The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker Page A

turned his head to fix me with what seemed to be his only good eye. I felt like an interesting caterpillar.
    “ Ja, ziemlich gut ,” I answered. “ Ich wohne zur Zeit im Heidelberg .”
    “ Ach, wie schön. Ich hab da studiert .”
    “ Und was für ein Fach? ”
    “ Mathematik. Zwar Logik und Mengenlehre .”
    This pleasant little chat about Roth’s mathematics studies could have been lifted right from a faculty tea back at the University of Heidelberg…though the presence of automatic weapons did stiffen the atmosphere.
    The room we were in was, except for one thing, just like the organizational office of any small political party. There were a couple of beat old chairs, a file cabinet, a table with a mimeograph machine on it, a vinyl couch and a desk with a typewriter. The wall next to the desk was covered by a bookcase. There were no windows, of course, but the air was fresh, and three fluorescent light fixtures set into the low ceiling provided a nice even glow. The floor was carpeted in beige, the brick walls were painted cream and the ceiling was covered with soundproof tiles. Two doors led off the office, connecting it on the one side to a sort of one-room efficiency apartment, and on the other to an enormous workshop with machines.
    The one thing that made this office unusual was the presence of large numbers of green plants. There was a row of ferns along the top of the bookcase, a huge spiky aloe plant in one corner, a little banana tree in another corner, several hanging pots of flowering fuchsia and numerous small begonias, African violets, geraniums and the like. It was the plants that gave this deeply buried room its fresh, open feel.
    Giulia and the other woman were intensely discussing something, so I continued my German conversation with Peter Roth.
    “What’s going on?” I asked him. “Why did those schnoids come after me?”
    “Virgilio has arranged it. At first he was going to sell you to Minos for a simple ransom. But after the Embassy’s reply he realized that you would be valuable to us. He told us where to seek for you. Virgilio’s phone is unfortunately tapped, so we had to act in some hastiness.”
    This raised more questions than it answered. For one: If a deal was made, then why had it been necessary to kill Lafcadio? For two: Why hadn’t the Embassy just said that I was an unimportant little physics researcher who knew next to nothing about bombs? Instead they had replied in such a way that Virgilio the trapper could peddle my pelt to…
    “Who are you? What is your organization?”
    “We call ourselves Green Death.” In German it came out Grüner Tod .
    “Not the Red Brigade?”
    Roth shook his head rapidly. “That’s all over with. Like the Baader-Meinhof gang. Seventies-years stuff. Green Death is eighties-years.”
    I was beginning to see why all the plants were hanging around. Green Death. I figured this must be some super-radical splinter of Greenpeace: the people who’d been going around wrecking seal hunts and ramming whaling ships.
    “But what do you want with an atomic bomb?” I demanded. “Surely that’s not…”
    “Professor Bitter!”
    The dark little woman had finished her conversation with Giulia. Giulia shot me a bone-melting smile and drifted into the connecting apartment. I felt like trotting after her and etcetera. How could any woman have such a thin waist and such wide…
    “Professor Bitter!”
    Roth nudged me, in as friendly a way as possible, with his gun. The boss wanted my attention.
    “Yes?”
    “I want you to build us a big-ass bomb.”
    She was only five feet tall, but the voice more than made up for it. It was strong and rough, with a punk-singer’s rhythm. Fingernails and black jello. Funny, I had taken her for Italian.
    Her skin was pale, with a yellow tinge of liver. Her hair was short, black, spiky. She wore an elastic-waist overall printed in camouflage, and a pair of black combat boots with little gold stars painted all