Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch

by Lawston Pettymore

  Zerrissen’s eyes looked away, the secret was out, but at least off his mind in the way that confessions are palliative for one’s soul, for those who actually have one.

  Visibly disturbed, Nicolaus rewound the film, slowly placed it back into the cannister, and replaced the wrapping carefully. They parted company, Nicolaus not speaking, perhaps disgusted by Zerrissen, through the back door.

  Zerrissen called after him, “Where are you going? The car’s this way.”

  Nicolaus waved, avoiding his eyes, “What car?”

  Zerrissen had to get back to his flat on foot or by bus. The stolen car was by now a liability that could lead to circumstances from which even Nicolaus could not extract himself. In any case, the automobile would become just another decaying artifact of the civilization abandoned in Kreuzberg.

  The revelation that Wermut could be circling overhead opened the compartment in his mind where the repressed memory of Apparatus 33 lived. He could not avoid visualizing the transformation that Pyotr’s irradiated body must have gone through in that anaerobic, but highly septic petri dish of a spacecraft. His would be the fate of large swathes of the planet should the craft reenter the atmosphere, poisoning for centuries whatever territory onto which it was dumped.

  Berthing a Submarine

  Zerrissen covered the distance from the theater to his flat autonomically, oblivious to traffic and landmarks that decorated the path, especially useful when at his drunkest. He could not refrain from trying to understand how Wermut had not executed the self-destruct sequency he had mounted on the launch sequencer. Does any new rocket system succeed on its first test? Or even the fifth? When he finally emerged from the fugue, he found himself lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, so he backtracked to get back to terra cognita, where the reverie forced its way back into his mind.

  If Todtenhausen had modified the self-destruct sequence for a launch protocol instead, could Wermut have achieved a stable orbit? Could the warhead survive re-entry? Could the Russian steppes, the breadbasket of Europe, or the American mid-west, be lost to generations of radiation?

  The Soviets will sorely treat anyone associated with that multi-generational, ecological calamity of a planetary scale, especially if it was an enemy escapee from a battle scene where their soldiers were not just wiped out, but incinerated and vaporized. These and similar thoughts kept flooding his brain; there would be little point in trying to sleep tonight, so he turned around and took the bus back to the shop.

  He saw from the corner that lights were on and Halina was playing music loud, dancing her dance of spirals and fluidic arm waving, which he had learned was her way of visualizing in three dimensions, in this case, their fish-shaped submarine. Exploring it, planning every joint, lever, and cable of it, for final fit and finish.

  The anti-government protest song that had recently become popular on a prohibited station from the West that Halina managed to coax from the old radio.

  “I stood on the bridge,

  Alone beneath the listless cold of the sky.

  Is the frozen river

  Still breathing faintly

  Through the throat of the reed…”

  Buttercup marched in mocking goose steps from end to end on its perch while bobbing and weaving its head loops in time to the music, while Halina pretended to conduct the performance with a baton.

  Her gift of eidetic imaging freed her ideas from the prison of pen and paper, of straight edges and orthogonality of a drafting board dictatorship. Starting with its purpose in life, the design told her what how it wanted to become incarnate, where to put linkages, springs, locks, and releases. In this trance, conflicts between moving parts, gears that did not mesh, levers that collide, rotors that did not generate sufficient torque, axles that would not rotate freely would expose themselves willingly as abscessed teeth, glowing in colors coded according to severity. She was free to engage individual components in rozmowa, sometimes ducking to get a better view from below. Rather than impose a solution, she invited the conflicts to express their needs.

  This thorough visualization emphasized planning first before beginning any construction, in contrast to Zerrissen’s customary approach which was to start building, then continuously repair, revise, and maybe even start over.

  Another difference just now occurring to Zerrissen - he always wore clothes when he was designing or building. Halina, at the moment at least, was completely naked, except for her leg brace.

  For the first time, Zerrissen saw that Halina was actually rather pretty. Height-weight proportional, not a gram of body fat, curves in the right places, curvier, in fact than he would have guessed. Hair falling long around her shoulders. Clean, healthy skin, the only blemish being the palsied leg that was too thin, and the brace that encumbered it. Then he noticed her body had one curve too many. Halina was obviously a few months pregnant.

  Halina yelped in surprise when she finally noticed Zerrissen standing there, silently admiring her performance. In a flutter of white, Buttercup flew from its perch onto her hand. The invisible floating, rotating apparition of a thousand parts surrounding her pirouettes, collapsed on itself, falling to the ground in an ectoplasmic pool only Halina could see.

  They stood there staring at each other for moment. Zerrissen realized he was blushing, but she made no attempt to cover herself. Having been raised in The Bunker where all genders regardless of age showered together, she never learned inhibitions or modesty. She smiled and made the sign that Zerrissen had learned meant ‘Good Evening, Raynor.’

  He returned the sign he hoped meant “Good evening, Halina”, which made her laugh.

  “Please continue. I’m sorry I scared you” he said aloud.

  Rather than resuming her dance, however, she turned down the radio, and made the sign that Raynor recognized was “Hello, Nicolaus.”

  Turning around, he saw Nicolaus standing there, a bag of groceries in his arms.

  “Raynor. Did not expect you back tonight. In fact, I thought you’d be passed out drunk by now.”

  “That was the plan, but your movie upset me too much.”

  “Oh. So, you have a soul after all?”

  Nicolaus set the sack on the rare available horizontal space and began pulling out the food items that Halina, now back in her frock, came over to admire and coo over, finally selecting a banana that she shared with Buttercup as she walked away to resume her design work.

  When out of range, Zerrissen turned to Nicolaus. “So. Halina is pregnant?”

  “Yes. Didn’t I tell you? Probably not. Yes, Halina is pregnant.”

  Zerrissen narrowed his eyes at Nicolaus, who laughed in response.

  “Oh, no. Me the father? Thanks for the compliment, but that thought is beyond all reason. By the guy that gave her the black eye. Remember that?

  “The guy you were going to bury in the duct?”

  “Raynor. I promised Halina I would not kill him. I was merely going to leave him to his own devices in the duct. So, that guy, yes, but my plans for him changed.”

  “So, she’s keeping the baby?” In Zerrissen’s mind, if anything were beyond all reason, it was a cripple who could not speak becoming a mother while trying to defect to an enemy country. How could that even work?

  “Correct. It’s her choice. I support whatever she wants which at the moment is for the baby to be born on Western soil. The child will be a citizen of West Germany. It’s the right thing to do.”

  Die Saugglocke29

  With late night East Berlin tucked in for the night, including Zerrissen, passed out in vodka binge, Halina, and Buttercup, Nicolaus had no choice but to step out of his preferred role of mastermind and thinker, and dirty his hands with actual work, including filling the spare sewer pipe, now referred to as the saugglocke, with sand, scrap metal, and other forms of ballast. Based on what he had learned from watching Halina, welded plates of sheet metal to both ends, rather proud that the plates stuck fast. By the time the sun rose again, all gathered around to admire his wor
k.

  Halina, looking at the lumpy welds, full of gaps and dry spots, said nothing, but her grimace said volumes. Zerrissen, too hungover to care about esthetics, announced it was time to put saugglocke to work as it swayed above the duct opening held by chains through the blocks and tackle from the ceiling. Zerrissen and Nicolaus, unusually generous with this interested in this step, guided it through the hatchway so that it rested on the halo of wire scrapers added to its entire girth, like a crown of thorns. It would be irretrievably stuck if it fails and sink to the bottom of the Spree if it succeeds, and in any event, sacrifice itself for the salvation of others.

  If the saugglocke failed to find its way through the hacking of roots, scraping of moss, shoving of rocks and debris along the way, then the schiff was not going to make it either. The project would be dead, and Zerrissen would return to being an anonymous drunk, at least until the KGB uncovered that he was Dr. Zerrissen of the Die Kuppel siege, or until Pyotr delivered his radioactive present to the world.

  “This is meshuga of the first order.” Zerrissen stated to the room.

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” Was the room’s response.

  And with this christening ceremony, saugglocke was slowly lowered into the duct, wobbling on its own as if not wanting to take this journey.

  Commenting on the unprovoked movement, Zerrissen quipped. “Saugglocke doesn’t want to go swimming today.” Then with a wry smile, added “Or it’s pregnant also.”

  Nicolaus yelped as the pull chains slipped through his ungloved hands, sending one end of saugglocke a meter or two into the ditch with a heavy thud.

  Zerrissen compensated using his body weight to slowly to wrestle control, cursing, then lowered the other end slowly until it was sitting on the bottom of the duct, fully immersed, only a few barbs of its scraper halos protruding from the black slime.

  Wiping his reddened palms on his shirt, Nicolaus opened a petcock on the barrel labeled VINEGAR, emptying the entire contents into the duct behind it, while the others held their breaths in what smelled like the worst egg-dying accident in the history of Easter.

  When the barrel finally drained itself of the odoriferous vinegar, the time came to start a chain of events that, once started, could not be stopped.

  Zerrissen pushed the barrel of naked Alka-Seltzer tablets into the soup, expecting to see smoke like dry ice billowing out in a mountain of plop plop, fizz fizz. Halina shoved the manhole cover hatch lid on its hinges shut, but the combined weight of both Nicolas and Zerrissen were needed to keep it closed while Halina slid the dogging latches into place.

  The flushing and scraping sounded like a gate to Hades had been rent open. The creation of and water vapor was noisy and violent. Jets of concentrated erupted around the perimeter of the hatch; it was not as airtight as Zerrissen had wished.

  The three of them were too absorbed in the cacophony below to immediately realize that they were becoming lightheaded. With his remaining consciousness, Zerrissen recognized the signs of poisoning, its molecules bonding 250 times faster than the free oxygen molecules that mammals needed for life. He yelled above the heavy din for Nicolaus to run. Then he grabbed Halina, who was too stunned by his violent reaction to attempt to hobble away. He tucked her under his arm as he had done twenty years earlier, before they both noticed an astonished head-bobbing Buttercup flew to Halina and flapped its wings as he hobbled run bounced him around on her shoulder.

  Zerrissen opened the garage doors to flood the workshop with the freezing December air full of life-restoring oxygen, even though this meant removing the precious coal-heated, but otherwise deadly, warmth.

  As their heads cleared, they looked to each other for nonverbal signs. Had they survived? Had anyone else heard that freight train plunge its way to the Spree? And what about the Spree? What must it look like there? Zerrissen looked over at Halina, who was laying on the freezing sidewalk, curled up to Nicolaus, Buttercup whistling and objecting to its treatment with loud squawks.

  “Someone give that damn bird its bourbon.” Zerrissen barked.

  Nicolaus restore the calm with dark humor. “If we are all going to die in the submarine, at least we’ll arrive in Heaven well-leavened.”

  Chuckling, then laughing, Nicolaus sat up. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  “Stay there. I’ll get you an Alka-Seltzer.”

  Birthing a Submarine

  Zerrissen’s increasing cynicism of life after hearing news that the Amerika Rakete may not have been scuttled, manifested in his continuous scatological references. Saugglocke had successfully opened the duct to the Spree, which he now openly referred to as an enema, and to Halina’s unnamed schiff, with frowning disapproval from the visibly pregnant Halina, as the Anal sonde, and sometimes the Freedom Suppository.

  In his depressed regard for the otherwise wondrous work of mechanical fabrication, he sullenly clambered in and out of it to finish connecting the remaining feedback loops, gyroscopes, and power connections to the sequencer.

  The austere interior consisted of three seats, two facing forward, the pilot’s seat facing the two passengers aft, salvaged from a junk automobile. Who would pilot the craft, between Nicolaus and Zerrissen, had not yet been discussed.

  The control panel was fashioned from the same automobile’s dashboard, and its gauges had been repurposed for an autobahn of water. The large speedometer, one of two large dials in the center, had been scaled to show velocity in meters per hour. The large tachometer to its right was recalibrated to tail flips per minute. Together, these instruments would inform the Sequencer to compensate for the flow of the river at that moment either slowing or speeding progress. The clock was repurposed to track elapsed time required for the traditional deductive reason formula: distance equals velocity multiplied by time.

  An automobile oil pressure gauge was adapted to indicate the remaining air pressure for the pneumatic controls. On the right of the pilot’s seat was a lever crafted from a parking brake that would couple or decouple the magnetic grappling mechanism that would release or retrieve the craft from the duct.

  Only the automobile’s battery voltage meter kept its original purpose, reporting the energy remaining in the two car batteries that powered everything, including two lightbulbs, which were the only sources of illumination for the length of the craft. Zerrissen switched these bulbs on and saw for the first time some changes to the plain walls of the tube. The bulkheads had been covered in sound deadening foam covered with fabric, which had no practical effect other than reducing the unpleasant acoustic effect of talking passengers who otherwise sounded as if at the bottom of a stonewalled well.

  Pillows with fringe and tassel covers matching the wall treatments resembling those one would throw around an artist’s loft in the tonier section of Berlin upholstered each seat. The instrument panel had been painted to compliment the pattern on the fabric with delicate pin stripe accents.

  Zerrissen cast a glance at Nicolaus as he poked his head inside. Nicolaus interpreted the puzzled look on Zerrissen’s face to be critical of the unnecessary, purely cosmetic appointments.

  “What can I say? We like to decorate.”

  Crouching nearby, Halina listened to the conversation and its meaningful pauses, then she lifted her head from her hand and signed to Nicolaus.

  Zerrissen waited for the translation.

  “Halina says it’s time we give the schiff a name.”

  Zerrissen scoffed. “How about Mayfly? It’s an aquatic insect.”

  Nicolaus sneered, “Yes, with a lifetime of a few hours.”

  “Exactly. And ironically tomorrow is May first, the day it’s named after.”

  There was more silence. Giving it a name made it alive. A living thing that could kill them all or save them from being killed. Water dripping from the duct roof echoed the sounds of a cave forming stalactites. Each one of them was revisiting their escape through their respective time filters of twenty years.

  Halina spelled out a short word to Nicolaus, who pr
onounced for Zerrissen’s benefit. “NIX? You mean Latin for ‘nien,’ nothing, or ‘cancel,’ or the Naiad river nymph in the Strauss opera?”

  Thinking for a moment, Halina nodded “yes” to all three options, then signed a long sentence for Nicolaus to translate.

  “She is quoting a lyric from the protest song. I think she’s saying it represents our own ‘journey on the frozen river, breathing through the throat of the reed.’”

  Zerrissen glanced ruefully at the erstwhile sewer pipe hammered into more of an oddly shaped black fish than any kind of reed and suggested an alternative protest.

  “If it’s a protest, I would have thought Mittlefinger30, but Naiad?”

  Nicolaus explained. “A magic sea creature of Polish folklore, half fish, half beautiful female, a Naiad, with the power to become invisible. A nymph of the River.”

  Ever the cynic, Zerrissen asked her “The River Styx or the River Spree?”

  Nicolaus provided the answer “I guess it depends on which direction you’re going. Please teach your sequencer the correct one.”

  Zerrissen waved his hand in dismissal, conceding what Halina wants, Halina gets.

  “So be it. NIX it is.”

  Halina clapped and began searching for a can of paint and a brush. Nicolaus translated to Zerrissen “She’s going to paint NIX on her bow.”

  “Oh great. So it’s also female now.”

  Name Dropping

  While Zerrissen was performing final center-of-mass and center-of-pressure calculations, the machine on the 14th Floor of Stasi headquarters was doing some computations of its own. Using one ruse or another, Nicolaus saw a second name card drop into the person-of-interest sorting bin. Dismayed, though not surprised, Nicolaus read the name on the card, Raynor Zerrissen, complete with the workshop address, his official assignment by the Central Committee. Authorities would eventually go there for an initial interview.

  Nicolaus could confuse and obfuscate locating Zerrissen for a short time, but a stopwatch on Zerrissen’s inevitable incarceration had been started. Whether it would time out first or the stopwatch already running for Halina’s childbirth was the critical answer even this miracle machine from American could not calculate. Either way, NIX would have to be launched in the next few days. Nicolaus encrypted a note and left at the usual dead drop he had set up for his counterpart at the Israeli Mossad. “Three to arrive May 1st Tiergarten boat ramp. Have obstetrician standing by.”