushed to help him up. “Excuse me—what’s going on?”

The gnome roughly shoved him out of the way, grabbed the comma, and took off at lightning speed to jump back into the place he had deserted. The others brushed passed him, not even noticing him as he leaped aside to make way for a giant O. More than five hundred of them ran past, disappearing into the tunnel once more, the light going with them.

Since Tony didn’t have anywhere else to go, he ran after the gnomes. He fell several times on the tricky, moving cables before he finally saw light ahead of him—red, this time, and coming fast. Two gnomes raced toward him, holding an enormous glowing red ball between them.

“Watch out! Tally light coming through!” one of them shouted.

Tony jumped back against the wall and the glowing ball shot past him at top gnome speed. He frowned after it, then turned to go on down the tunnel after the letter carriers.

Finally, he came to a glowing blue hole in the side of the tunnel. He took a deep breath and jumped through it, landing on a green cable on the other side. Looking around, he saw he was in another tunnel just like the first. He followed it, moving warily, since he really had no idea where he was going. At last the floor began to slope upward, the slope steepening until Tony was climbing more than walking, feeling as though he were three years old and trying to climb up a slippery steep slide.

Finally, he came to the top and crawled through a hole that was slightly larger then the biggest letter. He found himself in a glowing room with metal walls. Looking up, he saw that the light came from a hole in the ceiling that gave a glimpse of a more brightly-lit room above. Looking down again he saw, about a third of the way from the back wall, a huge blackboard with slim metal bands forming rows in equal widths across it. Half a hundred gnomes were standing on platforms beside the blackboard, holding their letters in front of them, while still more were climbing into place and even more were waiting to get on. In front of the blackboard ran three slightly taller gnomes, all dressed in yellow with gold stars on the tips of their hats. One held a scroll of what looked to be computer printout, shouting out words to the other two, who were arranging the letter-gnomes in order. The entire blackboard was moving upward into the even more brightly-glowing room above them.

Their speed seemed to vary, and as Tony stepped forward, hoping to get a better look, he noticed that there was another blackboard behind the first that was moving down, toward the room he was in. Letter-gnomes stood on the thin platforms and jumped down as soon as they were within three feet of the floor; then, still holding their letters, ran back to the larger group, waiting to get cycled back in.

They were making words and sentences. A speech. Suddenly he realized what he was seeing. He had been sent to help out with the often-malfunctioning PBS station WBEG once again. A few months before he had fought against a swarm of gremlkins who had attacked the character generator. The problems had escalated beyond that now, just when the station seemed to be doing better financially, and the equipment was either not working at all or working sporadically. He’d been sent inside the system to find out what was wrong and fix it, paying particular attention to the tally lights. He realized that what he was looking at was obviously the inner workings of the TelePrompTer. However, he had never in his life heard that TelePrompTers were operated by gnomes.

A voice boomed inside the room, echoing off the walls. “Ten seconds . . . Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

Tony realized the “room” was connected to the intercom system.

“Two,” the voice said. “One . . . we’re off the air.”

Every gnome in the room, except the ones on the platforms, collapsed, taking deep gulping breaths as if they had just come up from an underwater battle. No more gnomes appeared on the blackboard in front and gnomes riding down on the back blackboard jumped off it, tossing their letters toward the outer edge of the room and falling to the floor in a crumpled heap. Eventually both blackboards slowed to a stop and the gnomes, having recovered somewhat, slowly stood up, holding on to each other for support.

“The next break is in twenty-one minutes,” the echoing voice boomed.

There was a resounding cheer from the gnomes, and they all charged toward Tony.