The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker

police somewhere far behind. A beautiful Sophia Loren look-alike was driving. The snoids called her Giulia. It sounded like they were telling her to drive faster.
    I was in the front next to Giulia. The death seat, as regards traffic fatalities. Each snoid kept a gun-barrel on my neck. The way the car was whipping around was just unreal. It was like watching Cinerama.
    “Please, Giulia,” I moaned. “Please slow down.”
    She answered without looking over. Thank God she had the sense to keep her eyes on the road.
    “ Calmo .”
    The full beautiful lips made the second syllable into a kiss. The voice, damped and deepened by two luscious swells of mammary tissue, was like a caress. Poised between two kinds of death, I fell in love. Cautiously I touched my cheek. It was only an abrasion after all, already scabbed over. A stroke of luck.
    A bridge flew under us. To the left I could see the Castel Sant’ Angelo, beautiful in the mild April sun.
    We fishtailed around one of the vegetable-green Roman buses and took a hard right in a controlled four-wheel skid. I wished the car had a solid roof, or at least a roll bar. Giulia was not really a very good driver.
    Now we were on a wide street parallel to the Tiber. A nontourist street with cheap department stores and dress shops. A Supercortemaggiore parking garage was coming up on our left. With a horrible wrench, Giulia heeled the car over, cut through three busy lanes of traffic and skidded into the garage entrance. I kept worrying that one of the snoids’ guns would go off by accident. Distractedly I put my hands to my face and fingered my scabs.
    Inside the garage they seemed to be expecting us. In the rear wall a giant metal mouth yawned open. An elevator for cars. We powered in. And finally stopped. Behind us the two halves of the elevator door whumped together. In the pit of my stomach I felt the descent begin.
    “Are you a friend of Virgilio’s?” I asked.
    “Sometimes. He sold you to us. You will build atomic bomb, yes? We have…”
    The elevator came to a stop. The doors in front of us slid open like jaws—one half went up, one half went down. Giulia fell silent and jockeyed the car down a dark, empty tunnel and through another automatic door.
    “How you fellows making out back there?” I called to the snoids. There was no answer save for the steady pressure of the gun-barrels on my neck. I was so happy not to have died in a car crash that I felt absurdly elated. Build an A-bomb? No problem. I’d read a couple of articles on it in grad school. Now if they just had a glove box so I wouldn’t have to touch the plutonium it’d be… But what was I thinking?
    “OK,” Giulia said. “We get out here. You first, Bitter. You get out and up against the wall.”
    I hesitated. “You’re not…you’re not going to shoot me?”
    She smiled beautifully, each tooth a pearl. “ Calmo .”
    I got out, went up to the wall in front of the car and put my hands on it. The skin on my back crawled, but the snoids didn’t shoot me. To my left there was a door, and Giulia tapped out a complex tattoo. While we waited, I thought about the mysterious sphere I’d inherited from Lafcadio. I seemed to be able to feel its tiny warmth in my pocket. Later, when I was alone I’d…
    A peephole opened and closed. With a rattle of bolts, the door swung open. A slight red-haired man and a dark hard-faced little woman peered out over a pair of Uzis. The women talked Italian for awhile, and then we went on in. The snoids stayed outside.
    “The only exit,” Giulia cautioned me, “is back through this garage. So do not attempt an escape. There is no escape.”
    “Fine. Fine.” I nodded several times. All these guns were making me nervous. I kept my hands at my sides and tried not to make any sudden gestures.
    “ Peter Roth ,” the red-haired man said, introducing himself with a quick bow. “ Sprechen Sie Deutsch? ” He bobbed up and down with a chicken’s jerky nimbleness, and