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

Czechoslovakia. Rain was forecast for the next two days. The silence was broken by Halina, returning from school with Buttercup on her head, both listening to the tail end of the current discussion. She signed a question to Nicolaus. Zerrissen looked over to Nicolaus for the translation.

“She wants to know how submarines fire their torpedoes.”

Zerrissen looked at her smiling, but a bit frustrated. I brought that up as a joke. There will not be any torpedoes.”

“I think…” Nicolaus started as Halina repeated the question, “she just wants to know how torpedoes are fired.”

Zerrissen sighed. “Air pressure. Compressed air. A lot of it. The duct is two thousand cubic meters. That’s more than we have in my air compressor over there, or a hundred others.”

There was more thoughtful silence, followed by more signing between Halina and Nicolaus. It was a furious conversation, Nicolaus speaking his part in Polish, very little of which Zerrissen could follow.

Finally, Nicolaus summarized the conversation to Zerrissen.

“Raynor, Halina was given a toy submarine by the Red Cross. It had a chamber to fill with baking powder that caused the toy to rise and fall when placed in water. Have you ever seen this toy?”

Zerrissen shrugged “Maybe. What’s her point?”

“She’s asking if the air pressure could be generated chemically.”

“With baking powder?”

“Or any chemical, if there’s something better.”

Zerrissen glanced at the opening. They had covered it using a lid fashioned from a manhole cover, purloined from the street outside his old workshop location, making the odor bearable.

“Well, sodium bicarbonate along with some type of reagent could. With an expansion ratio of, say, 10,000:1, then…”

“Give me a shopping list. I want names and quantities. I’ll see what I can do.”

The next morning, two 200-liter barrels rested in front of the workshop. One was simply labeled “VINEGAR.”

The other barrel, compliments of the poorly guarded loading dock behind the East Berlin company that invented aspirin the previous century, was labeled:

“ALKA-SELTZER”

Matinee

The paper calendar on Zerrissen’s shop wall flipped from an illustration of a girl sitting on a bale of hay with pumpkins by her feet, wearing only short shorts, her arms crossed strategically across bare bosoms flipped to “October 1966,” to the same girl wearing a feather in her hair and only a breechcloth, the month Americans celebrate their annual meal of thanks with native Americans, whom they promptly killed and whose land was subsequently appropriated.

Zerrissen and Halina had become a welding and assembling team over the weeks, with Halina providing inspiration for the final product, and Zerrissen providing practical solutions to mechanical problems, such as levers that collided with tie bars, or how to make a rotating shaft turn a corner. The schiff was weathered in, was watertight, and now weighed over four thousand kilograms, as heavy as a luxury automobile.

Zerrissen was fine tuning his sequencer, some of the solenoids being stubborn and not activating before tiny devices died, they were maddeningly easy to destroy with the slightest excess of either current or voltage. Nicolaus’ face drained white every time he heard the faint pop followed by a delicate curl of smoke. Zerrissen’s largess of semiconductors was down to three of the power type, and four of the switching type, which was still the largest cache of transistors outside of Moscow.

Halina continued dressing weld joints and trimming parts that were not sliding smoothly, he walked the familiar route back to his apartment, a route that took him to his tobacconist.

Zerrissen needed a break. He walked out of the shop to a tobacconist where he picked up a carton of French cigarettes, the Russian versions being unsmokable, a newspaper, and, of course, a bottle of vodka. On the return walk to the shop, a blue automobile of Czech origin, with a green passenger door, pulled up and matched his stride. Through the open window, he could see Nicolaus at the wheel.

“Get in.”

Confused by the sight of Nicolaus in such a rattletrap piece of junk, and by the urgency of his order, Zerrissen concluded that giving orders was probably just another day at the office for Nicolaus, and that he was probably never disobeyed. Nicolaus leaned over, not much of a stretch in the tiny two-door machine and pushed the passenger door open.

“Where are we going?” Zerrissen asked as Nicolaus pulled into traffic.

“We’re going to see a movie.”

“I am not interested in movies. Take me back to the shop or buy me a drink.”

“Oh, I think you’ll be interested in this one. There are cigarettes in the glove box if you want some.”

“You don’t smoke, why do you have cigarettes in your glove box?”

“Because this isn’t my car.”

“Is it the Embassy’s?”

“Oh, hell no. This piece of shit? The Embassy livery is stocked with nice cars. Even some from America. I stole this one from the Stasi evidence garage on Friedrichstrasse.”

Nicolaus pulled the stolen two-door into an alley, its two-stroke engine roaring and belching white smoke from one pipe, black smoke from another, mustering enough horsepower to cross another street. Turning to a side street, Nicolaus pulled over to the curb and put the engine out of its misery.

Scanning the sketchy neighborhood, Zerrissen saw that they were in front of an old, Orpheum theater that had long since deteriorated with the fall of the Reich, and of this district in specific, known as Kreuzberg. The December skies were as sullen and gray as the grime accumulating on the facades of the pre-war structures. The repairs from the bombing had halted for the lack of building supplies.

He looked up at the marquee to see what cinematic masterpiece they had traveled across town to see. “Bathhouse Boys.”

“Um, I like art films, but I’m thinking ‘Bathhouse Boys’ will not get my favorable review.”

“It wouldn’t. I’ve seen it. Save your Deutsch marks for ‘Canterbury Tail.’ Now there’s some quality art.”

From the backseat, Nicolaus produced a flat square package, the size of a small pizza, wrapped in butcher paper and secured with twine.

“I brought my own art film. Specially selected from the Embassy archives. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single cock