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

and their activity became the only living movement in the capsule since his death. The gastrointestinal pressure became so great by his first year in orbit, his stomach burst open and showered the front panel and interior with the putrefied soup. The craft became a terrarium for insect and microbial activity which increased the internal temperature of the craft by ten degrees.

Thus, twenty years later, the only still recognizable part of Pyotr in this organic soup was his legless skeleton, which was now finally decomposing into calcium and other compounds, though at a retarded rate given the closed environment of the capsule. Leaks in the capsule and hatch seal developed, allowing the high gas pressures to escape, and the external vacuum to intrude.

During Pyotr’s absence, a US president was assassinated in broad daylight, and the French abandoned a long-held colony in Asia under ruinous fire, only to be succeeded by the Americans, always ready for a senseless fight in someone else’s unneeded civil war. Pyotr’s membership in space was no longer exclusive, as both the US and Soviet Union sent probes to Mars, Venus, and the Earth’s moon. The Americans announced their intentions to land men safely on the latter in just five more years.

Japan, so utterly demolished while Pyotr was still earthbound, developed economic muscles of planetary proportions, as did its Axis comrades in Germany, and to no small extent, in Italy, while England shed yet more properties, transforming its Empire into one on which the sun would finally set. Russia struggled with its own genocides of millions, quantifying the ironic question of who had actually lost the World War, and who had actually won.

The US discovered a spy in their own secret weapon facility who worked as a one-man trophy brigade and sent the recipe for nuclear fission to the Soviets without the need for a tedious siege. Wrangling with their own civil war, the Chinese taught the Americans the hard lesson that meddling in the civil wars of others, however strategic or altruistic the motive, was always catastrophic.

For their part, the Soviets in Eastern Europe deprecated their own best interests in an attempt to preserve them by forming the Stasi, a brutal secret police force that Pyotr’s surviving brother was now quite familiar. In an understandable sovereign act of catharsis, Pyotr’s homeland of Poland exiled all Germans and took possession of Vatican properties, some of which undoubtedly once belonged to Sister Kathe’s order of nuns.

Though its orbit, left otherwise unmolested, may have been perpetual, to say that time meant nothing to Wermut would not be correct. The dual warhead spheres of cesium and cobalt lost their potency by fifty percent every twenty years – their so-called half-lives. By this measure, the powder kegs had only reached pimply puberty.

As with all things man made, almost nothing worked exactly as planned, as was the case when solar storms had prevented the dead man switch signal from reaching Wermut in its halo orbit, and the return to Earth sequence was blocked five separate times. On one of these radio blackouts, Wermut was a mere 30-minutes from firing its retros to begin its return to Earth’s atmosphere.

As the storm subsided, the correct audio tones finally made their way from the broadcast antenna in South America to Wermut, preventing a twist of irony only tolerated in Hollywood, averting its reentry four days later above Pyotr’s home country of Poland.

Oubliette

By the time Halina slid into their usual booth at the Hofbrauhaus, Nicolaus had already downed one stein of pilsner, and ordered a pitcher of bock for them to share. He would ask why she was late, but waited for Halina to explain, as she did everything in her own time. Signing their introductions to each other, Nicolaus noticed Halina, who usually eschewed cosmetics, had slathered on something flesh-toned, especially heavy around one eye. When she noticed him staring, she turned away, but he had already made the diagnosis. A freshly blackened eye, or, more precisely, a purple, blue, and red shiner.

With some gentle, but firm and persistent urging, Nicolaus was finally able to extract the story, or the partial story at any rate, behind her black eye, but at the cost of sincerely and solemnly promising not to harm Ulf. According to Halina, Ulf was drunk. She had not cleaned some windows thoroughly. His anger was her fault.

This condition of naming her assailant was not out of tenderness for Ulf, but rather her believing the Schwesterkriegerine nuns at Die Kuppel, who planted in her mind the cancerous notion that all badness in her life was her fault. That she had polio? Her fault. That she was born Jewish? Her fault. That she was separated from her family and forced to live in the Bunker? Her fault. That she was late for her period? Her fault.

Nicolaus believed the thinly supported story for a moment, but when Halina refused any of the pitcher of her favorite beer, he surmised the rest.

While he intended to keep his promise to Halina as best he could, the first order of business was to immediately remove Halina from Ulf’s reach. She would spend the next few nights at his flat until he could work out the details for a rozmowa of his own with Ulf, one that Ulf would not enjoy, nor about which Halina would ever know. Ulf would not report her disappearance.

A lacework of utility tunnels had been built and abandoned underneath Berlin’s streets during the preceding centuries. A person could wander in total darkness for days in these ancient structures before succumbing to thirst and hunger. Such would be Ulf’s oubliette 25once Nicolaus located one suitably labyrinthine and forgotten.

Finishing the pitcher of beer himself, Nicolaus made plans to spend the next day at the East Berlin Hall of Records, his customary source of highly classified plat maps of municipal works.

Immediately, as with all plans, his scheme went awry. Every plat map had already been checked out to others on a need-to-know basis, including all copies, of