Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

Chapter 19

Once again, the gnomes barely noticed Tony as they ditched their letters and jumped into the hole that led back into the tunnel. He watched each one slide down the slope crying out in joy and running off into the tunnel—which, Tony realized, was the cable that connected the camera to the control room.

The room was emptying fast. In a few moments he would be alone and more confused than ever, and given some of his recent missions, that was really saying something. Before he could think about the consequences, he threw himself in front of the exit hole. Four or five gnomes promptly collided with each other, creating a gnome pile-up. Several of them cried out, and a younger one even squeaked in panic.

One of the yellow-clad gnomes—a sturdy-looking, middle-aged female with small spectacles—skidded to a stop near the pile and glared at Tony furiously. “What exactly did you think you were doing, young man?!?” she demanded. “Do you realize how many gnomes you could have hurt?!? And every one of us is important if we’re going to help the station survive the night!”

Tony stood up as soon as the gnomes had de-piled themselves, all glaring at him ferociously. He looked around apologetically, brushing off his clothes. “I’m sorry. I just need to know what’s going on. Who are you?”

Several of the gnomes harrumphed and a few laughed. The yellow woman looked at him skeptically. “You don’t look like an imp or a gremlin. Are you the one damaging the system?”

“Oh no,” Tony said quickly, eyeing some of the more burly gnomes who were shaking their fists at him. “I’ve been sent to help.”

“Sent?” another gnome, this one various shades of brown, demanded. “Sent by whom?!?”

“St. Vidicon.” Tony figured he might as well be honest, since they probably didn’t know who Father Vidicon was anyway—but a murmur of surprize and gasps of reverence echoed through the steel chamber. In a single smooth motion all the gnomes swept off their hats and bowed their heads. After a moment of silence they replaced their hats and looked at him with new respect.

All but the yellow lady. “Prove it,” she snapped.

Prove it? How? Tony stared, at a loss, then remembered Father Vidicon’s gift. He felt in his pocket and pulled out the rosary.

The yellow lady gasped, staring.

So did Tony. He had never before seen a rosary made from computer chips and strung on a strand of fiber-optic cable. The cross that dangled from it was made from four burned-out capacitors.

The gnomes murmured and took off their hats, bowing their heads. The yellow one nodded, apparently satisfied.

Tony, however, was still confused. “How did you hear of Father Vidicon? He’s scarcely been martyred yet.”

“Silly boy,” an older gray-haired gnome with a pocket protector and slight potbelly answered. “We operate clocks and watches and hourglasses and sundials!” He paused. “Well, okay, not sundials—but time doesn’t matter to Technomes!”

“Technomes?” Tony asked. He had never heard of such a thing.

The gnomes were outraged. “Who do you think runs the stoplights and the telephone wires?!?” one demanded.

“And the TVs and VCRs and microwave ovens! Who runs those?!?”

Tony was confused. “Well, electricity, cables, sound waves . . .”

He was cut off by a rush of voices. “And what keeps clocks ticking in a power outage?!?”

“What if there’s a short in the system? Who runs it then?”

“Who did Thomas Edison think he was, inventing that light bulb contraption? Have you ever been inside one? It’s horribly hot in there!”

Tony was feeling overly overwhelmed. Luckily the woman in yellow seemed to notice and silenced her fellow Technomes with a wave, then turned back to Tony and held out her hand. “I’m Beatrice. Call me Bea.”

“Tony.”

They shook hands, and she led him back to the exit hole. “We’ll explain it all to you back at the break room,” she announced.

Tony tried to ask another question, but Bea reached up and grabbed his shoulders, bending him down, then shoving him through the exit hole. He slid down the slide with a yelp and hit the bottom with a bouncing thud. He got to his feet as quickly as gravity allowed and stepped aside just in time to avoid being hit as Bea came sliding down behind him. She jumped up and took off running down the tunnel, the light on her hat showing the way.

“Follow me!” her voice cried, echoing down the tunnel behind her.

Tony took off after her, trying to keep up with her amazing speed and following the bouncing light in the tunnel ahead. He had been in TV studios before and knew there were yards and yards of cables. It would take forever to get out of the system.

He couldn’t have been running for more than a minute or two when there was a flash of blue light and to his great surprize, he stepped out of the cable and into the back of the break room refrigerator. He stumbled forward and nearly landed facedown on a large plastic container of pudding, clearly intended for someone’s lunch box—a normal-sized someone, not gnome-sized.

He looked around, amazed at the huge cartons of orange juice and half-and-half, the giant Tupperware containers full of salads and soups, and lots of other leftovers from lunches. Even a mammoth box of donuts peeked out around the mustard at the front. He’d never spent any time standing at the back shelf of a fridge before, but it was really quite fascinating. Bea looked at him and smiled.

“I told you time didn’t matter to us,” she declared with a hint of superiority. “We’re sent wherever and whenever there’s trouble.” She looked around at the groups of gnomes who had already started to party down. Spaghetti streamers decorated the shelf ceiling and five gnomes were rolling two very large cans of soda over to another group. One gnome ran forward and stuck what had to be some sort of a tap into each can, and the gnomes promptly filed up in line, filling tiny mugs with cold, cool, carbonated goodness. Bea flashed him a smirk and a shrug. “And when the trouble’s over, we like to relax.”

Apparently gnomes had taken relaxation tips from college students. Some were chugging soda. There was a high-stakes poker game going, using colored sprinkles from several of the donuts and set up on a clementine with cherry tomatoes as stools. One group had even managed to get the lid off a container of red Jell-O and proceeded to swim in it. The bright light of the fridge bulb illuminated the whole rowdy scene, and Tony realized he had finally found the answer to whether or not the light stays on when the fridge door closes.

The brown-clothed gnome with the gray hair and pocket protector handed him a small ceramic mug and led him over to the soda keg as Bea followed.

“I’m Robert, call me Bob,” he said, holding out a hand. Tony clasped it and shook. Bea led them into a quieter corner of the fridge, near the god-only-knows-how-long-it’s-been-in-here lettuce. They sat down on a large, but mostly, empty bag of cheese cubes.

“We’re Technomes,” Bea repeated, once they were settled.

Tony shivered as the chill of the fridge began to creep into him, but focused on paying careful attention to what she was saying as she continued. “Our job is to make sure that things work. Obviously we can’t fix everything—there’s simply not enough of us—so we help out in emergencies.”

“Most people don’t even know we exist,” Bob added, “but we’ve been around since the dawn of civilization. ’Course there wasn’t as much to do back then, but we kept ourselves busy regluing tablets and making sure fires didn’t go out too often.”

“Mending socks,” Bea added.

“Fixing quills and refilling ink. Then there was the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci kept us busy for a while.”

“So did the Wright brothers, remember them?” Bea and Bob exchanged pained glances, and Bea turned back to Tony. “You know, we did stuff like that. But these days we’re run off our feet. We’ve even had to divide into subgroups.”

“Which are?” Tony prompted.

“I’m a school gnome,” Bea declared proudly. “I help straighten up teachers’ desk drawers, unjam the stapler, scrub the bad stains off the blackboard, and such. Then there are the computer gnomes who basically have their own sub branch of Net gnomes, who fix problems on the Internet, get Web sites back up and running, destroy spam, and try to head off viruses. Traffic gnomes control the stoplights and walk/don’t walk signs. They also freelance in construction work. That’s where we got the red tally lights—we borrowed them from the streetlight on the corner.”

“But that means someone could get hurt,” Tony exclaimed.

“No, no, no,” Bea assured him. “We set the yellow lights on blink. Whenever you see that happen—stoplights stuck blinking on one color—it’s because the traffic gnomes had to borrow the light for something else.”

Suddenly Bea frowned and looked at a green-, yellow-, and red-clad gnome drying off from a swim through the Jell-O. “Edgar, when you pulled the red light, did you remember to set the yellows on blink?”

Edgar frowned, trying to remember.

They heard the muffled sound of a distant crash.

Edgar took off running.

“Apparently not,” Bob muttered, then looked at Bea with a sad sigh. “Edgar’s getting more and more forgetful these days. We’ll have to do something about that. We could get him a nice job in the CD department.”

Bea nodded, thinking, and sipped her soda. Bob turned back to Tony.

“Anyway, there are also two kinds of tele-gnomes,” Bob continued. “I’m a telephone gnome—I run back and forth fixing telephone lines, phone jacks—cell phones are a royal pain, let me tell you. Then there’re the television gnomes who take care of TV stations like this one and try to keep cable signals and reception clear. They also have to worry about cameras and lenses now, as well as DVD players, VCRs, satellite dishes, and digital programming.”

“I’m glad I don’t work in that office,” Bea muttered. Bob agreed.

Tony looked around. “Which ones are the television gnomes?” he asked.

“Oh, they’re still stuck in the control room fixing the problems there. The cooking gnomes send them catered snacks when we’re not on the air. You know all the lights on the video switcher?”

Tony nodded.

“Right now, each one of those is a gnome.”

Tony stared, struggling with the sheer magnitude of the idea. But something was puzzling him. He turned to Bea. “I was sent here to help fix the station’s technical problems, but you seem to be doing fine—so why am I here?”

They shrugged, and Bob said, “Maybe you can find the root of the problem. We’re just trying to keep it on the air.”

“Haven’t you looked for the source of it?” Tony asked.

They nodded, then looked away. “It was the first thing we did,” Bea told him. “Nothing seemed to be wrong with the equipment, so we figured something was down in Master Control—the engineering headquarters.”

“And what did you find?”

They shrugged. “The gnomes we sent there never returned. We sent two more parties, and they didn’t come back, either. No one goes near that area who doesn’t disappear without a trace.”

“Could a gnome be behind it?” They looked offended, so Tony quickly added, “I mean, has any gnome ever gone bad?”

“Where do you think Imps come from?!?” Bob declared. “Those are serious offenders, and we don’t take no responsibility for them! Oh sure, some gnomes get carried away and play a trick or two, like stealing a single sock out of the dryer, but what gnome hasn’t wanted to do that?”

Gnomes were the reason for odd socks? Tony shook his head and turned his mind back to the problem at hand. What was going on inside Master Control? He sat back and mulled over the information as he sipped his soda. Clearly he needed to find a way in there.

And find a way back.

“Three minutes till air!” someone shouted from over by the soda kegs. “Get to your positions!”

One by one the gnomes got up and hurried over to the door back into the cables. Tony held Bob back as he moved to join them. “How do I get to Master Control?” he asked.

Bob looked at him as if he were crazy. “Why go there? You won’t come back!”

“That’s my problem. Can you tell me how to get there or not?”

Bob nodded and called out to a cooking gnome, dressed in white with a fluffy baker’s hat. “John, can you show Tony here to Master Control? Take him to Roger.” He turned back to Tony. “Roger can show you the way there.”

“Thanks.” Tony followed John to a side entrance. They jumped into a hole in the wall and disappeared into the darkness.

Well, the first break had gone pretty smoothly. Beth sighed with relief as she drained the soda can, crumpled it, and tossed it into the recycling bin, heading back to the control room. One down and six to go. Please let the machines keep working, she silently pleaded.

She slipped back into her seat and put on her headset. She’d a chance to talk with the mayor, who was pleased with how the last break had gone—though she’d had to assure him that in spite of their strange costumes, the volunteer phone operators were really very nice and were certainly not taking the spotlight off him. He was satisfied that the evening would be a success.

Unfortunately, the phones were not ringing off the hook as she had hoped. Well, maybe they would pick up later, although given how boring the last break had been, no matter how Stan tried to lighten it up, she doubted it.

Mac wandered back in and sat down at the switcher, brushing some potato chip crumbs off his shirt. He smiled sheepishly as Beth gave him a reproachful look. Cockroaches in the control room, that would be all they needed now.

“To you in ten,” the sepulchral voice from Master Control said.

“Ready mikes, ready fade in three,” Beth called. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . Open mikes, fade in three!”

The break was underway.

Unfortunately, it promised to be even more boring than the last, as the mayor launched into a speech on sewer service reforms. It wasn’t boring for the crew, though—they were all praying silently for the equipment to keep working. Come on, just a little longer. Just a few more minutes.

Looking back on it, Beth would never be quite sure how it began, but someone on the set screamed. Beth, determined to keep the mayor on the air, kept the camera on him, but glanced at her preview monitors for the wide shot of the set. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

The phone volunteers had abandoned their posts. Three of the dozen were standing on the set, pointing an odd assortment of guns at the crew and the remaining, non-cloaked, volunteers. The rest of the cloaked club were rounding up everyone who wasn’t manning the equipment and forcing them over to the phone bank.

The mayor, realizing what was happening, stopped his speech and looked off screen. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.

Beth still knew better than to change the camera angle, even with Mac asking her a dozen times when she wanted to switch. “Do we really want the folks at home to know about this?”

The leader of the cloaked club pointed a gun at Stan’s head. “I want us on the screen! NOW!”

“Do it,” she ordered, and Mac punched up Camera Two.

“Please, no one panic,” Beth told her crew over their headsets, although she felt as if she were going against her own orders. “Please stay calm. Everyone will be okay. I’m calling the police.”

“Don’t call the police,” the leader said into Camera Two. “If we hear one siren, if anyone enters this building from now until we get off the air, we will shoot everyone in this studio.”

There was an audible gasp, and Beth waited breathlessly in the control room to hear their demands. What did they want? Money? Fame? Who would be stupid enough to hold a PBS station hostage? It’s not like anyone was watching.

“We regret using the threat of violence,” the leader went on, “but we feel it is necessary. We don’t want to kill anyone, but we will if we have to. We are fighting a war, and we understand that there may be casualties.”

War? Oh my God, they’re terrorists, Beth thought wildly. What could she do to stop them? Were they going to die?

“As some of you know and many of you do not, aliens are among us,” the “volunteer” declared.

Everyone froze, unsure if they had heard him correctly.

“That’s right, aliens. We are not the Fly-By-Night Candy Foundation, who deliver to pregnant women and college dorms around the clock as our banner claims. We are, in fact, The Interglobal Confederation of Totally Outrageous Conspiracy Theories.”

The what? Beth thought about the name for a moment and figured out their initials. TIC TOCT. They should have had clocks on their cloaks, not green eyes. Alien eyes, she realized with a start. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Even if she had, she would never have expected this.

“We are a secret organization of civilians dedicated to destroying the threat of alien interference in our daily lives and of preventing the great Intergalactic War that will soon be upon us. Do any of you realize how many evil things in the history of our world have been the treacherous plans of beings from another world?”

He walked over to one of the mayor’s staff, sitting by a telephone looking pale and worried. “You!” he demanded.

She squeaked with fear.

“Who was responsible for the assassination of JFK?”

“Um . . . Lee Harvey Oswald?” she mumbled.

“WRONG!” he yelled. “It was aliens! And who was responsible for the Black Plague?”

“Um . . . rats?”

“ALIENS!” he shouted. “Who started both world wars in an attempt to destroy our planet?”

“Um . . . aliens?” she suggested meekly.

“Exactly!” he cried, beaming with delight at her understanding.

Well, give them points for creativity. Beth had certainly never learned THAT in a history book.

He turned back to the camera and addressed the audience, all ten of them. “We do not like violence,” he said again, “but we are very good at it. We appeal to the people of this country . . .”

Country? Didn’t they realize this was a local PBS station? It couldn’t even reach the whole state.

“. . . to donate to our worthy cause! After all, we are fighting to save your lives as well as our own; we are fighting to save the world. But we need more money so that we can develop weapons powerful enough to defeat our enemies! Donate to us, here at this station, and save the lives of these brave volunteers while you help us save the world!”

There was a resounding cheer from all the black-cloaked volunteers.

Stan smiled, still sitting on the central, circular podium in the center of the set. “Hey, that’s not a bad slogan—WBEG-TV—saving the world through public broadcasting.”

“I’m in charge here!” the leader shouted. “I’ll come up with the slogans!” He turned back to the camera once again. “Citizens of the world, unite!”

Oh, the country wasn’t enough, he now assumed this broadcast was global. As if they had the money for THAT.

“We have long fought against the alien menace—join us now and fight for your world! Fight for your future! Send money to secure the safety of your home, of your children, from the alien scum! We must protect ourselves! Now is the time for action!”

“And for pledging at the hundred-dollar level we have a VHS copy of tonight’s program,” Stan declared, desperately trying to get back to the break’s script. “At the seventy-five-dollar level . . .”

“I’m talking!” the leader yelled. “And when I’m talking, you shut up!”

“But we—we have lovely thank-you gifts,” Stan offered.

“I have no interest in your pathetic gifts!” the leader glared at him, then looked at the VHS tape. “Ooh, Lord of the Dance . . .”

There was stunned silence in the control room.

“Well,” Beth declared. “At least the equipment is working.”

“Yippee,” Mac declared without enthusiasm. “Those nutjobs get to stay on the air.”

Beth knew the group was crazy, but they were holding the guns, and however far-fetched their theories, they were serious. Deadly serious.

Suddenly the phones in the studio began to ring.