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

untied using the various switches, knobs, levers, and the stick that looked like a broom handle stuck to the floor.

Immediately, a roar sounded from outside, exactly the response he expected but much louder, and the module began to vibrate in unison. A loop appeared on the screen that he recognized even as it blurred a bit from the shaking. He knew to twist a dial to flatten the loop into a line, while pressing a specific button on a panel of ten colored buttons. His input was accompanied by the sounds of gears grinding and pumps activating. A loud roar was followed by an unfamiliar feeling of heaviness, as if a large animal, like that cow he and Nicolaus had raised from a calf, sitting on his chest. Pyotr would never know that he was already higher above the Earth’s surface than any human in history, including Sir Edmund Hillary, and the B-17 pilots currently bombing Berlin into chunks of brick, mortar, and human kibble.

Pyotr preferred to think of the shapes as a game of Snakes and Ladders, with himself the snake master, and the broom-handle stick a snake-charmer’s flute. Sapera and pungi.

This imagery served Pyotr well, even now, when remembering the sometimes-complex sequences of inputs necessary to tame and domesticate the snakes, but this current session was disturbingly different. He had absolutely no room to move about in a confined area filled with new sounds – bangs and pops, and a scraping roar like the boat Pyotr had built from scrap to catch crayfish when scraping the bottom of the pond on the farm. The air in this smaller cabin was hotter and moister than either the training modules or the crayfish boat and smelled of feet. Most distressingly, the jolts and jerks were much more violent and longer lasting.

He could not know, of course, that the thin green snake-like shapes were Lissajous Figures, influenced by signals assigned to an X, Y, and Z axis from instruments monitoring Wermut’s velocity, yaw, pitch, and roll. He could not know that his puzzle solving - changing ovals into circles, rectangles into squares, and using the broom handle stick to center all of them on the screen – were commands to the cluster of rocket motors and verniers to throttle their thrust, or gimble their exhaust vectors.

The groans and grinding sounds were alarming him, but he did not want to fail Sister Kathe, whom he imagined was waiting outside with his brother, Nicolaus, ready to poke them both with her rod should he fail to solve the puzzles correctly.

The timer indicated the end of the training session was near, so he allowed himself this welcome image of his brother waiting outside, an imaged that shattered like glass as he was violently thrown forward, then back in his straps. Blood trickled from his nose; the combinations of pressures having broken the delicate capillaries that form the olfactory sensors. The screen blurred; he could no longer bring it into focus. Spittle and droplets of blood floated away in little spheres away from his nose and mouth. Pyotr wanted to leave the game, but his body was not responding, and his eyes could no longer see.

Wermut was now traveling at the magic velocity and trajectory that would wrest it from Earth’s gravitational grasp, along a large ballistic arc that would eventually, four days hence, intersect the orbit of the Moon at apogee. Here, Wermut would be captured by the Moon’s gravity, and an orbit giving the Moon, for the first time, its own moon, where Wermut would remain for all eternity there until recalled back to Earth.

Pyotr would never know his status of being the first human to the Moon. His fingers slumped off the stick, his arms floated away from the control panel, his head fell to the side, his eyes closed. The oxygen in the module was finally depleted, replaced by Pyotr’s .

Pyotr had become Amerika Rackete’s most recent, but not its final victim.

Pyotr was dead.

Radioactive Amber

In April of 1945, soldiers of the Soviet Army were fighting historically severe winter conditions and concomitant deprivation only Napoleon’s Grande Armee had previously been obliged to endure. For most, their uniforms were separating at the seams, lining exposed and torn, buttons gone and replaced with sinew or leather from looted farm animals, and ammunition low. The average soldier caught as much sleep as possible on the frozen ground and ate what remained of the squirrel and bird population of Eastern Europe.

But the battalion assigned to and encamped outside Die Kuppel, was a trophy battalion, relatively well cared for, a bit better off than the typical Soviet infantry. The 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor, marched with general orders to sniff out and abscond with anything that was valuable to “Uncle Joe,” and to destroy anything that was not. The division was led by a full Kombrig16, who was educated in engineering gymnasiums in Berlin, Paris, and London, and being special in Stalin’s eyes, was feted with a variety of perks unique to the politburo. One of a handful of trophy battalions roaming through Germany, the 6th traveled with its own well-stocked food wagon, long links of sausages handed out to minor officers to distribute among the troops. They had hygiene platoons carrying portable toilets, de-licing stations, and even portable showers. Nothing was spared for the trophy battalions if such lavishness could result in finding some shiny lagniappe that would be returned to Papa Stalin.

Whereas the food wagons in other battalions had, at most, one cauldron to prepare some sort of soup, 6th Trophy Battalion NKVD Motor had four: two for vegetables, one for meat, and the remaining one for coffee. Lockers were built into the caissons that transported the cauldrons, each the size of howitzer truck. These contained eggs, cheese, and for the officers, dried fruits, sour cream, and milk on occasion, from which cream and freshly churned butter were made. The enlisted men of the 6th ate as well as or better than officers of the