Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

by Christopher Stasheff

  “Guess what?!?” a phone volunteer cried, jumping up and running to the hosts’ table where the leader was standing. “Someone from Springfield will pledge one hundred thousand dollars if you can save the world by the end of the evening!”

  “Yes!” the leader exclaimed. “I love a challenge!”

  And just when things seemed to be getting better, and the TIC TOCTians were getting distracted, the worst possible thing happened.

  Everything stopped working.

  They were off the air. There was no light, no sound, nothing. It was as if every piece of technology in the building suddenly stopped. Beth could only imagine what the group would do, now that they were off the air.

  “Please turn back on, please turn back on,” she muttered.

  Tony and John had just dived into the switcher when everything went dark. The room was a mass of confusion as all the tele-gnomes stopped what they were doing and froze, uncertain of what was going on outside, but all knowing that something was terribly wrong.

  “What’s happening?” Tony demanded, fighting his way through the darkness to the nearest gnome.

  “No one knows,” she replied, standing perfectly still.

  Tony realized that whatever was happening on the outside, having the station go off the air could only make things worse. “Get back to work!” he commanded. “Whatever happens, we have to stay on the air!”

  This seemed to jump-start everyone. The Technomes began moving again. In a few minutes the lights came back on, and Tony found himself in a huge rectangular room, full of moving platforms and thin, tiny cables. Hundreds of gnomes stood perched on platforms or ran between the narrow aisles and into a hole at one end of the room. Each gnome had a very bright light in his or her hat and Tony realized they were lighting up, and operating, the switcher buttons.

  A tall gnome walked over to him briskly and held out his hand. He had a bristly beard and a mustache, both reminiscent of a college professor, and gripped an unlit pipe between his teeth. He removed the pipe and shook Tony’s hand.

  “Roger,” he said, introducing himself.

  “Tony,” Tony replied.

  “You’re the one sent by the saint himself?”

  Tony nodded, and Roger quickly moved him to the center.

  “Look, I need to know what’s going on.” Tony tried to quell his mounting apprehension. Whatever made the gnomes stop came from outside the equipment, even outside the studio itself. “I have to get out of the equipment and into the Master Control room somehow,” he said, almost pleadingly. “Whatever happens, you have to keep the gnomes working—make sure the equipment stays on!”

  Roger nodded gravely and turned to several tele-gnomes, who had just run into the “room.” He told them Tony’s orders and sent them back into the cable tunnels to tell the others to get the station back on the air.

  Tony looked around, trying to figure a way out of the switcher. He fumbled in his pocket and clenched St. Vidicon’s rosary tightly, rubbing the computer chips and thinking as hard as he could. Then he saw it.

  A shadow came over one of the gnomes and the gnome jumped up and down on the platform, making the outside button move. Tony realized that the shadow was a human finger. Maybe he could get inside a person on the outside and see what was going on? He had gotten into the inner workings of all kinds of things—why not a person? It could work. If only he knew how.

  The shadow descended again and without thinking, he ran for the platform it was heading for, mumbled an apology as he shoved the gnome off, and jumped up, hitting his head against the orange plastic ceiling.

  Suddenly he was flying and falling all at the same time, surrounded by darkness. Then he emerged, breathless, into a glowing red-and-pink tunnel—a vein, he realized, and dived in to swim through the red liquid. He found a section heading north and let the current carry him past fat cells lying around sipping piña colada, muscle cells flexing themselves and arguing about which of them was strongest, and several groups of white blood cells wearing martial-arts black belts and attacking nasty-looking leather-clad gangs of bacteria.

  Tony lay back in the stream of blood that carried him along and settled in for an interesting ride.

  It seemed forever, but could really have been only a few moments, before the switcher suddenly came back to life, lighting up the rest of the control panel. They were live and on the air again.

  At first the studio had been pandemonium, with the TIC TOCTians’ leader running around screaming at the crew, until Stan—good ol’ professional Stan—turned to Camera Two, and said, “Please bear with us, viewers—we’re having a few slight technical difficulties. We’re sorry for the interruption—but it does show you why we need your donations: to keep on the air.”

  “Order! Order!” The leader shouted, brandishing his weapon, The mayor’s staff fell silent, jumping back into their seats by the phones.

  Satisfied that the studio was back under his control, the leader turned to Camera Two, and cried, “See! The aliens conspire to deprive you of our inspiring words! Send in your pledges now to keep them from conquering the world!”

  He was, of course, standing in front of the brightly-painted flats with the WBEG logos. No one would ever forget which station was putting his little army on the air!

  In the background every spare person was answering phones—all except the mayor, of course, whose face was a blotchy mixture of white and red, looking both frightened and furious at the same time and, not knowing what else to do, was sitting in his chair quietly.

  “They will eradicate us all!” the leader screamed. “They will destroy your government and rule over your pathetic little lives! You will be mindless slaves, and they shall feast on the flesh of your children!” He paused in his frenzy and added with a gracious smile, “And that’s why we’d like you to donate to the ‘Save the Earth from Alien Attack’ fund.”

  “The phones are ringing off the hook,” Stan said, genuinely pleased with that fact at least. It meant people were watching. Which was a good thing, right?

  “Yes, they are, Stan,” the leader agreed. “And that’s good, for if they were not, I would have to massacre the entire phone staff and force their families to watch!!” He paused again and smiled. “Now let’s go over to my second-in-command—Major Paine—and see what lovely gifts we’re offering tonight.”

  “Dissolve Three,” Beth said, resigned, and the screen changed to an image of Paine standing in front of a tote board.

  “Thank you, General, first—at the thousand-dollar level—we have your basic membership in the ‘Interglobal Confederation of Totally Outrageous Conspiracy Theories,’ including an all-expense-paid vacation to our training camp, as well as your very own gun. Now at the five-thousand-dollar level, you can start off with a commission as a lieutenant, guaranteeing at least five other ‘Friends of the Federation’ under your command. As an additional incentive, if enough people make a pledge at the ten-thousand-dollar level then we will NOT kill your mayor. However, if enough people pledge at the hundred-thousand-dollar level, then we will kill your mayor. Now back to you, General.”

  All the color had drained out of the mayor’s face. He was looking both horrified and embarrassed.

  After what seemed like hours, and many wrong turns into strangely fascinating organs, one actually shaped like a pipe organ (clearly, gnome travel laws did not apply to human blood vessels)—Tony finally reached what he had been looking for: the brain.

  He had thought it would be impressive, but then of course, what did he know? He’d never been inside someone’s brain before. He stood in a narrow hallway at the top of the spinal cord staircase in front of a plain wooden door. He reached out, turned the handle—and found it unlocked. His host must be a very trusting sort. Of course, it was his body. Tony only hoped he wasn’t violating some unspoken law about not trespassing within thy neighbor’s mind as he stepped inside.

  What greeted him was a huge mess. Filing cabinets lined the walls, half-open, with papers falling
out of them, dangling from the drawers, and littering the floor. He looked down at the papers near his feet and read them out of sheer curiosity. Some of them were chewed-up math problems, others were scribbled notes such as do homework, or go to grocery store, or call home. Still others were questions: what is the meaning of the universe? or how does a toaster work? The majority of papers, however, simply had one word written on them in block letters: RANDOM.

  Tony wondered what his mind would look like if he were inside it. He looked around the room again and saw four or five dusty armchairs sitting in a circle around a bricked-up fireplace that had a rusty, tear-stained plaque hanging above it that read: THERE IS NO SANTA CLAUS.

  At the other end of the room, there were two doors several feet apart. The one on the left was covered with finger paint, bright stickers, and crayon drawings. The one on the right was sparkling clean—the only thing in the room that was—and ornamented into neat, geometric designs. In between them stood a tall dresser, covered in dust and cobwebs. It contained three drawers that clearly had not been opened for quite some time.

  Tony walked over and examined the dresser, looking at each neatly-labeled drawer in turn. From top to bottom they read: Childhood Fantasies, Brilliant Ideas, and Sex Drive. Figuring that this was more than he should know—certainly more than he wanted to know—he stepped back and nearly tripped over someone standing behind him. Stumbling backward, he caught himself before hitting the floor. He climbed to his feet and looked down to see what had tripped him.

  Standing there was a small child, possibly as old as ten, though he would have had to be short for his age. He was dressed like a biker in black jeans and leather jacket. His hair was tousled and messy; he wore dark sunglasses and had a candy cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  “Who are you?” Tony asked. He hadn’t realized there was anyone in here. He hadn’t seen anyone when he came in.

  The kid shrugged and pretended to light his cigarette, chewing on the sugary end. “I’m the Rebel.”

  Tony stared at him. He’d heard someone say once that everyone had a little rebel in him, but he somehow doubted this was what the person had meant.

  Before he could ask the child any more questions, both doors burst open and several people came charging into the room, arguing with each other. They yelled and cried and in some cases even swung punches at each other. Tony didn’t know what was going on, but he noticed that the people—all men—looked vaguely alike. They all had dark brown hair, brown-green eyes, and some sort of facial hair, a beard or mustache or goatee. Only the boy beside him was clean-shaven. All the men were different sizes and dressed differently, except that each one wore a black T-shirt with something written on the front in white, bold letters. Tony looked down at the boy and noticed his T-shirt for the first time. The word REBEL was printed across the front, and Tony immediately turned back to the others, who were marching past him and carrying their arguments over to the messy filing cabinets. One by one he tried to read their shirts and was able to make out various words such as COURAGE—a muscleman type wearing a musketeer hat and a superhero’s cape; SELF-PITY—a very large and strongly-built man; SELF-CONFIDENCE—a small, puny, straggly-looking guy with greasy hair; VANITY—a perfectly-groomed, very handsome man in an expensive Italian suit; and DEFENSE MECHANISMS—A large jumble of bulky bodyguards connected by a five-person vest.

  The argument only stopped when a man appeared in the doorway to the right. He looked like a geeky nerd who wore glasses and a pristine striped shirt over his visible T-shirt, which read INTELLIGENCE across the front.

  “Could you plebeians keep the shouting to a minimum?” he demanded. “There are a few people here who have jobs to do!” With that, he disappeared back inside the room and slammed the door shut.

  The argument barely paused, then continued unabated until another man appeared, this time out of the left-hand door. He was dressed in an artist’s smock that was spackled with paint of every color, a black beret perched on his head, and a Vandyke-style goatee. The word CREATIVITY glowed from beneath his smock.

  “Excuse me!” he shouted angrily. “Some of us are trying to work here!!!” And he ducked back into the room and slammed the door.

  The argument paused a little longer, but within minutes had started up again, even louder than before. Tony knew something had to be done, or he wouldn’t find out anything—he might not even be able to get out. He glanced at the group, hurling insults and scrap paper at each other, then realized no amount of time he had was going to solve their problems. He turned back to the doors, looking from one to the other and trying to pick. Figuring INTELLIGENCE was bound to understand the urgency of the situation better than CREATIVITY, he opted for that door, knocked, then entered.

  The room was neatly organized with rows of computers and blackboards. Harsh fluorescent lighting illuminated every nook and cranny. A table was set up in the center with a chart of the human body, clearly monitoring every movement.

  “This is a restricted area,” Intelligence snapped. “No unauthorized personnel allowed.”

  “The station’s in trouble,” Tony explained. “I’ve been sent to help.” He’d never had to explain his presence so many times on one mission.

  “Sent by whom?”

  “Saint Vidicon,” he announced.

  Intelligence looked thoughtful, as if trying to remember where he’d heard that name before. He turned to a man cowering under a nearby desk. “Fear, go check the files, see if you can find Memory—he’s probably asleep in the cerebellum. Check for the name, ‘Saint Vidicon.’ I want all references on him immediately.”

  Fear, a medium-sized man in clothes two sizes too big, quickly nodded, shaking and trembling as he stood up and ran out of the room. Intelligence stared at Tony, looking him up and down and clearly trying to decide whether or not to trust him.

  “Decisions!” he bellowed, and for a moment Tony wondered what he was talking about. Then two men appeared in the room from the back and walked up to him, past him, and over to Tony, walking around him in a circle and looking him up and down thoroughly as Intelligence had done. One of the men was dressed all in white with the words GOOD DECISION printed on his white T-shirt in black letters. The other was dressed all in red with the words BAD DECISION printed across the front of his red T-shirt in black letters. They reminded him of the angel and the devil that sit on the shoulders of cartoon characters.

  “Well?” Intelligence demanded, addressing Good Decision. “Should we trust him?”

  “Absolutely!” Bad Decision cried. “Trust everyone!”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” Intelligence gave him a scathing look, then turned back to Good Decision and looked at him questioningly.

  “I think we can trust him,” Good Decision said with finality.

  Apparently he didn’t have to give a reason why, his opinion was good enough. Intelligence nodded and looked at Tony.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tony.”

  “And what is the purpose of your visit to the land of Mac?”

  Land of Mac? That was a new one. “I need to know what’s going on in the TV studio and see if I can help.”

  Intelligence nodded again and looked almost relieved. He gestured for Tony to follow him and led him to the back of the room, where there was a white door. He opened the door and walked into another room. The only objects in it were three plain chairs, the door they’d come through, another door several feet away, and two gigantic television monitors, oval, like Mac’s eyes. Huge, fringed curtains descended quickly, then rose again as Mac blinked. From this room, Tony could see everything that Mac could see. Loudspeakers set into the walls somewhere allowed him to hear everything that Mac could.

  Mac looked up at the monitors across the room, and Tony saw the black-cloaked leader with his fellow TIC TOCTians holding the mayor’s staff and the crew hostage. He turned to Intelligence, who motioned him to sit and quickly but thoroughly explained what had happened whi
le Tony had been in the system.

  “Well, Stan,” the leader of the TIC TOCTians was saying, “the evening is going very well.”

  “Yes,” Stan agreed, and turned to look at the camera, “I’ve often wondered what it would take to get the people of our lovely community and surrounding areas truly to appreciate the quality programming that WBEG brings them every year. Who knew it would come in the form of a group of Anti-Alien Activists holding us hostage?”

  “Very true,” the leader agreed. “I’ve been a fan of WBEG and the quality sci-fi shows that air on it for many years now.”

  “So what’s your favorite show?”

  “The local gardening program.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I usually call in every other week. I raise petunias.”

  “I’m a spider plant man myself.”

  In the control room, Beth slammed her head on the desk repeatedly, trying to wake up. Not only was this the most dangerous, bizarre, and surreal pledge night ever in the history of public television, it was also by far the most successful. Who knew?

  The current conversation between the cohosts—now involving the mayor, who was discussing his favorite rosebush and jade plant—segued into a discussion on lawn care.

  The crew and the mayor’s staff watched, feeling as though they were in a surreal dream.

  Beth was watching a director’s nightmare.

  Stan, the mayor, and the TIC TOCTian leader had currently covered every topic of conversation from politics (“Well, yes, we think he’s a good mayor, but what are his policies on Alien Control?”) to religion (“Of course we believe in God! God created aliens!”) and even comic books (“Superman is an Alien, doesn’t anyone else realize that?!? They’re all out to get us!”)

  The mayor was taking everything rather well. Apparently everyone but the producer and the crew now thought this was an elaborate joke. The mayor—who had only had people pledge to save him and had been shown great support by the community—was now acting like the hero of the hour, pledging some of his own assets to help save the world from the Alien Menace. The guns, on closer inspection, turned out to be spray-painted BB guns, modified into what the cloaked group called their Multi-Action, Double-Barreled Lasers.