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

persist, even in the Worker’s Paradise. Getting to the machine, huffing and whining like a caged animal, would only require his dressing as a private in the Soviet Army and accepting the real possibility of his being shot as a spy should he get caught.

Nicolaus always being up for an adventure and rather oblivious to the tortures ahead for his spying on the spies, had himself in a suitably mocked up uniform the very next day. Using his best Moscow accented Russian, he rather easily relieved a private of his stack of catalog cards with the suggestion he visit the commissary before they ran out of their special piroshki. Once in the room, its door having been propped open, Nicolaus had would only have ten seconds to learn anything before the next stack-of-cards carrying private arrived.

He did not know how to load the cards into the hopper, and did not have the time to teach himself, so he just dumped them on the floor. Watching the cards already in the hopper sail through the bails of the machine was mesmerizing, and not becoming hypnotized by the blur and blinking lights of machine-thought took conscious effort. This is a machine Zerrissen would want to examine. Nicolaus forced himself to focus on the task during these last few seconds he would have to himself. He searched the bins into which the machine would drop cards that matched the search conditions. This potentially hopeless goal was made easy by virtue of the machine having only found one card that had met the criteria, whatever they may have been, from the two million cards already scanned.

Nicolaus read the card quickly, memorized the details, and left, discarding his uniform in a washroom garbage receptacle, scarcely believing he had gotten away with the stunt. Digesting the information and the implications required every bit of discipline he could muster. The single card found by the machine so far was the emigration record of a certain Helmut Gorgass who booked passage with a Vatican Passport for South America from Debica in May of 1945. Remarkably spry, Nicolaus thought, for dead man eaten by a dog.

Berlin Builds a Wall

Only 48 hours after seeing their feet from under an automobile, Zerrissen had convinced himself that the entire conversation was a vodka induced hallucination. He had not laid eyes on Halina since, her being in class during the day, and his being back at his flat at night. One aspect of the hallucination lingered, however. The engineering challenge did appeal to his instincts of problem solving and would be a welcome distraction. But are gimmicks, gadgets, and clever inventions the solution to life’s problems?

Still intrigued by the challenge, Zerrissen sat at his workbench to draw up his ideas for a mine detector which, even if Nicolaus and Halina come out of a vodka bottle, he might make use of himself. His first challenge was procurement. This was not Die Kuppel where expensive parts and rare chemicals were on hand at no cost, where nothing was beyond reach or no request unreasonable. Here, in modern day East Berlin, a lump of coal requires an hour in line at double the price of yesterday’s coal.

Looking around the shop for parts he might appropriate for the purpose, he noticed for the first time an intruder among the objects usually accumulating on the workbench: pistons, a carburetor partially laid bare, an oil can full of bolts, another full of screws. A stick and twig contraption with a wind-up crank, welded together from repurposed part plucked from the oil-stained cardboard boxes parked in various cubby holes around the shop. Turning the crank wound a spring that, when released, made a slithery object made of rubber and felts squirm and wag its legs, as if crawling up the branch. It was a caterpillar, but not a pretty one. It was black, odd shaped, with red spots. Someone with the skill to make this could have chosen a more beautiful insect, but Zerrissen had to admit it match very closely the caterpillars he sees in trees and grass around Berlin. Who could make this amazing toy, and, more curious, why leave it here?

At the end of the workday, Zerrissen walked autonomically back his assigned flat like the wind-up caterpillar on his workbench, at which point he concluded that it was a gift from Halina, and the conversation days ago was not a hallucination.

Before spending any more time considering implications, he passed a store with a rare television in its window. A newscaster was explaining that a boy from a local collective had been seduced by the West to steal a crop duster airplane so the West could study it and copy it as their own to help with their failing crops. Unfortunately, so goes the story, the boy was killed as he lost control of the plane at Potsdamer Place. The same reporter described how crops were failing in the West. Zerrissen reflected that despite the failures, their shop windows were as full of bread, vegetables, and stylish, cotton dresses, as they were of transistor radios and televisions. The East Germans should learn how to fail crops so bountifully.

A blocky and unimaginative concrete structure indistinguishable from a thousand others across Eastern Europe, Zerrissen’s building housed workers when off duty, like insects in a collector’s specimen box. Each had a single window that did not open, in what State propaganda sold as the pinnacle of architectural expression, pure Bauhaus. In reality, mock Bauhaus chic arrived conveniently as the fastest and least expensive way to meet a five-year housing plan. The building exterior was coated with the same brownish-gray paint that covered every building in the Russian zone of Germany, probably the result of some Five-Year Plan for paint as well. He strolled carelessly amid the clutter of decline - the empty vodka bottles, used condoms, unmatched mittens, moth-eaten wool caps, and a tricycle missing a wheel, smashed as if run over by a lorry, sending them skittering across