The Sex Sphere Read Online Free PDF Page A

fired my pistol at him, capering on the pavement some ten meters below. Missed. No time for another shot. I could hear someone running down some stairs to my left. I took off down the arcade in the other direction.
    And ran right into Virgilio. He darted out at me from a shadow and had his pistol back before I knew what had happened.
    “You make good sport, Alvino.” He twisted my arm behind me in a hammerlock and pressed the gun against my spine. “Come quickly now.”
    I groaned and went along quietly. Down the stairs to the ground-level arcade. Down more stairs. Some doors and stairs again. Doors. A cubical concrete room lit by a single caged light bulb.
    The guard was there, and the madman, and a businessman-gangster. The businessman-gangster seemed to be running the show. He was comfortably overweight, with amused, blinking eyes. They called him Minos.
    At his direction, Virgilio put leg-irons on me, and chained the irons to a heavy staple set into the wall. Minos watched from a sofa across the room. I had a pile of rags to sit on. The guard left, while the madman stood watch with a machine gun.
    “You are from the US Embassy,” Virgilio began.
    “I am not . I’m just a poor physicist living in Germany on a research grant.”
    “Fancy words,” Virgilio replied. “Signifying nothing.” Now that he was no longer playing the pimp, his English had improved considerably.
    “You don’t have any girls at all, do you?” I demanded. “Your whole living is kidnapping people off the Via Veneto. How long do you think you can get away with it?”
    “Virgilio is a very good trapper,” Minos remarked in his mild, cultured voice. He had a cupid’s-bow mouth. He looked as clean and well cared for as a newborn baby. “I often buy from him. But how much are you worth?”
    “He is very important,” Virgilio insisted. “The Embassy will pay billions of lire. I’ll let you have him for only one million.”
    “He says he’s merely a scientist,” Minos said doubtfully. “Perhaps you should just…” He made a negligent, lethal hand-gesture. “Why couldn’t you get me a spy?”
    “ Kree kree ,” the madman said, swinging his machine gun around. “ Kree kree kree .” The businessman-gangster said something to him, and he sat down on the sofa too, with his robot on one knee and the machine gun on the other. They talked quietly for a minute. The madman’s name seemed to be Lafcadio.
    Virgilio paced back and forth slowly, exuding menace. Suddenly he stopped and stood over me, his fists clenched.
    “You are from the US Embassy.”
    “Don’t start hitting me,” I said in alarm. “If you want to think that, you just go right ahead. Phone them up when they open. It shouldn’t be much longer.” I looked at my watch. It was almost 5:00.
    “What kind of physicist?” Minos wanted to know. “Lafcadio was a physicist, too, before he went crazy. Lafcadio Caron. You know of?”
    Lafcadio Caron? This lunatic? Sure, I’d heard of him. I’d even read some of his papers. He’d been in charge of the proton-decay experiment in the Mont Blanc tunnel. There’d been an accident there a few months ago. But how…?
    “What kind of physics?” Minos repeated. “I must decide if you are of any value.”
    “Atoms,” I blurted out. “I study atomic and nuclear physics.” This was a simplification. My precise specialty was the mathematical analysis of quantum-mechanical Hilbert Space operators.
    “He can build a bomb!” Virgilio cried excitedly. “Just think what the government will pay to stop him!”
    “Maybe I could build an atomic bomb,” I said, playing along. “But you’d have to steal me some reactor fuel.”
    “ Boomawhooma pow pow pow .”
    “Perhaps we know where to find some. Or perhaps the Embassy will think we know where.” Minos and Virgilio exchanged a significant glance.
    I was getting in deeper all the time. “I’m not a weapons expert,” I pointed out. “I’m simply a theoretical physicist