Snowball

A man ambled down the darkened, claustrophobically narrow corridor stretched out before him. Constrained to single file, he followed the long-haired, nubile, scantily clad figure. As they approached what appeared to be a dead end, the wall ahead suddenly slid up into the ceiling with a faint hiss, and a brief gust blew in. The human mused that purified air was like purified water; they tasted “wrong” precisely because they were so unnatural.

The lithe figure the man followed hopped through the doorway to the spacious chamber beyond, head snapping left, right, and up. Next, it glanced back with a gorgeous doll’s face, spearing him with amethyst eyes. Then “she” said something.

“Clear.”

The man likewise stepped out into the coldly lit, silvery tunnel. He was dressed in a white jumpsuit, slashed across the torso with a scarlet stripe, with more scarlet trimming his sleeves and the bottoms of both pants legs. On his left breast shone an array of medals hung by brightly colored ribbons.

A breeze ghosted down the tunnel, tickling his face even as it ruffled the feminine figure’s long hair. But the jump-suited man could smell nothing on the sterile wind.

“Unnatural,” he muttered.

“How the freezing hell would you know what ‘natural’ is, Julio? You’ve never been Outside!”

Julio blinked in surprise at the empty space about ten feet in front of him from whence the last sentence had come, for his thinly clad attendant had said so such thing. Suddenly, a tall, older woman with long white hair coalesced into view, seeming from thin air.

She was flanked by two hulking black Security bots, both clad in bulbous armor and bristling with equally obvious mag-guns. The torso of the woman’s white jumpsuit was slashed with a rainbow stripe, with additional rainbows trimming her sleeves and the bottoms of both pants legs. Her left breast cascaded with medals – far more than Julio sported. She also held a crystal scepter in her right hand and wore a long, blue cape that seemed to flutter in the breeze as though she were a superheroine.

The woman was taller than the man she surprised, and her piercing blue eyes looked down on him. She had a long, aquiline nose, yet Julio imagined that it was turned so far up, she would drown if it rained.

“Master Worthington,” noted Julio with a quick bow. “What… are you doing here?”

“I am the Master Director of this hab, child,” Worthington hmphed. “I can be literally anywhere I freezing well please!”

“You want to be in a maintenance access?”

“Don’t get cute with me, Julio. You come this way every morning at this time to get to work. We need to talk.”

“You could have called.”

“What we have to say doesn’t need to be hacked and overheard.”

“Um, there are Security sensors in this very tunnel.”

“Which is precisely why you and I are going up to Alpha Prime.” Worthington snipped. “Leave the sexbot.”

“It’s not a sexbot.”

“Please Julio, I know a sexbot when I see one. I can’t afford to be seen with that thing up on A-Prime, and frankly, neither can you. They’re disgusting!”

“It’s a former sexbot reprogrammed to protect me, so it’s technically not even a sexbot anymore.”

“You… don’t… sleep with it?”

“No ma’am. That’s what my wife is for.”

Now the Master Director stepped toward him, looking annoyed.

“Julio Cesar Gonzales,” she lectured, pointing her scepter at him. “As Director of Maintenance for Martin Luther King Habitat, you know you rate a legit Security bot, right?”

“No gracias,” Julio responded, lifting a hand while shaking his head. “In the barrio, a Security bot following you around causes more problems than it solves.”

“And why are you and your wife still living all the way down there in that dirty… dangerous... hole?” Worthington sneered; face twisted as if she’d tasted something foul. “Why don’t you bring her up on A-Prime with the rest of us? I’ve prepared an entire penthouse suite just for you! Place even has a pool. With a spa quality hot tub attached!”

“Look... ma’am…” Julio began, mind racing to make his point as diplomatically as possible. “I am forever grateful that you decided to make a guy like me a Director.”

“Not a guy like you. You! Julio Gonzales!”

“Yes, thank you Master Director. And I am proud to be the first Citizen below Alpha Level to reach the rank of full Director. But if I move my family…”

“I recommend you bring your wife, and only your wife. But if you must bring friends, the suite capacity is a hundred…”

“…if I move up there with you guys, I’ll abandon my people, and I’m just not going to do that."

“Ugh!” Worthington groaned, rubbing her forehead as if struck by a migraine. “Those downlevel ingrates are always complaining!”

“Perhaps that is because they have plenty to complain about. Ma’am.”

That earned him a few seconds of glare. But Julio didn’t apologize. He’d been rehearsing for that conversation for quite a while, so if now was time, he was ready.

“Julio, we are not having this conversation. Not now.”

Ouch.

“But you will come with me, and you can send the sexbot – and it is most definitely a titanic sexbot – on to your office. You won’t need a bodyguard where we’re going.”

“You are literally flanked by two state-of-the-art Security bots.”

“Up on Alpha Prime, they’re more for status than anything else. Trust me. You! Sexbot. Go to the Maintenance Directorate. Now!”

Though registered to one Director Julio Gonzales, the beautiful doll nodded dumbly at the Master Director and then fled down the maintenance access, far faster than any human sprint.

*

Up on Alpha Prime, it was a fine spring day. Julio found himself on a wooden bench under a warm sun in a gorgeously maintained park. Impossibly green grass stretched out before him, as a fragrant breeze ruffled through the trees, swaying the branches, fluttering the leaves. Flower beds dotted the park, bursting with a kaleidoscope of bright colors. Happy people, often couples or even whole families, passed by or frolicked in the park, many of them playing with dogs. There were no uniform jumpsuits like in the rest of the hab; here, they experimented with an endless array of fashion. In the distance, above the emerald tree cover, fantastic crystal towers soared into the sky. And that sky – Julio couldn’t take his eyes off it. There, little clouds floated through a heaven of boundless blue...

“Stop staring at it!” Worthington hissed, approaching from an ice cream cart with a cone in each hand as one of her flanking Sec bots carried her crystal scepter. “Stop gawking at the ceiling like some uneducated downlevel ingrate. You’re embarrassing me! And yes, those towers in the distance are a projection, because of course they are.”

“Is it always this… sunny?”

“Usually, but not always. We’ll have weather up here occasionally, including storms with thunder and lightning and all that jazz. Plus, we simulate the seasons as if we were still in Solar orbit, with days longer or shorter as appropriate, including the spring and summer solstice. In winter, we'll even have snow.”

“Wow!” sighed Julio in shameless wonder. “It doesn’t look like a ceiling, and this… park doesn’t feel like a room. It’s as if we were totally Outside, like in the movies!”

“Yeah, Outside, where we’d all freeze to death. Butter pecan, right?”

His boss finally reached the bench and presented him with a classic ice cream in a cone. Julio reached for the treat, noting, “actually, we’d suffocate first. And yes ma’am, it was butter pecan. Muchas gracias.”

“De nada”.

Eating ice cream with her right hand, the Master Director took her crystal scepter from the bot with her left and sat down on the bench beside Julio. She lay the scepter across her lap.

Julio broke from the cold, buttery-nut treat to ask, “How many dogs are bots and how many are one of those clone things?”

“Pets in this hab are 99% bots,” Worthington declared. “I personally know everyone who owns actual flesh.”

“And none of those people live below the Alpha Levels, right?”

That got Julio another glare. Feeling a sudden urge to lighten the mood, he added, “if we can make animal bots, why limit ourselves to real ones? We could have unicorns or mermaids or dragons, or…”

“Is it really bad down there?” spoke Worthington, leaning back on the bench with a sigh.

“Well, there’s infrastructure…. issues. And it gets worse every month.”

“I can help in that regard. How about I pay the Director of Resources a visit?”

“You mean your husband?”

“Yep! Just for my old buddy Julio! Anything else?”

“Well, the main problem is just… jobs. Almost no one has one. Everything is AI and bots.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying not everything has to be automated. Like law enforcement, for instance. Way too many of us are being hurt or outright killed by soulless machines. If I had my way, there would not be a single Security bot in the Hab Police!”

“Hoolie, are you really suggesting we regress technologically just so more people can work?”

“What I am saying is… whoever said, ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop’ spoke ice cold truth.”

Still licking her ice cream, Worthington shifted on the bench and added, “Speaking of ice-cold truths, I’ve activated a field around this bench. We can speak freely.”

“Good,” snapped Julio. “Cause we’re about to have a revolution on our hands! The Citizens in the down levels…”

“We’ll reach Alpha Centauri in thirteen years,” the Master Director stated bluntly, “Or rather, we’ll finally be close enough to make travel to some habitable planet practical. Or a planet we can make habitable. Ironically, space travel is a lot easier without the atmosphere in the way; all gasses being frozen to the ground. Point is, we’ll have a new Earth, where we’ll finally be able to safely go Outside, just like our ancestors. Yahoo.”

Julio blinked at his boss, shocked to silence. It took a moment for him to find his voice.

“That’s… literally impossible,” he claimed at last.

“That’s what I told Carrie,” Worthington noted, slowly licking her cone. “But the Director of Science insists her data is solid and the Director of Exploration backs her up.”

“That would be your daughter and son respectively.”

“You know Julio, now that you’re officially a Director, you can have children, too. Legal children: none of that filthy unlawful breeding you think I don’t know about!”

“Lo que sea. Look, it’s only been 120 years since the Rogue. How the hell does this planet cross four lightyears in only 133 years? We aren’t going that fast!”

“Yes, one hundred and twenty years ago, the gravitational pull of a travelling rogue planet dragged the Earth right out of orbit, hurling us out into deep space. Fortunately, the Rogue and its trajectory was detected hundreds of years out, so we had plenty of time to prepare, building habitats all over the planet powered by nuclear or geothermal energy.”

“Sure, they had plenty of time, but they wasted most of it,” Julio complained, feeling the anger. “When the Rogue was first detected, the governments of basically every nation on Earth decided that since Doomsday was hundreds of years away, it just wasn’t their problem, and besides, surely some cool, whizz-bang future technology would magically solve the issue. Those freezing pendejos didn’t even start building the first habitat till the Rogue was 83 years off, and most of them were slapped together in the last five years before the event!”

“Julio…”

“There were supposed to be 10,000 habitats built with a one million population capacity each! We only built… 1,492! 85 percent of the population died! And they didn’t all die at once, either. They spent many a year as the world got darker and colder while agriculture got increasingly hard to the point of impossible.”

Worthington stuffed her remaining desert, cone and all, into her mouth and sat up straight, now taking up her scepter in her right hand. She glanced about like a hawk as she chewed. Finally, she swallowed. Julio pounced.

“Boss… what do you want me to do about this?”

“Master Director.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s ‘Master Director’, or just ‘Master’. Not… ‘Boss’.”

“Master Director…”

“Keep this news under the ice, Director Gonzales. Till I can confirm its authenticity. I just decided that the Director of Maintenance needed to know about these… reports. Oh, and I expect you to do your part to prevent any... revolutions.”

“I believe that’s a job for the Director of Security. Your first son and heir. Ma’am.”

“It seems to me, Julio, that the Director of Maintenance, who has considerable control over which life support systems are working properly and which aren’t, would be a more effective champion in our struggle against ungrateful Citizenry.”

“Are you seriously telling me to murder people?”

“Relax child, I doubt it’ll be necessary for you to kill anyone, even a downlevel ingrate. Protests are fine, but the next time one results in violence or property damage, maybe make that level cold enough to freeze water for a few days. That might… chill them out, pun intended. Or maybe someone gets the oxygen mix wrong and everyone falls asleep for a while. Use your imagination.”

Pause.

“You know, I discovered my first day on the job that the Alpha Levels operate on completely different systems independent of the rest of the hab, and that despite being the Director of Maintenance, I have no control over the Alpha systems.”

“Is that a fact?” Worthington quipped, rising from the park bench with a smug little grin. “Good day to you, Director Gonzales. I’ll keep in touch. Don’t freeze.”

*

When Julio entered the Maintenance Directorate, he saw what he expected; a large room with 42 workstations arrayed in stadium seating, like a Greek amphitheater. Each station had its own screen, but there was a huge floating hologram showing blueprints of the entire habitat at the front of the room that all the workstations faced. At the back and highest level was the Director’s Station, with its three large screens facing the Director’s Throne in concave arrangement. Yes, forty-two people in white jumpsuits trimmed with scarlet ran all the maintenance for a million+ population habitat. And with one noticeable exception, everyone in the room looked much like Julio Gonzales.

As Julio entered, two armed and uniformed officers of the Habitat Police Force at the door, dressed in white jumpsuits slashed and trimmed in Security Blue, snapped to attention as one of them cried, “Viva la Raza!”

“Viva!” cried everyone else in the room, leaping to their feet, save one, who looked in Julio’s direction and gave him an acknowledging nod, but otherwise remained seated. They were all brown, but the man who did not rise was considerably darker than the rest.

“As you were,” Julio declared, and then everyone sat back down, except for a man and a woman who both scurried to him.

“You’re late!’ the woman cried accusingly, but she threw her arms around Julio, kissed him on the lips, then squeezed him in a fierce hug that he was happy to reciprocate.

“I was delayed,” the Director explained. “On Alpha Prime!”

That news caused a general gasp from the room, but someone cried out “A-Prime?!” in unabashed awe.

“Yes, Alpha Prime,” declared Julio with considerable pride as he and the woman he was hugging separated. “By none other than the Master Director herself!”

Applause. Everyone in the room literally clapped their hands.

“You sly old dog!” crowed the man who had approached the Director. “Julio man, you’ve got that crusty old gringo puta wrapped around your little finger. Dude, you’ve always had a way with the ladies even all the way back in high school!”

“Forget high school, Jose’!” the woman next to him added. “Before I married this zorro, he was charming his teachers ever since we met in freezing First Grade! You remember Mrs. Hernandez, right, Julio?”

“First Grade?” the Director asked. “That was a long time ago, Maria!”

“Well, you should remember her,” Maria continued. “That woman loved you like her own son.”

Julio looked over at a teenage girl slumped at her station, scowling at a screen.

“You’re not going to greet your old man?” he snapped.

“Yes Lupe,” added Maria, “You’re being rude. Come over here and say ‘hola!’ to your father.”

“Ay Papi!” Lupe groaned. “Leave me alone!”

Julio snarled, “Young lady, you talk an awful lot of ice for someone who doesn't exist!”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” his wife cooed, stroking her husband’s arm. “She’s just really upset because it’s been a week and Haoyu still won’t return her emails.”

“Lupe!” barked Julio. “Girl, what did I tell you about hanging your heart on that boy? You know how expensive and dangerous it is to travel between habitats? That kid might as well be on the far side of the Moon!”

The girl swiveled her station seat to face her father.

“But Papi!” she pleaded. “Now that my Daddy’s a Member of the Board of Directors, you can go to the Director of Exploration and…”

“Forget it. Just because precious Jesus Cristo has made my family prosperous doesn’t mean we can waste resources. If you must betray your people and date outside La Raza, I can take you a few floors uplevel to where the squints live.”

“Squints dad?” Lupe noted, raising an eyebrow. “Really? You know that's titanic racist, right?"

“Sweetie, our daughter can’t leave this Level,” Maria protested. “None of the kids can; they’re Unauthorized. We can’t risk it!”

Julio sighed and turned to his high school friend, grateful for an opportunity to change the subject.

“Well Jose? I assume there’s a reason you left your station?”

“There sure is, amigo,” Jose agreed, and handed a pocket slate to the Director. “For one thing, we’re running short of active bots. Between the ones that have broken down permanently, and the ones we’ve cannibalized to keep the others going, we’re only running a third of the service bots assigned to Maintenance Directorate.”

“I’ll talk to the Director of Resources about it,” Julio noted as he took the slate and examined its screen.

“Director of Resources? That guy hates us, Julio. He can’t stand La Raza.”

“Then I’ll talk to his wife. Now what’s this about an accident?”

“Yeah, another one. This time a steam conduit burst. Fifteen people got lobstered to death, including three kids. Witnesses said they were still screaming as the flesh melted right off their bones!”

“Ouch,” Julio gasped, wincing. “Unacceptable.”

“Yes, unacceptable!” Maria declared, raising her voice to address the whole room. “Come on people, the Alphas don’t run this place anymore. This mierda is on us now. The whole hab is watching La Raza, so we’ve got to do better!”

“You’re overreacting,” claimed the only Black man in the room as he stood. “These days, unless an infrastructure failure kills at least a hundred people, it doesn’t even make the News. Fifteen is nothing.”

“Hey, Leroy!” Julio countered. “Those fifteen were La Raza. Every one of them was something to me!”

“In the six months since you replaced those freezing Alphas, there’s been a 63% decrease in infrastructure accidents, and the victims of those accidents are 84% more likely to survive. You guys are doing great, so don’t beat yourselves up.”

“We could do even better!” Maria insisted.

“Bitch, you could shut your damn mouth!”

“Leroy!” Julio howled, horrified. “Dude, that’s the mother of my children!”

“Your illegal children. But sure. Forgive me, Chief.”

“Director.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s ‘Director’, not ‘Chief’.”

“Sure thing, Director,” snapped Leroy, and he sat back down at his station.

The atmosphere had suddenly grown tense. Julio felt he could rend the tension with the saws-all attachment on a service bot.

“Leroy meet me at the Throne,” he announced. “The rest of you get back to work!”

The room of Assistant Directors became animated as if a switch had been tripped, making quite a show of diving into their duties. The tension, while it plummeted considerably, didn’t quite go away; at least not yet. Julio seized the opportunity to stride boldly up to the Director’s Throne, head held high. There, the Director tripped on a field and addressed his Deputy.

“Deputy Director Jenkins,” he hissed, “Do you know how many people I pissed off when I gave you this job?”

“Not near as many had you been stupid enough not to give me this position!” Leroy countered, undaunted.

“Dude, I don’t care if your gang runs three Levels. You don’t get to disrespect my wife!”

“My peeps run three and a half levels, and it’ll be four by the end of the year.”

“How dare you…!”

“You got my report, right? Director?”

The sudden change in tone caught Julio by surprise, leaving him with no response save, “um… what?”

“My report. I stayed up late analyzing and collating the data, just so I could get it to you before today’s shift. You got it on your pocket slate, right?”

Not for the first time, Julio marveled how the leader of a vicious hab gang somehow acquired first class technical training. But first things first.

“I believe we were talking about you calling my wife a bitch, you popsicle!”

Leroy huffed contemptuously, and bending over, his hands danced a blur across the controls of the Director’s Workstation.

“What do you think you’re doing?” gasped the Director of Maintenance, but just as he was about to chastise his wayward subordinate, his eyes went wide with shock as the station hummed suddenly to crimson glowing life!

“My… that station has the finest security in this habitat! How the freezing hell did you hack my…”

“Your titanic daughter hacked it for me,” snapped Leroy, fingers still dancing. “Like a week ago.”

With a bitter taste in his mouth, Julio glanced across the room at Guadalupe Gonzales with narrowed eyes, determined to soon have a “chat” with his daughter about hacking her father’s equipment, much less granting access to his personal workstation to someone who wasn’t even La Raza!

The Deputy Director of Maintenance stood up suddenly and pointed at the middle of three screens fronting the Throne as luminous text, charts, and graphs began scrolling across it.

“See that?” he crowed. “Seismic activity!”

“Well of course there’s seismic activity,” the Director sneered, frankly feeling rather satisfied with himself; as if he had somehow gotten over on the brash gang leader. “This whole habitat is powered by an undersea volcano. There’s seismic activity all over the freezing place!”

“Not like this, bro!” Leroy insisted, still pointing at the scrolling figures. “This is regular -- I’m talking very freezing regular -- and increasing in intensity. It ain’t natural, man!”

Finally, Julio paid attention to the information on his screen, and his further arguments died in his mouth.

“This… this can’t be real,” he gulped.

“Dude, you have access to the same sensor info. Don’t believe me? Do the analyzing and collating your damn self. Director.”

“This… this says… Leroy, every indication… the data shows there is some… some… thing very large and unnatural under the habitat coming this way. That’s what I’m seeing.”

“Dems the ice-cold facts, Director. And at present rate of travel, whatever that thing is will arrive here at King Habitat in 166 hours!”

A horrifying thought turned the blood in Julio’s veins to ice water, and he struggled to control the mounting terror within. It made him deactivate the sonic disruption field.

“Lupe!” he roared across the room. “When did that Squint idiot stop emailing you?”

“A week ago, Papi!” the teen hollered back. “And por favor, don’t call Haoyu an idiot. Or a Squint! That’s racist, Dad!”

“Get me the Communications Directorate,” Julio hissed to his Deputy. “Now!”

“Already ahead of ya!” Leroy quipped, once again blurring his fingers on the controls.

Obviously, Julio could have just as easily called Communications himself, but directing “make-work” tasks to his subordinates had become such an organic part of the Director’s job that he stopped realizing he was even doing it. He did remember to reactivate the field, however.

“Communications Directorate!” sang a happy female voice emanating from the Director’s Throne. “How may I assist you, Citizen?”

“I need to talk to your Director,” Julio insisted. “Now!”

“And who might I say is calling?”

“Director Gonzales, as if your caller ID didn’t tell you that.”

“Please standby for the Director of Communications.”

A sprightly song began to play; “Yankee Doodle went to London, riding on a pony…”

“Yankee Doodle?” Leroy complained. “Seriously? How about some titanic rap?”

“Deputy, are you trying to be as ridiculously stereotypical as possible?”

The Black man’s face darkened, but there was no verbal retort. Instead, he demanded, “yo, you even know this guy?”

“Of course, I do, I’m a Director. I’m in the Club, Leroy!” And you’re not, was left unsaid, but might as well have been shouted.

“Yeah, you probably know him,” Leroy nodded. “He’s the only mother-freezer besides yourself who isn’t a damn Worthington.”

“This is Samuel Marconi Bell, Director of Communications,” came a mature male voice after about two minutes. “Make it quick; I’m at a football game.”

As if to verify that statement, the sounds of a cheering crowd swelled from the station – something dramatic had happened on the field of play?

“Football game?” asked Julio after the crowd noise subsided. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Shouldn’t you be minding your own business, you titanic downlevel popsicle?”

“He’s got a chick in the downlevels,” whispered Leroy to his boss. “A whole other family he’s hiding from all his uplevel peeps, including the Master Director. So – yeah, you can totally freeze him for talking to you like that. Ahm just sayin’ Chief… ah, Director.”

“Director Bell!” Julio stated, brushing off his Deputy’s suggestion. “When was the last time you made any contact with Mao Se Tung Habitat?”

“Everyone just calls it ‘Mao’,” Bell explained, “Just like everyone calls us ‘King’. You don’t have to be so freezing formal all the time, you frosted teacher’s pet.”

“It’s a simple question, my fellow Director. By regulation, your Directorate is supposed to make formal contact with all the other habitats daily from zero four hundred to zero nine hundred Zulu. Please confirm your latest contact with Mao Habitat.”

“Dude, my Horses have the ball and… gah! Fine! Wait one, over.”

“Deputy Director do not leave this station till we get an answer,” Julio ordered.

“Oh trust me dude, I ain’t goin’ no freezing where!”

“It’s ‘Director’. Not ‘Dude’.”

“Sure thing, Director.”

They stood there beside the Director of Maintenance’s Throne for over ten minutes. When Director Bell responded, obvious worry had crept into his once smug voice.

“Director Gonzales,” he reported, “Please be advised that we have failed to make contact with anyone at Mao Habitat. No one from there will answer us.”

Stop it! Julio told himself, as claws of terror raked his mind. Stop the panic. Stay cool. Stay calm.

“Director Bell. I suggest you confirm contact with every habitat on the planet.”

“Yeah, we’re already doing that. Please stand by.”

It took another four hours of painful silence. In the meantime, Julio sat down in his magnificent Throne while Leroy stoically parked his butt on a corner of the workstation. Finally, Bell came through, sounding worse than ever.

“Of the 1,492 habitats, we have failed to contact 492,” Bell reported, his voice quavering.

“That’s a third, Chief!” Leroy cried.

“’Director’, dammit!”

“One in every three habitats have gone dark, Director!”

“I wish I could tell you what the freeze was going on,” Samuel Bell stammered. “But honestly guys, I haven’t got a clue!”

Julio noted how Bell’s smug condescension had utterly evaporated; the man was scared.

“Director Bell, Director Gonzales!” a new male voice thundered from the station. “This is Julius Caesar Worthington, Director of Security. All discussion of the silent habitats will cease from this point forward! Are you two idiots in a sonic disruption field?”

Technically, Julius Worthington was equal in rank to both Samuel Bell and Julio Gonzales; he lacked any formal authority to tell either man what to do. But in reality…

“Yes sir, I’m in a field all by my myself,” Bell stated.

“I’m in a field too,” Julio reported, somehow failing to mention that Leroy was also in the field with him.

“Excellent. Both of you will report to me in person at once! And you will say nothing to anyone about the silent habitats, do you hear me?”

“I’ll be right there, sir!” promised Director Bell.

“On second thought, Bell, you’re at the game aren’t you? Well stay put; I’m sending Security to give you a ride. As for you Director Gonzales, take the Tube to Alpha Prime. I’ll have Security waiting at Grand Central.”

But Julio couldn’t go for that.

“With all due respect sir,” he protested, “No one below the Alpha Levels uses the Tube; it’s just way too icy. I could be trapped for hours or even days, if not injured or outright killed. But if I use one of the maintenance accesses…”

“You will use the Tube!” Julius howled, almost screeching. “Get in the freezing Tube and get here Gonzales. Now!”