The Sex Sphere (11 page)

There was all kinds of equipment around the room…welding torches, Geiger counters, cases of
plastique
explosive, stacks of metal scrap from wrecked cars. From what I’d gathered, Rectelli and Orali encouraged the Green Death to take actions against those polluters who also happened to be slow in paying protection. They were hoping that this bomb caper could bring in 10
¹⁰
lire, plus. They, obviously, were crazy, too.

For one thing, this room had big ventilation ducts in the ceiling. Which meant that when we started taking the fuel rods apart, there’d be plutonium dust filtering all through the
Supercortemaggiore
garage. If inhaled, a one ten-millionth gram speck of plutonium gives a seventy percent risk of eventual lung cancer. A five-hundredth gram causes certain death by fibrosis within two weeks. I’d tried to tell Beatrice about this yesterday, but she acted like she didn’t believe me or…which was quite possible…she didn’t care.

The fuel rods slid out easily. We laid them down side by side, not
too
close together, of course. According to some papers Peter had found in the truck, each of the rods held forty little hundred-gram pellets: thirty low-enriched uranium oxide and ten of the heavy stuff, PuO
₂
, plutonium oxide.

Peter got a cutting-torch and took off the metal cap at the end of a fuel rod. I tipped it up, and the pellets came sliding out like sooty checkers. Some dust flew up and I stopped breathing for a second…then went back to hissing the air in and out through my filters.

Peter nudged the pellets with his foot. “How do we tell which are plutonium?” His echoing voice was mixed with the buzz of his breathing system. He sounded like Darth Vader with a German accent.

Without stopping to think it over, I told him. “Use a Geiger counter. The plutonium gives off more alpha-radiation.”

It was funny. I knew I didn’t want the bomb to be a success. But yet, I’d spent so many years working around physics labs that I couldn’t stand not to do it right.

That’s not quite honest. On some deeper level I really
did
want to build a working atomic bomb. Build it and see it go off. Death wish? Maybe. Or think of a couple of bored twelve-year-old boys whiling away a long Sunday afternoon by setting off firecrackers. The thrill of the blast. The smell of the ozone, the roar of the cloud. I’ve heard that when an A-bomb goes off, the air around it catches fire. You see every color of the rainbow. Especially God’s colors: purple and gold. I wanted to see it for myself.

I got a Geiger counter and separated out the plutonium from the uranium. I used my gloved hands…there was no real danger from the actual radiation. You don’t get the neutrons and the hard gamma-rays until a nuclear reaction starts. The current issue was just to avoid breathing in any plutonium particles …and presumably the hazard suits were taking care of that. I planned to keep my suit on until I was well out of this place.

The next hour was filled with the simple, repetitive work of opening the twelve rods and separating out the PuO
₂
pellets. It felt more and more unreal. My mind wandered back to my encounter with the sex sphere.

Had I imagined the whole thing? All the ingredients for a good hallucination had been present: physical injuries, mental stress, isolation to the point of sensory deprivation. Bullshit. It had really happened.

With the suit on I couldn’t get to my pants pocket, but I could feel the tiny pressure of the little ball in there. If I called her, would she come return? Of course she would. We were
lovers
.

This brought back the sick, ashamed feeling I’d woken up with. I was no better than some geek with a foam-rubber woman’s torso like they advertise in
Hustler
. What a pathetic, twisted vision of womanhood: all the “inessential” parts lopped off, nothing left but tits and ass and holes.
Lifelike washable plastic skin. Greek and French features
.

But yet, in a way, wasn’t the sex sphere what I’d always wanted? An ugly truth there. “Shut up and spread!” How many times had I said that to Sybil, if not in so many words? The memory of her weeping, televised face filled me with such anguish I could hardly…

“
Na?
” Peter said, interrupting my thoughts. “
Was nun?
”

What now. We had twelve little mounds of plutonium pellets, say one kilogram per mound. Critical mass of PuO
₂
was, as far as I could recall, around ten.

“Put them all together and they all spell MOTHER!” I sang, my voice breaking. “The sound of one hand clapping.”

“What is the next step, Alwin?” Peter held the cutting torch near my suit. “We have no time for lighthearted games.”

“OK, OK. What we need to do is form the plutonium into two hemispheres. Separate the hemispheres with Styrofoam or something, and then pack the whole thing in a big ball of plastic explosive. With any luck, a fast reaction will set in when the explosive slams the two hemispheres together.”

“Why do you speak of luck, Alwin? We need your scientific certainty.”

“So forget luck,” I said with a shrug. “So far as we know, no one has ever built a simple atomic bomb that didn’t work. Let’s finish the job. Do you have anything to pack that plutonium in?”

“There are two steel mixing bowls in our kitchen,” Peter suggested.

“Good. Go get them.”

“You go. We can’t trust you alone in here.”

I went and pounded on the workshop door.

“What?” shouted Beatrice from the other side.

“We need the steel mixing bowls from the kitchen.”

“What else are you gonna need? I don’t wanna open this door any more than I have to.”

I thought for a minute. “Get a bunch of tubes of epoxy glue. And a Styrofoam ice-chest. A-and a small trunk to put the whole thing in.” I paused and thought again. “Do we have wires and a timer in the workshop?”

“
Ja, ja
,” Peter put in. He was standing next to me. “We’ve got all that.”

“OK,” Beatrice called, her voice gone girlish with excitement. “We’ll get that other stuff right away.”

While Peter monitored the radiation count, I split the plutonium oxide pellets into two six-kilogram mounds. I was hesitant adding the last few pellets, worried I might hit critical mass before I expected to. But the counter just ticked along evenly.

“All right,” I told Peter. “Now we want to find some way of compacting this stuff.”

“Why not hammer the pellets into dust?” Peter suggested. “They’re brittle enough.”

I groaned softly. “Peter, the last thing we want is to kick up a whole lot of plutonium dust. As it is, I plan to keep my suit on until I’m a kilometer or two away from here. Think of something else.”

“Melt it? We’ve got an oxyacetylene torch here that cuts plate steel.”

“Now you’re talking. Now you cookin’ wif gas, boah. We just need a crucible.”

We poked around the workroom till we found a barrel of sand.

“This is perfect,” I told Peter. We’ll hollow out a hemispherical mold like this…” I dug rapidly at the sand, making a bowl-like depression some ten centimeters across and five centimeters deep. “Get the torch.”

Peter dialed the torch up to high and fused the top layer of sand. This would keep the plutonium from trickling away. I got six kilograms of the dirty disks and set them gently in. At my insistence, Peter covered the torch and barrel with a plastic drop cloth before the next step.

“That’s our fume-hood, Peter.”

Just as he started heating up the plutonium, Beatrice got back. I went to the door.

“Is it safe?” she called.

“Oh, sure. We’re not doing much of anything. Come right in.”

The lock clicked and the door slid open. Beatrice stared past me at the flare of light in front of Peter. A fat sputter of plutonium flew up and melted a hole in the plastic cover sheet.

“Take a deep breath,” I mocked. “Good clean country air.”

Beatrice looked a little pale. “Take this shit and let me close the door. And don’t worry about those ceiling vents, I told Orali not to run them today.”

I reached out towards her, rubbing my dusty fingers together. “Don’t just stand in the shallows, Beatrice. Come all the way in. Get healthy, baby.”

There was a sharp report and something whistled past my face. Giulia. She was standing behind Beatrice, firing her Uzi at me.

I know when I’m not wanted. I backed off. Beatrice shoved in some parcels, and the door slammed.

“The first batch is all melted,” Peter said, turning off the torch and walking over to me. “Why do you try to contaminate Beatrice?”

“I don’t like her. I don’t like being kidnapped. I don’t like bombing thousands of pilgrims.”

“Oh, come on, Alwin. So far you have cooperated so well. Just a little more and we’ll let you go.”

“When? When do you let me go?”

“After the bomb goes off. Soon after that.”

Would they? Would they let me go then? Of course not. How could Green Death extort ransom for an imaginary second bomb if I were free to give out their names and the location of their hideout? And Beatrice almost certainly had cancer now. There was plutonium dust all over my fingers. Would she be likely to free me, after she started coughing up bloody gray broccoli?”

“Come on,” Peter said again. “Let’s finish the bomb.”

We levered out the fused PuO
₂
hemisphere with crowbars and chipped off the glassy sand stuck to it. It was lumpy, but it would do. I got one of the steel mixing bowls and tried the fit. Not too bad. Peter got the sand ready for the second batch.

I brought over the other six kilos of plutonium pellets and stood off to the side while Peter melted it down. I was thinking hard.

The main thing was to keep them from setting this bomb off when Sybil and the babies were around. One option would be to just slap those two plutonium chunks together here and now. Boom.

But there had to be a better idea. Maybe I could rig the bomb up wrong…fix it so it wouldn’t go off? Unfortunately it was just about too late for that. I hadn’t told them about using a tamper and an initiator…a jacket of uranium to keep the neutrons in, and a central source of neutrons to get the reaction rolling…but the bomb would probably work without them. We had an awful lot of plutonium.

Even if I didn’t help any more, Peter would probably be able to put a working bomb together in the next couple of hours. Maybe I should kill him? I picked up a crowbar and stepped towards him. He had his back to me and would never…

A shrill bell went off. Peter whirled around, holding the torch towards me. The door rumbled open and a gun-barrel poked in. We were being watched.

I tried to look nonchalant. “Just…getting ready to help lift the slug out.”

Peter’s voice was hard. “Sit down over there.” He gestured with his torch. “Sit down where I can watch you. Don’t try anything else. Already you have become expendable.”

I circled around him and sat down on the floor. The bomb was going to get put together whether I helped or not. Which left only one alternative. Boom.

I waited blankly until Peter was ready. I helped him lift out the second plutonium hemisphere. We nestled the two gray metal slugs into two mixing bowls, fixing them in place with epoxy. Peter carved two Styrofoam disks out of the sides of the ice-chest and glued one to the top of each hemisphere’s flat surface. While I monitored with the Geiger counter, he eased the two mixing bowls together…tilting them up till they joined to make a plutonium-filled steel sphere.

The chatter of the counter was nervous, but not hysterical. It sounded like a platoon of paratroopers getting ready to jump. Peter smeared a thick bead of epoxy along the crack where the lips of the two mixing bowls met. And then it was done…the core of the Green Death atomic bomb, a steel sphere the size of a soccer ball. All we had to do now was pack it in a symmetric charge of plastic explosive, wire blasting caps all over the explosive’s outer surface, and hook a timer up to the wires. Then put the whole thing in a trunk and leave it somewhere. I giggled.

“I want you out of here, Alwin. Now. I can finish alone. I don’t want you messing with the explosives.”

Beatrice heard this and slid the door open. “Leave the suit in there, Bitter.”

“No way.”

BRATTA-TAT. A flock of bullets winged by. Without even thinking, I ran over and snatched up the bomb core. I held it up high over my head.

“Cut the shit or I drop this. The Styrofoam’ll give way.” I wasn’t fully sure that was true, but it sounded convincing.

A moment of silence. Our air-filters rattled. Peter was too close. I sidled off from him, moving towards the door.

“Should I waste him, Peter?”

“
Nein!
” A yelp of fear. “It could go. It could really go if he drops it.”

“All I want,” I insisted, “is a chance to clean up.”

“I’ll hose you,” Peter offered. “Go stand on the drain.”

There was a floor-grate at the other end of the workroom. Beatrice shut the door, and Peter hooked a hose to the sink.

“Not too close,” I cautioned, keeping the bomb-core high overhead. “Just hose me down. Me and the death sphere.”

He dialed up the nozzle and played a hard stick of water over my suit. Bits of black dust washed down with the clear rivulets. I raised one foot, then the other, letting him clean the soles.

“Don’t forget my hands.” The splattering pressure moved up my arms and played across my hands. For an instant the water got between my fingers and the bomb’s steel shell. It shifted a bit. I stifled a scream.

If it fell from up there the Styrofoam really might be crushed. The mass would go hypercritical. The air would burn and we’d all see God. Half-assed, but effective. I kept wondering if I should just drop it and get this mess over with. But maybe I could still get out.

Peter turned the water off. “OK,
kerl
, you’re clean.”

The death sphere was getting heavy. Still holding it high, I jiggled it like Dr. J. ready to unloose a half-court swish.

“Beatrice,” Peter shouted. “Open the door. Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot him.”

The door rolled open. I could see Beatrice and Giulia out there, machine guns at the ready. I walked towards them, Godzilla with his giant boulder.