Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  Nicolaus, Halina, and the bird stared silently down at the slab, like dogs who actually caught the car. The abstract idea of following an enclosed duct to the sea in a pipe the only breathable air being what they brought with them, and with no chance to escape should they get stuck, began to dissolve the mood of anticipation a bit.

  Zerrissen contemplated the best place to punch through the concrete top of the duct, calculating that if the duct were flooded, the trapped water in the several hundred meters of the duct uphill of them would come rushing out, flooding the shop, but more conspicuously, the street outside.

  With a nod from Nicolaus, Zerrissen heaved the pickaxe into the Reich era concrete slab. A single blow penetrated, boring a small hole through which a fountain of water promptly shot out, a dark geyser smelling of fetid organic material, rose two meters into the air, ejected the pickaxe out of his hand, soaking everyone and everything before it hit the ground.

  The waterspout collapsed on itself with a final splash, leaving the pool on the floor to find a new path back to the Spree and the North Atlantic where it would be free from the confines of the Reich era drainage duct. What remained in the subterranean vault was a shimmering pool of black and greenish cave water, dripping like stalactites.

  The three of them stared inside, seeing only the surface of the still water and their reflections staring back.

  Dripping muddy water only a microbe could love, Zerrissen wiped his mouth, and sputtered “I guess I was should have tried a bit further uphill.”

  “Are we not going to talk about how it smells?”

  After recovering from shock, Buttercup, doused in the same fluids, did the talking for them.

  The next morning, cleaned up with dry clothes, Zerrissen threw together pieces of scrap and lengths of metal L-brackets into a make-shift drafting table with sliding straight edges. Here he would show Nicolaus pictorially how ridiculous the U-boat idea of his was. Zerrissen picked up a pencil, and perhaps because of the hard work and excitement the day before, or the vodka already consumed for breakfast, laid his head down and promptly fell asleep.

  When a passing lorry woke him perhaps 30 minutes later, he opened his eyes a crack to ascertain where he was, only to see Buttercup standing on the drafting table two centimeters from his face, staring silently into his eyes, not blinking or moving.

  Almost afraid to move, the tension was relieved when Nicolaus emerged from the shadows, as was their habit.

  “I see you two are getting along.”

  Buttercup flew over and landed on Halina’s head. She went about her work, Buttercup talking nicely “What are you doing? It’s OK. I love you. Do you love me?”

  Zerrissen, never failing to be surprised by Halina’s comfort on this planet, turned to Nicolaus, saying what had been on his mind since their water-soaked episode the day before.

  “Tell me you’re not still thinking about this stupid U-boat idea.”

  “That’s almost all I have been thinking about, actually.”

  “I can list a hundred reasons why it won’t work. Please think of another way to get us all killed.”

  Nicolaus swallowed his annoyance, took a moment, and decided to manage Zerrissen’s lack of faith.

  “Start at the beginning. The first reason. What’s at the top of your list? Then we’ll tackle the other ninety-nine.”

  Frustrated, Zerrissen looked to Halina as an ally to inject some common sense into this extravagant death trap project, but she was already distracted, picking through junk.

  He turned back to Nicolaus, “Propulsion. How do you propose the thing will move?”

  “Don’t ask me, Raynor. You’re the engineer. How will you solve your propulsion problem? Don’t boats use propellers or something?”

  It was now his propulsion problem, rankled Zerrissen. This was not his propulsion problem, he thought. It was theirs.

  Brushing the petulance aside, Nicolaus pointed to objects in the shop, nearly all of them propellers of some sort for all kinds of different machines.

  “What about an electric motor?” he said pointing to one wall, “You have an entire cabinet full of them.”

  “Electric motors require batteries. Batteries create sulfuric acid. Sulfuric in gas form eats membranes in the lungs, nose, and eyes. We’ll be in this thing for hours. Are you sure you’re not working for Todtenhausen?”

  “Then change the destination. We don’t need to make the North Sea. We just need to cross over to the Spree riverbank on the West side. The boat ramp in the Tiergarten is only a couple of kilometers downstream. We’ll only be in the U-boat for a few minutes, an hour at most. Problem solved. Next problem on your list.”

  “Propeller shaft. Rather than tell you, I’ll show you.”

  Zerrissen grabbed a discarded drive shaft from a door raising mechanism and punched a hole in an oil can of the approximate diameter, filled the gap between the drive shaft and the hole with rags, plunged the entire assembly into the vat of water used to find punctures in inner tubes. A small stream of bubbles roiled to the surface.

  “There’s no way to keep water, even at a depth of one or two meters, from leaking around anything that protrudes through the hull. Like the drive shaft, or the tie rods that for steering, or for depth control. Without a means to pump the water out, it will fill your U-boat in a few minutes.” Zerrissen pulled the assembly out of the water, removed the shaft from the tightly packed hole in the oil can, and poured out a liter of water.

  “How about a pump?” Nicolaus seemed to be finally grasping just how complicated a viable U-boat would be.

  “Pumps are heavy, noisy, and also require power from the batteries, not to mention, they also require a hole in the hull.”

  Zerrissen looked at Nicolaus for a second then he added, “Next on the list, and believe me, I’m just getting started, is steerage. Steering requires a rudder, and a rudder requires tie rods, and tie rods require holes. This means more water on the batteries, and batteries don’t like water.”

  Nicolaus was silent, signing to Halina occasionally, while both men were in thought. One trying to come up with solutions, the other with barriers.

  “What if,” Nicolaus posited, “we flooded the hull, and Halina and I wore scuba gear. That way, we have as many holes as we like. In fact, the more the better.”

  “And the batteries?”

  “A watertight box the size, say, of a footlocker would be sufficient, yes?”

  Zerrissen contemplated the idea in his head. Getting the craft out of the water, once flooded, would be impossible, but why would that matter? The craft was going to be abandoned on the other side anyway once its precious cargo was delivered. He drew out what the men had discussed to this point, a sewer pipe with a hatch cut into the top, a propeller coming out of the back end, a rudder after the propeller, and tie rods attached to bicycle handlebars for the person steering inside. That person would be Nicolaus. And Halina would position herself in front of and facing him so they could communicate, signing with hands would be impossible if they both faced forward. This raised the issue of the third person, something Zerrissen had been keeping to himself until he could run the numbers. As the design takes shape, the answer became increasingly clear – the tube and mechanisms and available air would only accommodate two people, not three. Raising this issue now would only sound selfish. The who adventure began by saving Halina and Nicolaus after all. Zerrissen decided to skip to the next objection, navigation.

  “How will the pilot navigate? The pilot’s head cannot be above the water; you’ll be seen by the GDU guards, and I hear them even from here taking pot shots at floating garbage out of boredom. What would they do with a head wearing scuba gear? Should we shave circles on our heads like a bullseye?”

  Nicolaus rested his head in his hands in near defeat. He had not thought of that one.

  “This is impossible, isn’t it?” Nicolaus conceded. He glanced at Halina, wondering how to break the news to her. She was busy with Zerrissen’s torch and scrap m
etal with Buttercup on her shoulder, chatting away, sculpting something, another caterpillar perhaps. She was within earshot, but otherwise oblivious to the conversation.

  “Yes. I’ve known from the beginning, but I understood that you needed to see it for yourself.”

  It was getting dark, which made it easier to lose the Stasi tails Nicolaus knew were waiting for him outside. He lifted his head to call out to Halina, but she was already standing there, beside Zerrissen, with something in her hands. Another sculpture, but it was larger, and half as long as Halina was tall. It was a tube with flaps on the side, rounded at one end, and pinched to a vertical flat surface on the other.

  She held it out with outstretched arms to Zerrissen, who took the load off her spindly arms and placed it on the desk. She had created another work of art. It had a muffler pipe as the body, with an articulated flat section made from overlapping joints of scrap aluminum. The joints of the pinched section were held in place by a rubber lining made from an innertube. A crank on the nose turned a shaft running through the center of the pipe set the flat section at the rear end in motion, moving it side to side when turned. Another crank moved the side flaps up and down, and a third lever limited the motion of the tail end so that the cranking would make the tail flip more on one side than the other.

  “Gottverdammt. It’s a toy fish. Or a sculpture. Made from muffler pipe, an innertube, and… what? scraps of aluminum?” Zerrissen’s admiration of her craftsmanship put a smile on his face, taking his mind off his current predicament and the dungeon that was East Berlin.

  Halina signed something to Nicolaus, who, in turn, smiled and laughed out loud.

  “Raynor, that’s not a toy, or a sculpture.”

  “No?”

  “It’s a prototype, dummkopf.”

  Sentient, not Sapient

  The mechanical elegance of Halina’s prototype was difficult to ignore. One could easily imagine it in a museum of industry. Or at least one in the West, since none of those existed in Germany anymore.

  Parts that moved did so organically, not in the mechanical, jerky motion of robots one saw in the cinema. They glided smoothly, possessing the same inertia, momentum, and hysteresis one expected from a living creature.

  Movement where joined pieces needed to rotate, fold, or slide, were balletic, firm but yielding where the joints needed to be strong and solid. The parts were simple and economical. There was no propeller, and therefore, no propeller shaft penetrating the hull. The prototype demonstrated that depth could be achieved by displacement and ballast, adjusted by pneumatics from compressed air, and set to neutral buoyancy. When at rest with its occupants, the schiff 28would float just below the surface of the water. When in motion, depth could be set by bow fins that did not rotate as would a propeller shaft. Rather they would be controlled pneumatically via rubber hoses fed by compressed air tanks completely sealed from water.

  Steering could be accomplished by flapping the center point of the tail to one side or the other, mimicking real fish, which Halina, in her wonder of nature, had studied with an intensity beyond ordinary human curiosity. A metal bar with seven settings, three to port, three to starboard, and one in the center inside the rubber seal, limited the excursion of the flapping tail, and vectored the flow of water to the direction of desired travel. The energy to flap the tail also came from tanks of compressed air. These could flood the interior of the rubber bladder should something go wrong with the mechanism and bring the craft to the surface. The solution would be to allow the schiff to reverse direction. This would be possible if they had enough room to maneuver, which, when in the duct, they would not have, not until they gained the river.

  Within a week, and with Halina’s help, test articles of the tail and bow fin controls were built, and various other kinks were ironed out. Zerrissen’s list of reasons to abandon the adventure eroded. The main reason that remained on the list, remained unmentioned until Zerrissen could confirm his arithmetic to himself.

  Meanwhile, Halina’s skill with the welder and metal work in general had progressed far beyond the imagination of Zerrissen or even Nicolaus who knew better what to expect from her. Though he had resigned himself to the jerky mechanical movement typical of pneumatic systems, Halina’s implementation was supple, organic, and quiet. Could these characteristics improve performance? Probably not. But this was performance art to Halina, not just performance metrics, as essential as the schiff was to Zerrissen.

  “I sense you remain skeptical, Raynor. Talk to me.”

  Zerrissen picked over the possible items to raise at this point. He went for the easiest of all the remaining hard ones.

  “Navigation. While the passengers are nestled inside, how does the pilot know where the opposite shore is?”

  The two men dove again into their world of design ideas, each idea knocking the other one down.

  “ADF,” announced Nicolaus proudly.

  “ADF? You mean a radio signal? The fish swims towards a radio signal?”

  “Yes. Towards some transmitter that we place on the bank, or an existing transmitter. Voice of America for example.”

  Zerrissen challenged Nicolaus, “Can radio waves penetrate water?”

  Nicolaus shrugged. He had used radio direction finding equipment in his “work” at the Embassy, but never under water.

  “No. A loop antenna would have to protrude several meters out of the water.”

  “If piloting cannot be done automatically somehow, we have no choice but to put a bubble of some sort on top, so the pilot—that’s me—can steer the damn thing. Maybe disguise the bubble as floating rubble or something, at least as viewed from the East side riverbank.”

  Halina signed something to Nicolaus, using gestures Zerrissen had learned were letters from the Polish alphabet. She was using a word for which no Polish equivalent existed in sign language.

  Zerrissen looked to Nicolaus for the translation.

  “She wants to know if you could recreate your sequencer from the Bunker days.”

  Where did she pull these ideas from? What was going on in that mind of hers? Zerrissen mused, growing uncomfortable with the idea of resurrecting his sequencer from Die Kuppel, which had already failed to prevent the deployment of Todtenhausen’s Apparatus 33.

  “It took a room the size of this one, and a massive bank of batteries. So, no. Does she want to run an extension cord from behind the schiff all the way back to here?”

  “It’s been two decades. Are there no new technologies that…”

  “My Apparatus 33 was based on a kinescope, yes? What developments have there been in movies in the last two decades? It would have to be very small. The other electronics and mechanical parts… well, they would all have to be very small.”

  “How small?”

  Zerrissen thought for a moment, assembling a description in his mind that was beyond anything he believed possible. Once again, he was operating in suspension of disbelief mode.

  “I’ve got to create some electronics, and with the available space and heat dissipation…”

  “So, how small?”

  “Smaller than a paperback book.”

  “Oh. You mean like this?” Nicolaus reached into his pocket, pulled out two oblong objects, each encased in aluminum, each about the size of a candy bar.

  “This,” he said, pointing to the smaller one, “is a camera. And this,” pointing to the larger one, “is a tape recorder.” Then he popped out a plastic cassette, not much larger than a postage stamp, and said, “And this is the magnetic tape. Good for thirty minutes of music at the symphony, or for secretly recording someone’s desperate plea for asylum.”

  Zerrissen had never seen such miniaturization before. “How is this possible? Have you ever recorded me?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. Your name has not dropped out of the American card reading machine yet. I’m tracking that. You’re safe for now.”

  Nicolaus let the implications sink in for a moment. He was presenting Zerrissen with the oppo
rtunity to redeem his failure to protect the victims at the Bunker.

  “You asked how it was possible to make these things so small. I don’t know. When I ask that question, the answer everyone seems to be happy giving me is ‘transistors.’”

  “Transistors?”

  “Yes, transistors. They’re all the rage now, whatever they are. Evidently, they replace vacuum tubes. They’re tiny and smart, I think.”

  Zerrissen was still contemplating getting recognition for his innovations at the Bunker, and for clearing his name as the ‘good guy’.

  “I need to get my hands on ‘transistors.’”

  Zerrissen tried to imagine how a device that ran cold and was the size of a kernel of corn could replace a vacuum tube. “Todtenhausen told me that for a device to be smart, it needs to be self-aware, possess self-control, and memory.”

  “Do transistors really have all that?”

  Warming up to the project, Zerrissen revealed a bit of excitement. “We don’t need them to. We only need them to control and remember. There’ll be humans on board to have self-awareness.” Zerrissen stopped himself, realizing the picture he was about to paint recalled Pyotr’s destiny, clear to anyone one who would only look, and reveal the one insurmountable barrier that he was not ready to reveal, even to himself.

  Plop, plop, fizz, fizz

  Nicolaus awoke Zerrissen at the makeshift drafting board again, passing out drunk from the night before, noting that, though his consumption has increased, he remained functional. Nicolaus would broach the subject of Zerrissen’s drinking when that time came.

  Zerrissen rubbed his eyes, tasted his tongue with some displeasure, and focused on Nicolaus flourishing his hands, theatrically like a stage magician.

  From his expensively tailored trouser pocket, Nicolaus produced two packs of cigarettes. Each pack had a false lid made of cigarettes tips. They contained twelve transistors wrapped in tissue paper, each in its own cardboard sleeve. Six were of the type called “power transistors,” and six performed some magic called “switching.” The power transistors were the size of poker chips shaped like yield signs on the autobahn. On one side, there was a rounded dome, housing whatever magic made transistors possible. The other side was flat with two short and stiff leg-like leads.