Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

bear the idea of their blubber greased hands pawing superior German technologies. As was required of the research and development facilities of the Reich, an approved and rehearsed self-destruct plan was already in place, a task decidedly and devastatingly effective by the expedience of hypergolic and pyrotechnic materials that were in ample supply. These chemicals would be combined remotely at a moment’s notice and would simply incinerate everything and everyone remaining inside the structure, the concrete of which made an ideal oven. Stalin’s delicious breadfruit within Die Kuppel would thereby turn to ashes in his greedy mouth.

But irony alone released no endorphins in Todtenhausen’s brain. Where was the satisfaction in merely denying the Soviets technology that they could not comprehend in the first place? By Todtenhausen’s revenge calculus, luring the Soviets into the rocket’s flame trenches daring them to enter with its overhead doors titillatingly cracked just slightly ajar, then obliterating the Slavic mongrels along with a few Poles within two kilometers by launching the Amerika Rakete was the same revenge dish served much much colder.

Though it was unlikely the Wermut rocket stack could survive launch, much less the treachery that lurks in the upper atmosphere for all rockets that would dare approach called Max-Q, 15the glory of achieving the halo-shaped high ground, a first for the Reich and all of mankind was too intoxicating to resist. In this alternative ending to Todtenhausen’s Wagnerian opera, Die Kuppel, Wermut, and the Third Reich would not be consigned to the same anonymous grave of history as the Library of Alexandria was by the Romans, but rather, his was going to be played before the public and all the world was literally the stage.

Todtenhausen appropriated two film canisters from Zerrissen’s lab, each the size and shape of a pizza, and each containing a reel of 35 mm film with 86,400 frames, not of Hollywood glamour or of Goebbels’ propaganda, but of rows of dots that danced from side to side when projected onto a screen. These were the only two 35 mm sequencer reels that Zerrissen’s team had prepared.

One reel listed the steps to simulate a launch for testing purposes. In this test version, the dots were arranged in codes assigned to open all doors, fuel the tanks to capacity, test fins, engine gimbaling, flight controllers, and everything else needed for flight except for the ignition of engines.

The second reel was the self-destruct sequence. In this reel, fuel tanks were loaded, and all tests were performed, ending with the ignition of engines, but without opening the doors. The plasma would then fill the launch room before Wermut slammed into the ceiling, spilling all its remaining fuel into the firestorm below, bringing the entire interior of Die Kuppel to sterilization temperatures, breaking all molecular bonds, and ionizing all atoms. Todtenhausen had no intent to be one of the victims of such a dissolution. With the increasingly close reverberations of Soviet munitions, however, Todtenhausen figured that he and Sister Kathe had less than an hour before the Soviets would pour in through whatever ingress they created.

To stage his Gotterdammerung, Todtenhausen had to locate the frame that opened the doors in the test reel and splice it to the self-destruct reel that contained the complex engine ignition sequence, which he himself did not know, but which Zerrissen had captured in the self-destruct reel, and installed in the A10 launch sequencer residing on the floor of the launch dome.

Where should Apparatus 33 be instructed to park the warhead, awaiting instructions to descend back to the Earth’s surface? A low Earth Polar orbit would allow it to fly above any spot on the globe and return to the surface within five or 10 minutes. A geostationary orbit would allow it to hover above a given target until recalled. Falling back to the surface from this altitude would take a few hours. Pondering these options, Todtenhausen was inspired to act on the hints from his counterparts at the Eispalast when an idea occurred to him on how to cut the mass of Apparatus 33 by several kilograms. Doing some quick math between the cracks of a fractured slate chalkboard, he satisfied himself that the goal was ambitious, but possible. He would not send Wermut to any target. Instead, he would park the capsule out of reach. Someplace where even the Americans could not find or shoot down. He who uses power, loses power. He would configure the capsule to fire its retrorocket motors only when the on-board radio fails to receive a signal from Earth, a so-called dead-man-switch. Should anything unpleasant happen to him, the signal to remain in orbit would cease, and Wermut would retro rocket out of hiding, falling back to Earth.

So Wermut was not going to Washington, or Moscow, nor was it going to loiter in low-Earth orbit.

Wermut was going to the Moon.

Götterdämmerung

The soldiers were now close enough for Todtenhausen to hear them yelling at each other in Russian. He estimated this gave him at most three hours to assemble the actors, props, and script for his tragic opera.

By projecting both reels from two editing projectors onto small screens, and with the projector gate properly synchronized, the rows of dots came alive, shoving each other around, up, and down in perfect unison. With practice, one could learn to decode the 127 possible patterns for each of the ten rows, turning the dance into a story, like bees dancing for hive mates to explain where the nectar can be found.

When the dances on the two screens fell out of synchronization, Todtenhausen knew he had located the frame with proper launch opening instructions to keep the oculus closed, which, by rewinding and single stepping forward a bit, occurred early in the test reel, at frame 1488 to be exact, which he surgically cut away and, as if performing a plant graft, spliced into the self-destruct reel. His opus film was now ready to make as much film history as that Jewish movie, Gone with The Wind, with which