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

disappointed; the notion was far-fetched, but he did not appreciate Zerrissen’s tone and responded with silence, drumming his fingers on the table, petulantly pulling the wine bottle back, out of Zerrissen’s reach.

Seeing how this was going to be, Zerrissen sighed in exasperation. “Seriously, all the remaining options have been tried. The guards have checkmated all the other strategies that exist.”

Nicolaus rubbed his cheeks, gazed out a corner of the window where the foil had been torn away, staring into the islands of light, illuminated road crews at multiple points around the city, working around the clock to secure all exits. What would Pyotr do? He was better at puzzles.

They both reflected on the issues for a moment, allowing the sound from the radio to penetrate their thoughts. Nicolaus asked himself again, what would Pyotr do? Before breaking the silence.

“So, no rocket…” Then, as if Pyotr were whispering in his ear, “Then a submarine.”

Zerrissen straightened, not sure if Nicolaus was joking. “Submarine? Well, they won’t be expecting that. No one has escaped Germany by submarine in over two decades. Might be a little conspicuous launching it though. Why not just launch a raft?”

Nicolaus warmed to the idea. “Think about it. We build it in your shop, send it to the Spree through the drain tunnel, staying under water down stream, we get out when we hit the Netherlands, plea for asylum.”

Zerrissen scoffed. He can’t hold his wine. Wasted that portion of the bottle.

“I have no access to those kinds of materials. Steel for the hull? Lead and copper for batteries? How much oxygen for a 10-hour journey to the North Sea? No one east of the Spree can get that stuff, including the Soviets. Please. No pipe dreaming. Lives are at stake. Submarines? Listen to yourself.”

Nicolaus looked away, gazing instead out the smudged window at the demolition crews boarding up the condemned buildings, using picks and backhoes to excavate the length of Muntenstrasse to reclaim the precious copper wiring laid down by the Reich decades before, as well as lead water pipes, and excellent Krupp steel sewer pipes. They might have also realized that the pipes were large enough for defectors to crawl through and into the River Spree.

“You said ‘pipes’, right?” Nicolaus rubbed absently the back of his neck, feeling phantom dandelion seeds blowing against his skin.

A Cock or Two

Zerrissen was awakened by as shaft of afternoon sun glaring through the torn corner of foil over his window, having passed out in the chair, never making it to the bed. Nicolaus was gone, leaving him to wonder if the conversation was real or a hallucination, and whether he had committed to making a three-man river submarine. He felt the hangover worse than usual. Muntenstrasse was currently impassable, in worse condition than any car ever brought in for repair. He will not open the shop today.

We pretend to work while the State pretends to pay us he thought to himself

He rubbed his temples to massage away the headache and recalled the dreams the sunlight had interrupted. He dreamt of solving problems of buoyancy, pressure, hydrodynamic drag, thrust, and energy states. Problems of oxygen consumption, conversion, Boyles law, Newtonian laws of thermodynamics. Problems of trigonometric navigation.

This was the engineering he regretted leaving behind, scratching an intellectual itch that the repair of automobiles and appliances could not reach. Maybe going to the shop will help the hangover, and he could at least scratch out some numbers to prove to Nicolaus to give up on the idea of a river U-boat.

Zerrissen picked his way between trenches, through blocks, pulleys, and the rubble left by the road workmen laboring to extract anything that looked like a reclaimable metal. When he arrived at the barn-doors of the garage section of his shop, he was greeted by workmen carrying everything away. Zerrissen raised his hand in protest, but before he could utter a single word, one of the workmen handed Zerrissen an official looking document. It was an order from some bureaucrat at the Central Committee condemning the property, with a terse explanation that he can resume operations at a similar shop 100 meters up the street, where the shops contents were now being carried.

Arguably it all belonged to the State, so he could not object too vehemently. Last to be loaded was his usual workbench and his favorite tools. He picked the piston ashtray and one-station radio off the top as it paraded by. The men carrying the bench, stopped, looked at each other, but before they could scold him, Zerrissen opened a drawer and pulled out a vodka flask, setting it on the bench in the spot left by the ash tray he had just plucked. The movers thought this a suitable trade, and the workbench joined the rest of the items marching their way down the street.

He studied the paper as he walked in the direction of the new venue, one of the movers handed him a box of carburetor parts from his old shop, with an as-long-as-you’re-going-that-way scowl.

The accretion of junk in the old location was organized chaos twenty years in the making. Sorting through the new piles the workmen dumped unceremoniously here will take nearly as long.

He kicked through the objects in his new shop, some he had not seen in decades, until he saw two large unfamiliar cylinders, poised like obelisks, silhouetted against the high windows. As he approached, dwarfing him by a full meter high, he recognized them as erstwhile sewer pipes, standing now with more dignity than ever before laying sideways in their former employ, with an inner diameter of one meter and a wall thickness of one centimeter. Each one was encrusted in mud on the outside, and an accretion of black substance and a fragrance one expects from twenty years of draining sewage.

Zerrissen pulled off a note written in grease pencil by a neat hand on a piece of cardboard stuck to mud coating one of the pipes with a screwdriver.

“These are gifts from the German