Free The Sex Sphere by Rudy Rucker Page A

westbound traffic, staying low and out of the lights. His job is to spot the truck with the reactor fuel.
    In the van, Giulia and Beatrice get ready. Giulia slips off her sweater and bra. The breasts are a bit smaller than you’d expected. But they feature perfect, jutting, baby-bottle nipples. Beatrice is impressed, and briefly reaches out to fondle Giulia.
    “You’re beautiful.”
    “Being beautiful isn’t enough.” She starts the car.
    They both get out now, Beatrice with a machine gun, Giulia with her breasts. And a brick. She’s standing by the open driver’s door with a brick.
    Beatrice presses her walkie-talkie to her head, waiting to hear from Peter. Crackle hiss crackle nothing crackle WHOOP!
    “HERE HE COMES!”
    Over to the left you can see a bunch of headlights coming. Giulia watches intently, then cuts on the van lights and drops the brick on the accelerator.
    The obedient vehicle stutters forward through the hole in the fence, picks up a little speed, wobbles across the emergency lane and then angles left onto the autostrada, into the oncoming traffic.
    A Ferrari fishtails around the van without slowing down. Next is a little station wagon and…doesn’t make it. Smack into the cree-cree spark roar scub thub-thubby. DOA.
    Giulia springs out into the highway and poses near the crushed van, boobs wagging, “Help me!” At the shadowed highway edge lies Beatrice, prone markswoman. Here comes the truck.
    A shiny big truck-cab pulling two low trailers. Cool and professional, the driver glides in slow and stops in the emergency lane. He jumps out to help the half-naked woman kneeling by her van. His partner runs back to set flares.
    All unnoticed in the grass, Beatrice is talking on the walkie-talkie.
    “Hurry up, for God’s sake. There’s two of them. Shoot the one lighting flares. Hurry!”
    The driver, a serious, solidly built fifty-year-old; is leaning over Giulia now. Beatrice can’t quite bring herself to pull the trigger. Then there’s a long, loud burst of automatic weapon’s fire a hundred meters to the left.
    “Got him,” says Peter over the radio.
    The driver starts, turns and sprints towards his truck. Even with the shipping schedules secret, they’ve been expecting something like this. He realizes that he should have…
    Beatrice drops him just off the corner of the cab. Giulia drags her suitcases out of the crushed van. Cars are stopping on both sides of the autostrada, doors slamming, hurry hurry hurry!
    Here’s Peter. He knows how to drive trucks. Beatrice scrambles into the driver’s door ahead of him. Giulia hands her suitcases in the other door and comes in after. The big engine fires up and they clanklurch onto the highway.
    The truck-cab is a nice medium blue, sort of ultramarine. There’s two flatbed trailers in back, each with a pyramid-stacked load under gray tarps. You can tell it’s really heavy stuff, from the stiff way the trailers ride.
    It’s a long way to Rome. Past Bologna, past Firenze…they drive all night, stopping now and then for gas and coffee, delicious greasy sandwiches and a shot of grappa as the sun goes up. Somehow the badly organized police roadblocks are all too late, or in the wrong places.
    By breakfast time, Green Death is safe in the cool concrete of the Supercortemaggiore . One of the snoids, Orali, watches the other unloading the fuel-assemblies. Rectelli’s using a forklift to get the six bulky concrete boxes off the trailers. Most of the weight is just padding and shielding, but no one’s quite ready to try pulling the fuel rods out.
    “We’re gonna build an atomic bomb,” Beatrice tells the snoid.
    “ Bene .”
    “Do you know how this is done?” Giulia asks Beatrice.
    “Peter knows. Don’t you, Peter?”
    “No.”
    Beatrice starts to say something cutting, then stops herself. “It doesn’t matter really. They’ll think we can build one.”
    Orali shakes his head. “We got build one bomb and set off good. Then is much more for