As her supervisor and mentor, he told her to see his stenka and his precious possession, the television, currently broadcasting a political discussion on how Capitalists suppressed the negro, and how capitalism would erode the family should it take hold in the East. He explained to her, as a boss might, that she could have these things someday as well if she did her work for the State well. Ulf was expecting her to marvel at the images of talking men, and, on another channel, the ballet dancers that floated across the screen like beautiful ghosts. He did not expect her to peer behind the set, and in between the grille work, feeling the heat emanating from within, and trying to understand what made it work. She entered one of her fugues, urging the set to explain its miracles in a language only she could hear and understand.
Halina’s process to understand complex interactions was to close her eyes and imagine them working together, using her hands and fingers to trace mechanical motion or electron flow, a hula telling the story of signal flow from the V-shaped, foil wrapped antenna on top of the set, through a system that amplified its frenetic leaps in voltage and frequency that made a radio wave. She visualized amplified raw composite video frequency beating against an oscillator to produce the sum and differences of the two. The latter difference signal coupled through filters and detectors to teased out instructions for the electron gun to brighten or dim as it painted itself across the screen’s phosphors and extracted the audio that fed into the speakers.
This vivisection of the circuitry performing its own dance of electrons was what Halina saw; distinctly different from what Ulf saw. Ulf watched her dance in her work shoes, long flannel skirt, and shapeless blouse and was aroused. Ulf had never been with a woman, but he knew the basics of the act. He grabbed Halina from behind, her being only a third of his bulk and so easily subdued, but he quickly learned to avoid kicks from her braced leg.
Afterwards, she gathered the torn blouse around her exposed chest, and hobbled the six flights to her flat to clean up, knowing that the rape of a crippled Polish Jew would be of no interest to the Volskspolizei, especially when the perpetrator was consistent, if not a particularly articulate, informant to the Stasi. She also resolved that Nicolaus could never know, not out of concern for Ulf’s safety, but for Nicolaus’ already having been arrested for one crime already. If she became pregnant, he would learn of it soon enough. Meanwhile, she could easily avoid Ulf while attending her trade school class on welding and metal working during the day and to be sure, the foyer would never be mopped or swept again.
Henge Sarcophagus
In the final months of 1964, the Soviet Chairman of the Council of Ministers and party leader, after which so many structures throughout Eastern Europe were informally named, was forced into retirement and confined to his dacha. This was followed by the traditional scouring of whatever policies, plans, or accomplishments bore smudges of his thumbprint, smudges that surfaced as grudges is pursuit of retribution.
Under this political pressure washing did bring forth dusty records as far back as the close of the Great War. Among the documents that were since ignored, but were now raising questions, were odd references to a 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor, every member of which was missing. These included two Kapitans with engineering degrees, three Kapitans with chemistry degrees, a commanding officer, a full Polkovnik, and an engineer fluent in English with a degree from the prestigious Moscow and Novosibirsk State University in thermodynamics, too valuable to let slip away, or worse, fall into the hands of the decadent West.
The credentials were clear, even if the trophy to be retrieved was not. However, that all of them were now missing was just more suspicious than the bureau could bear, leading to the conclusion that instead of bringing home the trophy they were assigned to retrieve, whatever it may have been, they had instead stolen it, and were now living abroad on the Soviet kopeck in wealth and splendor.
A retrieval team was thus mustered from what was now called the KGB, and sent to the vicinity of Debica, Poland, to retrieve any evidence pointing to where the defectors may have fled with their valuable trophies.
The team sent to discover the fate of Sixth Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor followed local legends and alleged eyewitness accounts of a fire tornado that left the soil incapable of sustaining normal plant life. The area, so go the legends, was guarded by a ghost battalion of war-era Soviet soldiers, still standing at attention. Anyone venturing into the area will join them, standing guard forever over a savanna frosted with a permanent veil of poisonous ice. Peasant stories. Amusing. Fantastic stories to amuse and discipline misbehaving children.
Twenty years to the day after the record cold of 1944, the team arrived in relatively warm, pleasant spring weather, in the vicinity to inspect the area, fully expecting to take it off the list of potential sites and move on to the next.
As the team broke through the dense brush and ivy accumulated over the last two decades, some of the smug smiles dissolved. The forest, usually full of birds, frogs from the streams, a wall of sound from various insects, completely fell away to a clearing, absent of any wildlife, as still as the apse of a cathedral or a confessional booth. The soldiers could almost hear each other swallowing.
A translucent white porcelain ground cover matched the instructions on the handwritten map provided by the single village starszy23 willing to discuss the matter, as the perimeter to the ghost soldiers’ final billet.
The frosting resembled snow but was warm to the touch. A filigree of dead ivy tendrils, decayed to brown and black, could be seen through it. Too delicate to support any weight, each crunchy footstep sent warm shards of the icing material and puffs of rotting material into the air, both accumulating on the boots and leggings of the soldiers. Bending over to inspect the material meant breathing in both.
Tales of mutated flora and fauna were not exaggerated. Shrubs were actually stunted trees that looked like they could have contracted polio themselves, took forms of crones with brooms or crutches, the leaves shaped by a fun house mirror. And there was utter silence; no birds, lizards, or any other scavengers could be heard.
Meter-high cairns of dusty quartz rock grew from the floor around the glass lake. The symmetry of the arrangement, with perfect distancing between each rock, formed a sort of glassy Stonehenge.
A soldier broke the silence, and the tension, with an attempt at showing his bravery. He patted the top of the cairn nearest to him as one would do a beloved dog, then he said, “First Secretary Brezhnev sends his regards, Comrade, and we’ve come to relieve y…” At that moment, the soldier’s hand fell through the brittle glass veneer that formed the exterior of the cairns, and into the pasty muck inside. A puff of organic gas held within exhaled through the fist-size hole he had made, releasing a cloud smelling of rotten of eggs and a Soviet gulag latrine on hot day. Warm glass shards the size of bee stingers slipped deep into the flesh of his palm.
The laughing stopped, the cairns receiving more attention now, the soldiers gently stroking nearby cairns to visually inspect for any similar fragility. Blowing the dandruff-like dust off, the translucent shapes confirmed that the contents were soldiers from 1944, their uniforms and rank insignia burnt and corrupted but still recognizable. Their eye sockets stared blindly towards the sky, or each other, looking twenty years into their future for answers, but receiving none.
One by one, the members of the platoon held a free hand to their mouths, trying to overcome the first wave of nausea. Others dropped their weapons and backpacks, hastily shed their pants like molting dead skin, and ran for the woods to deal with the offal of explosive diarrhea. Die Kuppel had not finished its revenge for the pummeling Soviets dispatched two decades ago.
With pants gathered around his ankles, a corporal pulled his radiation counter from his backpack and switched it on which screeched loudly. His eyes told the story for his astonished comrades. For the second time, a Russian officer commanded his men to run, but the word died in his throat. He knew, by the warmth on his hand and the glow of the
cairns, that their lives were beyond saving now. All that was left was for the macerated cell membranes of soft intestinal and ocular linings to hemorrhage and dissolve. This was their fate if they remained standing, or later, on a fluid soaked hospital bed.
He dropped his pistol and the radio to the ground. With his shoulders slumped, he responded with a single word to the shocked looks on the faces of his platoon.
“Srat24.”
Poles
Wermut skirted the edge of the Moons disk as seen from Earth, from pole to pole, in its so-called highly elliptical Halo Orbit, its radio receiver almost always within reach of the numbers station broadcast. Every eight days the voice sent from Earth reached Wermut, reciting in the correct order of audio frequencies and within the expected range of the female voice for every one of the thousands of receiving windows. Even years later, someone was instructing Wermut that the time to return to Earth was not yet nigh.
Wermut would remain in this orbit until either the dead man switch fell silent, or until the power supply, the same type of radioactive thermocouple power generator made famous by American spacecraft, dropped too low to power the onboard radio and the re-entry sequence, at which point it would be rendered inert and relatively harmless.
During these 20 years, Pyotr’s body had worked through the inevitable stages of decay that began the moment the last heartbeat stopped - self-digestion and molecular death, followed by the breakdown of soft tissues into gases, liquids, and salts.
With some oxygen remaining in his lungs, and mostly in the cabin, the normal waste disposal mechanisms of Pyotr’s body slowed to a stop; the byproducts of metabolism became an acid that quickly etched away cell membranes and normal bacteria, both rupturing their contents. There was a shift from aerobic bacterial propagation, which required oxygen to grow, to anaerobic ones that did not. But both fed on body tissues, fermenting the sugars in them to produce gaseous by-products such as toxic methane, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia, and increasing the pressure on board the Wermut capsule.
Basted in this effluence, the surface of Pyotr’s muscles and internal organs began to form blisters, causing bloating, and eventually rupturing their own nutrient-rich fluids. This added a sheen to his skin that glistened in the dim light that came from the few miniature bulbs that backlit the panel controls. After some time, the skin loosened, then floated away after it sloughed off during the accelerations of apogee and perigee. It floated in the weightless confines of the warhead for several months on his journey to apogee.
While Zerrissen, Nicolaus, and Halina pursued their lives in East Germany, enzymes made new life within the capsule as they leaked from the microorganisms and bacteria of Pyotr’s corpse. These enzymes then combined to form the many gases of the “putrefaction” class, the most recognizable of which to humans since the dawn of man were the sulfur compounds, causing his body, small and legless, to double in size. The lice and other parasitic insects that prospered on his body during the final days of the Bunker followed him into the warhead to became fellow travelers, sputniks as they say in Russia, and their activity became the only living movement in the capsule since his death. The gastrointestinal pressure became so great by his first year in orbit, his stomach burst open and showered the front panel and interior with the putrefied soup. The craft became a terrarium for insect and microbial activity which increased the internal temperature of the craft by ten degrees.
Thus, twenty years later, the only still recognizable part of Pyotr in this organic soup was his legless skeleton, which was now finally decomposing into calcium and other compounds, though at a retarded rate given the closed environment of the capsule. Leaks in the capsule and hatch seal developed, allowing the high gas pressures to escape, and the external vacuum to intrude.
During Pyotr’s absence, a US president was assassinated in broad daylight, and the French abandoned a long-held colony in Asia under ruinous fire, only to be succeeded by the Americans, always ready for a senseless fight in someone else’s unneeded civil war. Pyotr’s membership in space was no longer exclusive, as both the US and Soviet Union sent probes to Mars, Venus, and the Earth’s moon. The Americans announced their intentions to land men safely on the latter in just five more years.
Japan, so utterly demolished while Pyotr was still earthbound, developed economic muscles of planetary proportions, as did its Axis comrades in Germany, and to no small extent, in Italy, while England shed yet more properties, transforming its Empire into one on which the sun would finally set. Russia struggled with its own genocides of millions, quantifying the ironic question of who had actually lost the World War, and who had actually won.
The US discovered a spy in their own secret weapon facility who worked as a one-man trophy brigade and sent the recipe for nuclear fission to the Soviets without the need for a tedious siege. Wrangling with their own civil war, the Chinese taught the Americans the hard lesson that meddling in the civil wars of others, however strategic or altruistic the motive, was always catastrophic.
For their part, the Soviets in Eastern Europe deprecated their own best interests in an attempt to preserve them by forming the Stasi, a brutal secret police force that Pyotr’s surviving brother was now quite familiar. In an understandable sovereign act of catharsis, Pyotr’s homeland of Poland exiled all Germans and took possession of Vatican properties, some of which undoubtedly once belonged to Sister Kathe’s order of nuns.
Though its orbit, left otherwise unmolested, may have been perpetual, to say that time meant nothing to Wermut would not be correct. The dual warhead spheres of cesium and cobalt lost their potency by fifty percent every twenty years – their so-called half-lives. By this measure, the powder kegs had only reached pimply puberty.
As with all things man made, almost nothing worked exactly as planned, as was the case when solar storms had prevented the dead man switch signal from reaching Wermut in its halo orbit, and the return to Earth sequence was blocked five separate times. On one of these radio blackouts, Wermut was a mere 30-minutes from firing its retros to begin its return to Earth’s atmosphere.
As the storm subsided, the correct audio tones finally made their way from the broadcast antenna in South America to Wermut, preventing a twist of irony only tolerated in Hollywood, averting its reentry four days later above Pyotr’s home country of Poland.
Oubliette
By the time Halina slid into their usual booth at the Hofbrauhaus, Nicolaus had already downed one stein of pilsner, and ordered a pitcher of bock for them to share. He would ask why she was late, but waited for Halina to explain, as she did everything in her own time. Signing their introductions to each other, Nicolaus noticed Halina, who usually eschewed cosmetics, had slathered on something flesh-toned, especially heavy around one eye. When she noticed him staring, she turned away, but he had already made the diagnosis. A freshly blackened eye, or, more precisely, a purple, blue, and red shiner.
With some gentle, but firm and persistent urging, Nicolaus was finally able to extract the story, or the partial story at any rate, behind her black eye, but at the cost of sincerely and solemnly promising not to harm Ulf. According to Halina, Ulf was drunk. She had not cleaned some windows thoroughly. His anger was her fault.
This condition of naming her assailant was not out of tenderness for Ulf, but rather her believing the Schwesterkriegerine nuns at Die Kuppel, who planted in her mind the cancerous notion that all badness in her life was her fault. That she had polio? Her fault. That she was born Jewish? Her fault. That she was separated from her family and forced to live in the Bunker? Her fault. That she was late for her period? Her fault.
Nicolaus believed the thinly supported story for a moment, but when Halina refused any of the pitcher of her favorite beer, he surmised the rest.
While he intended to keep his promise to Halina as best he could, the first order of business was to immediately remove Halina from Ulf’s reach. She would spend the next few nights at his flat until he could work out the details for a rozmowa of hi
s own with Ulf, one that Ulf would not enjoy, nor about which Halina would ever know. Ulf would not report her disappearance.
A lacework of utility tunnels had been built and abandoned underneath Berlin’s streets during the preceding centuries. A person could wander in total darkness for days in these ancient structures before succumbing to thirst and hunger. Such would be Ulf’s oubliette 25once Nicolaus located one suitably labyrinthine and forgotten.
Finishing the pitcher of beer himself, Nicolaus made plans to spend the next day at the East Berlin Hall of Records, his customary source of highly classified plat maps of municipal works.
Immediately, as with all plans, his scheme went awry. Every plat map had already been checked out to others on a need-to-know basis, including all copies, of which there were several. He recalled seeing unusual activity of road construction crews on the trolly ride to the Hall of Records, unusual enough site in East Berlin on a normal day, but to see dozens of them, together with the blocked access to plat maps, could only mean the Central Committee had big plans for the city perimeter in general, and from what Nicolaus saw from the trolly, for avenue Unter den Linden, and the Brandenburger Tor in particular.
Plat maps dating back to 1943, however, were still where they would be expected in the stacks, surely of little help given the extensive re-landscaping done by the Allied B-17s that hovered over Berlin like aluminum overcast for the last two years of the war. As he thumbed through them, his eye caught a footnote describing odd underground structures indicated by dotted lines on the map leading from areas in old Berlin to the River Spree labeled “Entwässerungskanal“26. Large, concrete drainage ducts. He counted six of them in all, leading from parks and high two meters underground at their source, one going underneath Muntenstrasse 27, a meter below the surface of the River Spree.
Apparatus 33 Page 7