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

spirit level, not as good as a theodolite, but good enough, to calibrate the real world to the representation on the plat map. Satisfied with his measurements, Zerrissen measured and spray-painted parallel lines on the ground where he calculated the sides of the particular duct passing under this building should be.

Nicolaus took the first shift of excavation, dug a one-meter diameter hole through the densely packed earthen floor down to 30 centimeters before hitting concrete slab.

He hopped out of the hole, handed the shovel to Zerrissen.

“There’s your duct.”

“I like how it’s my duct now.”

Halina, back from class, sidled up beside Nicolaus, Buttercup on her head bobbing up and down in time to the music on the radio, its shift at the old shop finished for the day.

Nicolaus, Halina, and the bird stared silently down at the slab, like dogs who actually caught the car. The abstract idea of following an enclosed duct to the sea in a pipe the only breathable air being what they brought with them, and with no chance to escape should they get stuck, began to dissolve the mood of anticipation a bit.

Zerrissen contemplated the best place to punch through the concrete top of the duct, calculating that if the duct were flooded, the trapped water in the several hundred meters of the duct uphill of them would come rushing out, flooding the shop, but more conspicuously, the street outside.

With a nod from Nicolaus, Zerrissen heaved the pickaxe into the Reich era concrete slab. A single blow penetrated, boring a small hole through which a fountain of water promptly shot out, a dark geyser smelling of fetid organic material, rose two meters into the air, ejected the pickaxe out of his hand, soaking everyone and everything before it hit the ground.

The waterspout collapsed on itself with a final splash, leaving the pool on the floor to find a new path back to the Spree and the North Atlantic where it would be free from the confines of the Reich era drainage duct. What remained in the subterranean vault was a shimmering pool of black and greenish cave water, dripping like stalactites.

The three of them stared inside, seeing only the surface of the still water and their reflections staring back.

Dripping muddy water only a microbe could love, Zerrissen wiped his mouth, and sputtered “I guess I was should have tried a bit further uphill.”

“Are we not going to talk about how it smells?”

After recovering from shock, Buttercup, doused in the same fluids, did the talking for them.

The next morning, cleaned up with dry clothes, Zerrissen threw together pieces of scrap and lengths of metal L-brackets into a make-shift drafting table with sliding straight edges. Here he would show Nicolaus pictorially how ridiculous the U-boat idea of his was. Zerrissen picked up a pencil, and perhaps because of the hard work and excitement the day before, or the vodka already consumed for breakfast, laid his head down and promptly fell asleep.

When a passing lorry woke him perhaps 30 minutes later, he opened his eyes a crack to ascertain where he was, only to see Buttercup standing on the drafting table two centimeters from his face, staring silently into his eyes, not blinking or moving.

Almost afraid to move, the tension was relieved when Nicolaus emerged from the shadows, as was their habit.

“I see you two are getting along.”

Buttercup flew over and landed on Halina’s head. She went about her work, Buttercup talking nicely “What are you doing? It’s OK. I love you. Do you love me?”

Zerrissen, never failing to be surprised by Halina’s comfort on this planet, turned to Nicolaus, saying what had been on his mind since their water-soaked episode the day before.

“Tell me you’re not still thinking about this stupid U-boat idea.”

“That’s almost all I have been thinking about, actually.”

“I can list a hundred reasons why it won’t work. Please think of another way to get us all killed.”

Nicolaus swallowed his annoyance, took a moment, and decided to manage Zerrissen’s lack of faith.

“Start at the beginning. The first reason. What’s at the top of your list? Then we’ll tackle the other ninety-nine.”

Frustrated, Zerrissen looked to Halina as an ally to inject some common sense into this extravagant death trap project, but she was already distracted, picking through junk.

He turned back to Nicolaus, “Propulsion. How do you propose the thing will move?”

“Don’t ask me, Raynor. You’re the engineer. How will you solve your propulsion problem? Don’t boats use propellers or something?”

It was now his propulsion problem, rankled Zerrissen. This was not his propulsion problem, he thought. It was theirs.

Brushing the petulance aside, Nicolaus pointed to objects in the shop, nearly all of them propellers of some sort for all kinds of different machines.

“What about an electric motor?” he said pointing to one wall, “You have an entire cabinet full of them.”

“Electric motors require batteries. Batteries create sulfuric acid. Sulfuric in gas form eats membranes in the lungs, nose, and eyes. We’ll be in this thing for hours. Are you sure you’re not working for Todtenhausen?”

“Then change the destination. We don’t need to make the North Sea. We just need to cross over to the Spree riverbank on the West side. The boat ramp in the Tiergarten is only a couple of kilometers downstream. We’ll only be in the U-boat for a few minutes, an hour at most. Problem solved. Next problem on your list.”

“Propeller shaft. Rather than tell you, I’ll show you.”

Zerrissen grabbed a discarded drive shaft from a door raising mechanism and punched a hole in an oil can of the approximate diameter, filled the gap between the drive shaft and the hole with rags, plunged the entire assembly into the vat of water used to find punctures in inner tubes. A small stream of bubbles roiled to the surface.

“There’s no way to keep water, even at a depth of one or two meters, from leaking around anything that protrudes through the hull. Like the drive shaft, or the tie rods that for steering, or for depth