The switching transistors also hid their mysteries (some form of mineral called germanium) inside aluminum cans. One could easily imagine a small light switch inside, but it was hard to imagine the small leprechaun living inside, flipping that switch on command. The switching transistors were the same size as the top hat piece found in a popular board game dedicated to indoctrinating the young in the art of suppressing the proletariat. Three wires protruded from under the hat. They were longer than those on the power transistor, but not as stiff. Why one had two leads, and the other three, Zerrissen could not even guess.
Fortunately, the ever-resourceful Nicolaus had spirited the data sheets and carefully folded them inside the cigarette packs. He explained to Zerrissen the usage and limitations of each type. The data sheets were in English, and Nicolaus spoke English fluently, in three different accents. But even he could not translate some of the highly scientific terms. The most important information, however, was written in the universal language of mathematics from which he was able to build a simple amplifier that could read bits of magnetized ones and zeros on the tiny cassette tape of Nicolaus’ pocket voice recorder.
As promised, the switching transistors were fast, completely cool, and abstemious, unlike his older sequencer of vacuum tubes that could melt a chocolate bar at ten centimeters and burn through a car batter in ten minutes. However, the switching type of transistor was not muscular enough to operate the pneumatic valves needed to propel and steer the craft. For this, power transistors would need to intercede. Though not as clever, the power devices could summon the amperage to energize the electro-magnets to open or close whatever valve the eerie tones on the magnetic tape requested from the smaller switching devices. As with any society, be it Capitalist or Marxist, the brains at the top direct the muscles that perform the actual work while the frail elite listen to music.
Zerrissen would be lying if he said the exercise did not transport him twenty years back to his rocket navigation project. Both projects had size constraints, and both used deductive reckoning for navigation. That is, both would guide the craft on laws of time and velocity, where distance equals time multiplied by velocity. Success with this sequencer also had further, more subtle implications. If he could get this version to save lives, doing so might shed light of honest intent on his failure to replace Todtenhausen’s Apparatus 33.
Nicolaus made no attempt to hide his delight with Zerrissen’s miniature controller, even at the expense of his pocket recorder, available only in Japan, and not likely to ever be replaced. Checking a mental box, Nicolaus turned the group to the remaining barrier. “Time to clear out the duct!”
“Clear it out? How do we do that exactly? Hire a pool boy? A kreigsmarine frog man?” Occupied with other issues, Zerrissen had given the matter exactly zero thought.
Nicolaus glanced over at the schiff, which was beginning to take the shape of a snake and fish chimera but was still in many pieces. Many heavy pieces, including steel, aluminum, wood, and some plastics.
“Could the schiff do it? It’s heavy, and the duct angles slightly downhill. The sides appear to be slippery with moss. Actually, it would be a decent test of your sequencer. You could sequence it to swim to the river and stop. Then we wench it back using the block and tackle on the ceiling.”
Zerrissen did not want to admit it out loud, but this was resourceful thinking. The schiff was going to be tested anyway before risking anyone’s horrible death by prolonged entombed drowning. The idea of being caught in the schiff, unable to go forward or backward, was spine-tingling. The hairs on the back of his neck stood.
“What if it gets stuck?” Zerrissen, ever the pragmatist, asked.
“That would be bad. I can’t steal any more materials. Questions are already being asked. Besides, we’re running out of time.”
Nicolaus and Zerrissen traded knowing glances. This meant the KGB and the Stasi were getting closer to him.
Though against his first instincts, Zerrissen decided to be helpful. “We have the last sewer pipe. Instead of the schiff, we could send the spare sewer pipe through.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t gotten that far yet. Maybe pull it through the opening in the Spree with a block and tackle.”
In an odd reversal of roles, Nicolaus was the one casting doubt on the enterprise. “We’d be seen rigging a tripod and pulley system on the riverbank. That would attract a lot of attention. And besides, we don’t know exactly where the opening is, or whether it’s been sealed up.”
There was a moment of silence as the issue was pondered. The only sound came from the radio; a symphony by a Russian composer was broadcasted, interspersed with propaganda announcements, and bits of news and football scores from Moscow. The Russian chess master was scheduled to play his American counterpart for the International Title. Poland lost to Czechoslovakia. Rain was forecast for the next two days. The silence was broken by Halina, returning from school with Buttercup on her head, both listening to the tail end of the current discussion. She signed a question to Nicolaus. Zerrissen looked over to Nicolaus for the translation.
“She wants to know how submarines fire their torpedoes.”
Zerrissen looked at her smiling, but a bit frustrated. I brought that up as a joke. There will not be any torpedoes.”
“I think…” Nicolaus started as Halina repeated the question, “she just wants to know how torpedoes are fired.”
Zerrissen sighed. “Air pressure. Compressed air. A lot of it. The duct is two thousand cubic meters. That’s more than we have in my air compressor over there, or a hundred others.”
There was more thoughtful silence, followed by more signing between Halina and Nicolaus. It was a furious conversation, Nicolaus speaking his part in Polish, very little of which Zerrissen could follow.
Finally, Nicolaus summarized the conversation to Zerrissen.
“Raynor, Halina was given a toy submarine by the Red Cross. It had a chamber to fill with baking powder that caused the toy to rise and fall when placed in water. Have you ever seen this toy?”
Zerrissen shrugged “Maybe. What’s her point?”
“She’s asking if the air pressure could be generated chemically.”
“With baking powder?”
“Or any chemical, if there’s something better.”
Zerrissen glanced at the opening. They had covered it using a lid fashioned from a manhole cover, purloined from the street outside his old workshop location, making the odor bearable.
“Well, sodium bicarbonate along with some type of reagent could. With an expansion ratio of, say, 10,000:1, then…”
“Give me a shopping list. I want names and quantities. I’ll see what I can do.”
The next morning, two 200-liter barrels rested in front of the workshop. One was simply labeled “VINEGAR.”
The other barrel, compliments of the poorly guarded loading dock behind the East Berlin company that invented aspirin the previous century, was labeled:
“ALKA-SELTZER”
Matinee
The paper calendar on Zerrissen’s shop wall flipped from an illustration of a girl sitting on a bale of hay with pumpkins by her feet, wearing only short shorts, her arms crossed strategically across bare bosoms flipped to “October 1966,” to the same girl wearing a feather in her hair and only a breechcloth, the month Americans celebrate their annual meal of thanks with native Americans, whom they promptly killed and whose land was subsequently appropriated.
Zerrissen and Halina had become a welding and assembling team over the weeks, with Halina providing inspiration for the final product, and Zerrissen providing practical solutions to mechanical problems, such as levers that collided with tie bars, or how to make a rotating shaft turn a corner. The schiff was weathered in, was watertight, and now weighed over four thousand kilograms, as heavy as a luxury automobile.
Zerrissen was fine tuning his sequencer, some of the solenoids being stubborn and not activating before tiny devices died, the
y were maddeningly easy to destroy with the slightest excess of either current or voltage. Nicolaus’ face drained white every time he heard the faint pop followed by a delicate curl of smoke. Zerrissen’s largess of semiconductors was down to three of the power type, and four of the switching type, which was still the largest cache of transistors outside of Moscow.
Halina continued dressing weld joints and trimming parts that were not sliding smoothly, he walked the familiar route back to his apartment, a route that took him to his tobacconist.
Zerrissen needed a break. He walked out of the shop to a tobacconist where he picked up a carton of French cigarettes, the Russian versions being unsmokable, a newspaper, and, of course, a bottle of vodka. On the return walk to the shop, a blue automobile of Czech origin, with a green passenger door, pulled up and matched his stride. Through the open window, he could see Nicolaus at the wheel.
“Get in.”
Confused by the sight of Nicolaus in such a rattletrap piece of junk, and by the urgency of his order, Zerrissen concluded that giving orders was probably just another day at the office for Nicolaus, and that he was probably never disobeyed. Nicolaus leaned over, not much of a stretch in the tiny two-door machine and pushed the passenger door open.
“Where are we going?” Zerrissen asked as Nicolaus pulled into traffic.
“We’re going to see a movie.”
“I am not interested in movies. Take me back to the shop or buy me a drink.”
“Oh, I think you’ll be interested in this one. There are cigarettes in the glove box if you want some.”
“You don’t smoke, why do you have cigarettes in your glove box?”
“Because this isn’t my car.”
“Is it the Embassy’s?”
“Oh, hell no. This piece of shit? The Embassy livery is stocked with nice cars. Even some from America. I stole this one from the Stasi evidence garage on Friedrichstrasse.”
Nicolaus pulled the stolen two-door into an alley, its two-stroke engine roaring and belching white smoke from one pipe, black smoke from another, mustering enough horsepower to cross another street. Turning to a side street, Nicolaus pulled over to the curb and put the engine out of its misery.
Scanning the sketchy neighborhood, Zerrissen saw that they were in front of an old, Orpheum theater that had long since deteriorated with the fall of the Reich, and of this district in specific, known as Kreuzberg. The December skies were as sullen and gray as the grime accumulating on the facades of the pre-war structures. The repairs from the bombing had halted for the lack of building supplies.
He looked up at the marquee to see what cinematic masterpiece they had traveled across town to see. “Bathhouse Boys.”
“Um, I like art films, but I’m thinking ‘Bathhouse Boys’ will not get my favorable review.”
“It wouldn’t. I’ve seen it. Save your Deutsch marks for ‘Canterbury Tail.’ Now there’s some quality art.”
From the backseat, Nicolaus produced a flat square package, the size of a small pizza, wrapped in butcher paper and secured with twine.
“I brought my own art film. Specially selected from the Embassy archives. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single cock in the entire movie, but there is a lot of thrusting.”
Five Stages Lost
Nicolaus carefully pulled back a flap of the butcher paper wrapping, the way one opened a stolen letter so the true recipient could not tell it had been opened. He revealed its contents to Zerrissen; a fiberboard carrier of the type used to protect 16 mm film reels.
Zerrissen read the label: “Sputnik 1/A7 4/10/57.”
“This film is four years old.”
“Correct. The Soviets are releasing some of their space program footage to counter the impression that the Americans are leading in the space race. No one outside of Star City has seen this yet. Except me. And soon, you.”
“Star City? Never heard of it.”
“By design. They have extreme paranoia that the Americans will compromise it or bomb it or… I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
With piqued curiosity, Zerrissen followed Nicolaus into the theater, where they were immediately confronted with the expected odors of disinfectant, cigarettes, cigars souring in ashtrays, and old carpeting, sticky and matted, peaking from under discarded condom wrappers. The place was otherwise abandoned. Zerrissen waited while Nicolaus threaded the film into the proper kinescope in the projection room.
“Pretty lonely in here. I guess we’re between showings of ‘Bathhouse Boys.’”
“Not quite. I had the place closed for our private showing. We need to be out of here within the hour. This,” Nicolaus pointed to the reel of film, “must be back in its place in the archives before it’s logged as missing.”
After some cursing, a few motor sounds, and sending the film in the wrong direction and completely unthreading it, Nicolaus finally got the correct combination of switches. Lights in the theater were turned off, and the black and white image, grainy but distinguishable, appeared on the silver screen in silence.
In its center was a rocket standing vertically on its pad and shaped like an obelisk. It consisted of a tall, central cylinder, surrounded by four similar tubular structures strapped to the central cylinder’s sides. For all the claims that each superpower used stolen technology from the other, this rocket shared zero DNA with its American counterparts. The two space programs could not have been more distinctive.
“So that’s a Soviet booster?”
“Evidently. They call it the R7.”
“It does look familiar, doesn’t it?” marveled Zerrissen.
“You tell me.”
Zerrissen nodded in appreciation. Its scale was hard to estimate, but its proportions were, like anything that flew well, appropriate.
“It’s elegant. Almost beautiful.”
The rocket stood still, coated in army green with black markings, shimmering lightly behind heat waves even though it was October. This indicated that the camera had recorded the scene from far away through a telephoto lens. Apart from a smoky fog boiling from a vent towards the top of the rocket stack, there was no apparent human activity anywhere. A flock of starlings flew through the shimmer, then suddenly dove to the ground, causing those on the ground to rise in a pandemonium. Plumes of flame and smoke appeared at the base of the rocket assembly, and four mechanical arms, one for each side booster, rolled back like a flower opening in the sunlight. Then, the beast began to lift off the pad.
The camera tilted on its tripod as the rocket accelerated soundlessly through the cloudless sky, the lens zooming in to keep the rocket centered and recognizable. After several seconds, the object split into five parts: a central core and four boosters falling away. Nicolaus stopped the movie, freezing the image on the screen.
“Does this remind you of anything?” Nicolaus asked Zerrissen.
“Did it explode?”
Nicolaus laughed. “So you would think.” He advanced the film a few frames. A casual observer could clearly make out the central core continuing its skyward journey, the four boosters falling away in perfect symmetry.
“They call them the Korolev Star. These four boosters dropping away to send the central core into orbit.”
“The who star?”
“Some Russian guy named Korolev who’s in charge of their space program.”
“Like von Braun?”
“I guess so.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Do you remember how we thought we saw Wermut explode above Die Kuppel twenty years ago?”
“Vaguely, yes.”
“Was there a ‘Korolev Star’ amid the smoke and flame?”
Zerrissen dredged the images, marinaded in vodka and myriad other bad habits, from deep memory.
“Maybe, maybe not. What’s your point?”
“I don’t think Wermut exploded. I think we witnessed the stage separation.”
“Are you suggesting that Wermut worked?”
“Possibly. W
ith Pyotr in it. Pyotr could be circling overhead, like a Sputnik, at this very moment. Who knows?”
“No. I loaded the self-destruct procedure reel into the ground sequencer myself.”
“Were you the only one who knew how to change or program the reels?”
Zerrissen thought about his staff of twenty years prior. The list was short. There was Mosner, Bebarfald, and Pardo, but they had all escaped the day before the launch. There was Markuse and Keyler, but they had both shot themselves, or had been shot by the SS guards ordered to prevent defections. And then there was Todtenhausen. Not only did he know how to change the reels, but also how to edit, develop, and prepare them.
“Todtenhausen. Todtenhausen knew how to work the sequencer. But where did Wermut impact? With its warhead, we would have heard about it. That kind of explosion does not just blend in with the wallpaper of a typical day’s V2 attacks. The whole world would have heard about it. The poisoning of the food chain, water supply, and farmland would still be occurring today, in a sense.”
“Farmland? I’m sorry, what kind of warhead was this?”
Zerrissen caught himself, sensing that he had revealed too much. Nothing had been verbalized about that warhead since it was installed while the Reich was still alive.
Deciding there was no point in keeping it a secret any longer, Zerrissen conceded. “Cesium and cobalt. Mostly cesium.”
“What on earth is cesium?”
“Think radioactive.”
“Like an atom bomb?”
“No, we never got that to work. More like a biological one.”
Nicolaus drew an audible breath, looked into Zerrissen’s eyes to confirm he was not joking, or waiting for him to take it back, or clarify, or explain that the biological weapon wouldn’t work either. Zerrissen returned the stare, expressionless. Unblinking. Silent.
Having confirmed the worst, Nicolaus held out his index finger in Zerrissen’s face.
“Tsk…” Deliberate pause. “Tsk…” Wagging the finger. “Tsk…You’ve been a bad boy…”
Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch Page 12