Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch
Page 18
You will ask whether there are others here. There are not. Neither Todtenhausen, nor Kathe, and neither is Pyotr. We evidently die alone. I imagine Todtenhausen and Kathe are dealing with their own transitions that Isaac Newton assured us was inescapable, that a living body at rest cannot become a dead one instantaneously. Pyotr died in his cramped capsule somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, the farthest any human had died from any other human in the history of humans, a record that stands to this day, and will hopefully never have to be exceeded.
Though the time for his 2nd Law to expire is brief, it is nonetheless long enough for me to marvel, the miniature sun formed and obliterated the blood that the Mossad might have wanted to someday collect and forensically understand what had happened here.
Enough time to understand the blast wave that followed a microsecond later sent windowpanes and doors thirty meters into the vineyard, setting some of the vines themselves on fire, and scattering the rental car in a thousand pieces across several acres. Its license plate impaled an oak tree all the way in the neighboring vineyard.
Metallic objects, including the transmitter and repeater devices, converted to gaseous metal and glass before they were sent into the sky to eventually cool and coalesce into metal and glass rain, similar to what drenched and entombed the Soviet trophy brigade into radioactive henges twenty years earlier.
Listening for, but the recitation of numbers of numbers no longer being broadcast, Pyotr was coming home.
Don’t ask me how I know these things. You will know for yourself soon enough.
Revelation
While Halina and Nicolaus executed their defections to the West, the attention of the remainder of the planet in general, and US taxpayers in particular, was riveted on the sudden blossoms of success by the US against the Soviet man-in-space projects. Adherents could not get enough space pornography, a distraction welcomed by the CIA, NSA, and the US Air Force not wanting any publicity for their ultra-discrete activities in space.
The first product of this American secret troika put human spies in orbit for two-week sojourns, an orbit as ideal for window peeping as it was for dropping surprise warheads onto any doorstep on the planet.
Benignly named “Manned Orbiting Laboratory,” or MOL, officers of the US Air Force under this program lived inside a two-man, cone-shaped capsule. Cut in its curved base was a circular hatch that allowed access to the empty upper stage of a rocket, modified into living quarters complete with galley, head, bunks, and gear one expects to find in an orbiting spy headquarters. This gear monitored radio traffic on any spectrum and observed ground activity through an extreme zoom lens in light both visible to the human eye and invisible.
An on-board dark room processed the fine grain, wide-format negatives that could be parachuted back to the Earth’s surface and caught by helicopter. External antennae in the shape of loops, hoops, and even barber poles harvested the dust bunnies of electronic telemetry for decoding and interpretation by on-board computers. At the end opposite the nose cone were the retrorockets, tickets for the MOL stack to ride the waterslide home when the consumables on board were exhausted.
The most tantalizing assignment of MOL was to maneuver close to satellites from other countries to understand their capabilities and develop strategies to intercept or modify these capabilities towards US interests, not unlike an emerald wasp with a cockroach, or a cuckoo insinuating its eggs into the nest of an unsuspecting bird species to avoid the personal expense of raising the egg to adulthood.
On this occasion, MOL operated in this latter capacity when it was asked to intercept an object on an Earthbound trajectory from the Moon and only recently detected by their garden of antennas. The mysterious object’s albedo was too low to image from afar, the most likely hypothesis was that the object was an errant satellite orbited by a competitive US space espionage program known to be less expensive and less risky known as Corona.
The pilots sidled up next to the object as ordered and described the object to ground controllers as clearly man made, of Earth origin, windowless, sleek and aerodynamic, closer in shape to an arrowhead, but more muscular, defying all known profiles of known satellites from the US or any other country, including those of the Corona program which more closely resembled a stack of concentric rings like a collapsible drinking cup. The MOL pilots and their ground control counterparts were highly intrigued by this discovery adding color to mission routines already saturated with near fatal levels of boredom.
What baffled them the most were the side markings in Germanic alphabet that, though scarred from the heat of launch and just pure age, was just readable as WERMUT II.
The MOL crew imaged the craft in all wavelengths and found it was very bright in the infrared, with a surprising level of gamma rays, which as high-energy beta-particle radiation, consistent with nuclear reactors emitting highly disruptive to molecules that made up human tissue. Structures on one end of the craft appeared to be retrorockets made for reentry but were obviated and useless now as the craft was tumbling slowly with no obvious way to stabilize itself.
The possibility that it was inhabited never crossed more than a few minds, though the only occupants would have had to be little green men, the operative word being little. By way of counterevidence, however, the craft was also emitting a steady oscillation at precisely 455 kHz, the world-wide standard for super-heterodyne frequencies for radio receivers, ruling out, for those who needed to dispel their first and most outrageous guesses to the contrary, it being of anything but earthly origin, while at the same time indicating that the object was configured to receive information from the ground, which was the wrong direction for most conventional satellites.
After a brief discussion of the evidence, the ranking officer on the MOL recommended contacting Werner von Braun, given the Germanic markings and one observer commenting that the craft closely resembled images of von Braun’s fabled A10 America Rocket.
The static-laced audio from the MOL received by the communications officer was heard and written down as “8:10” rather than “A10.” Thus, when passed along to von Braun, never far from the phone when the NSA called, he claimed to have no knowledge of any German craft named “8:10.”
Wanting to investigate further before anyone by the NSA competition sniffed their way into the mission, the Air Force controllers proposed that MOL stop the object’s tumble, and attempt to bring it home.
After some ground simulations and a practice run, the pilots devised to touch the object, physically but gently, with the spent rocket motor bell of the MOL, to absorb and transfer some of the rotational energy into the MOL stack, which they would then null out using its own reaction control thrusters. Should they grab the ancient retrorockets that were on one end of the mystery craft, risk of damage to either object would be minimized. The unneeded engine bell of the MOL could sustain damage without consequence as it would have been jettisoned before the MOL re-entered.
The two objects made contact two hundred kilometers over Indonesia, both heading north, exactly as Wermut’s on-board timer fired its retro motors. Had the MOL not stabilized the craft, the firing of these rockets would have sent it into a destructive spin, sending all components harmlessly into the Sun. However, the good intentions of MOL positioned Wermut retro motors perfectly for Earth re-entry instead.
The hypergolic fuels mixed as super heated plasma directly onto the engine section of the MOL, causing its own hypergolic retro-engines to ignite, blasting open the pressure hull containing the two pilots. The men were sent into space in their shirt sleeves, along with their films, backgammon board, deck of cards, and uneaten tubes of beef and soup, creating a brilliant flash in the sky.
Inside the warhead, protected from the heat of reentry, the progeny of insects that adapted to the lightless, weightless, and anerobic atmosphere, crawled with their barbed tarsi in search of food along the bulkheads that were carpeted in pods of edible bacteria colonies. The spherical cesium and cobalt warhead surfaces were the
only areas uncovered by the colonies, as they were too hot and too radioactive to support even these extremophiles.
In natural light, this carpeting would have appeared as patches of greens, yellows, blacks, and rusty browns: a box of crayon colors. Some patches were furry, others were barbed and spiky. In random areas, stalks rose above the felt, popped open and spread a new generation of spores to circulate in the wafting gases and start new colonies among Pyotr’s organic remains.
Wermut, now traveling at subsonic velocity glowed white hot as it entered Earth’s thickening atmosphere, restoring the sensation of gravity on board for the first time in two decades, sending the creatures briefly into its nooks and crannies. Wermut traversed the sky in an arc northward over the South China Sea, still fifty kilometers above Indonesia.
Twin sonic booms were heard in the corridor that Wermut threaded between the Philippines and Vietnam before the crossing the border of China at a forty-kilometer altitude. Finally reaching the maximum aerodynamic pressure, it exploded, salting its contents over the estuaries and wetlands, a kilometer above the rural Chinese landscape.
Surviving bits of metal and plastic, coated with cesium that combined with oxygen, spontaneously combusted into compounds of cesium oxides, killing most of the remaining populations bacteria, parasites of bacteria, exotic viruses, marinated for decades in the cesium and cobalt radiation mutated dramatically from their earthbound forebearers.
Most of the insects expired in the inferno, though a small number of egg sacs hidden in various crevices remained viable. Their descent slowed as they met thicker air to the speed of a gentle snow fall, landing in the boughs of trees, home to any number of birds, bats, and even pangolins. Nearby vegetable gardens, streams, rivers, water wells, and farmland were peppered with the mixture of radioactive dust and exotic bacteria.
Pyotr and his traveling companions had come home in a cloud carried by divine winds thought by the local population as a great star falling from heaven and burning as one of their rice-paper lamps. Their journey to the ground was completed in a village not part of any Western vocabulary for at least another fifty years.
A village at the confluence of two great rivers.
A village called Wuhan.
* * *
1 Schwesterkriegerine –Sister Warrior, in English
2 Schlaf und Ruhe – Sleep and Quiet, in English
3 Die Kuppel – The Cuppola, in English
4 guimpe and wimple – The white shoulder cover of a nun’s habit, and headdress, respectively
5 Gürtel – the belt of a nun’s habit
6 Mädchenwohnheim – in English, Girl’s Dormitory
7 Flasche Mann – Literally Bottle Man, in English
8 Sequenzer –Sequencer, in English
9 Rakete – Rocket, in English
10 Arzt – A family doctor in English
11 Wermut: In English, Wormwood
12 Zerżnąć Dupę – A rude Polish epithet
13 Eispalast – ‘Invader’ in Greek, or ‘Ice Palace’ in English
14 Kombrig – Soviet Battalion Commander
15 Max-Q – In simple terms, the point where a rocket’s velocity through the atmosphere approaches the inertial limit of air molecules to move aside, thereby creating a pressure wave that can destroy a rocket that fails to adjust its ascent rate accordingly.
16 Kombrig – Rank of battalion commander in the Soviet Army
17 Strelyat – A Russian warning of imminent explosion in this context
18 BeeZhat – In English, Run
19 Khrushchyovka – The informal name for the rapidly built apartment buildings during the time Nikita Khrushchev was Soviet Party Leader
20 Volkspolizei – ‘People’s Police’ in English
21 Rozmowa – In English, ‘conversing’
22 Zersetzung – ‘Decomposition’ in English
23 Starszy – ‘Elder’, in Polish
24 Srat – What one says when something bad happens, but in Russian.
25 Oubliette – derived from the French ‘oublier’, to forget
26 Entwässerungskanal – Literally, Water Drainage Duct in English
27 Muntenstrasse – The boulevard running along the riverbank of the East Berlin side of the River Spree.
28 Schiff – In English, a small ship
29 Die Saugglocke – The Plunger, in English
30 Mittlefinger – Literally, Middle Finger in English
31 Schlange – Serpent, in English
32 Scheißkerl – Derogatory term, akin to shithead in English
33 Verstehen – ‘understand?’ in English
LAWSTON A. PETTYMORE
Born and raised in Texas cattle and oil country, Lawston studied mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, lost in Austin culture, before jaunting off for a couple of decades in Silicon Valley, finally returning to his beloved ranch outside his hometown of Kilgore, trout fishing being his passion when not writing novels or screenplays.