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

the world was currently so distracted. Todtenhausen blew on the pungent adhesive applied between the splice joints to speed the curing process.

Gently tugging on the film strip to test the strength of the splice, he visualized the edited version of his movie in his head and saw an opportunity to add some more drama. Dipping a small brush in the opaquing solution, he blacked out the command that would shut off the pumps to the methane tanks after decoupling from the Amerika Rakete. This would flood the launch chamber with liquid methane that would ignite when sufficient ambient oxygen entered the chamber from the open oculus, through which the Rakete would have already flown, and would enhance the fireball inside Die Kuppel, to the amusement of anyone left alive within.

Satisfied that these instructions had been blacked out, he then mounted the reel on the rewinder to take the frames back to the first frame where the sequencer would expect to find the beginning instructions. When mounted, the projector would loop through 86,000 frames, obeying whichever of the 127 commands, approximately an hour’s worth of processing. Rather than trust his time estimates, Todtenhausen would have preferred to rig a hidden switch to trigger the sequencer, but there was no time for that. This would have to be an asynchronous series of events that began as soon as he set the sequencer in motion.

Two hours and thirty minutes remained. There were more explosions, more concrete shrapnel bursting off the walls, and more yelling in Russian, each time clearer than before.

Installation of the navigation and flight control device, Apparatus 33, was next, and for this, Sister Kathe and one of her charges were required. With her standing calmly by his side, not even glancing at the ceiling after each blast, he remarked to himself how composed she continued to be. He wrote the serial number tattooed to the wrist of Pyotr, the top-performing student, on her hand. Then she was off on her mission, navigating with confidence the dark, fluid-slick corridors of the hanging dead to retrieve him.

The fat pediatrician, Gorgass, was cowering in the same corner Todtenhausen had last seen him a day and a lifetime ago, yelping with each explosion. Wrestling the fat man to his feet, Todtenhausen saw what could have only been a Vatican passport, poking out of his lab coat pocket. With threats that he would soon be a Soviet prisoner, he commanded Gorgass to set up the surgical theater under pretense of offering aid to the injured Soviets, once they broke in, as an act of contrition.

Two hours and twenty minutes remained. Todtenhausen could now distinguish separate voices, one of which had the bass note of authority that he did not care to meet face to face.

Kathe appeared before him, cool and unflappable as before, cooler even than any of the SS guards he remembered, dragging Pyotr behind her, for whom Todtenhausen stood ready with a syringe of opium. As the door to the operating room slammed behind them, Todtenhausen caught a glimpse of a small boy shouting and reaching out to them, which he recognized as Pyotr’s brother. He was the one Mengele had found so intriguing. But no matter now.

What mattered was reducing Pyotr’s mass to fit into the smaller available volume of the Wermut capsule, the interior of which Todtenhausen had modified according to the notes received from Eispalast. Inserting the additional tank of hypergolic propellants not only consumed half the available space for Pyotr, but the additional mass of these propellants must also be compensated for by removing the same mass from somewhere else. Todtenhausen’s inspiration was that legs are not necessary in space. In fact, legs are a liability. They add weight without contributing to anything except the susceptibility of the pilot to blackouts from g-forces. A pilot blacks out from high accelerations because blood is forced away from the brain and into the legs. Remove the legs and the blood has half as much body mass to deprive the brain of its critical oxygen. And the Amerika Rackete was going to experience some extraordinary accelerations on its way to its ambush orbit around the Moon.

The opium injection slowed Pyotr’s protests to floppy motions before he went limp, slumping to the ground with his eyes shut. His unconscious body was thrown onto a gurney and wheeled into the otherwise empty and only partially looted surgical theater, where Todtenhausen, assisted by a perplexed Gorgass, attached pumps and hoses to keep Pyotr breathing, replenishing lost blood with plasma that Kathe kept stocked. The carving process proceeded through the hour, accompanied by explosions from above and the cascade of concrete chips from all directions. Gorgass protested when he became aware of Todtenhausen’s intentions with Pyotr, and an injection of opium from Kathe quickly put an end to his unplanned interruption. Todtenhausen reminded Kathe not to forget grabbing Gorgass’ Vatican Passport before they fled the site.

The amputation would be performed under anesthesia, of course, for neither Todtenhausen nor Mengele were animals after all. The spinal cord was cut in just the right place so the boy could still move his hands and arms but feel nothing below his waist, of which nearly nothing, including the stomach and intestines, would remain anyway.

When installed in the warhead, the boy would notice several changes from the Iron Lung trainers. The CRT display was now only a few centimeters away from his face, and his arms would be confined close to his torso, what remained of it. But the interior of the warhead would be dark, and his abdomen covered, so the boy would likely never be aware of the improvements to his body made by the good doctor during the few minutes he would be alive after launch.

Gorgass was reviving from his opium nap, and was trying to strike anyone in range, including Kathe. Todtenhausen made final use of the surgical instrument in his hand against his carotid, though Gorgass managed, despite his bulkiness, to stumble out of the