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

in the entire movie, but there is a lot of thrusting.”

Five Stages Lost

Nicolaus carefully pulled back a flap of the butcher paper wrapping, the way one opened a stolen letter so the true recipient could not tell it had been opened. He revealed its contents to Zerrissen; a fiberboard carrier of the type used to protect 16 mm film reels.

Zerrissen read the label: “Sputnik 1/A7 4/10/57.”

“This film is four years old.”

“Correct. The Soviets are releasing some of their space program footage to counter the impression that the Americans are leading in the space race. No one outside of Star City has seen this yet. Except me. And soon, you.”

“Star City? Never heard of it.”

“By design. They have extreme paranoia that the Americans will compromise it or bomb it or… I don’t know. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

With piqued curiosity, Zerrissen followed Nicolaus into the theater, where they were immediately confronted with the expected odors of disinfectant, cigarettes, cigars souring in ashtrays, and old carpeting, sticky and matted, peaking from under discarded condom wrappers. The place was otherwise abandoned. Zerrissen waited while Nicolaus threaded the film into the proper kinescope in the projection room.

“Pretty lonely in here. I guess we’re between showings of ‘Bathhouse Boys.’”

“Not quite. I had the place closed for our private showing. We need to be out of here within the hour. This,” Nicolaus pointed to the reel of film, “must be back in its place in the archives before it’s logged as missing.”

After some cursing, a few motor sounds, and sending the film in the wrong direction and completely unthreading it, Nicolaus finally got the correct combination of switches. Lights in the theater were turned off, and the black and white image, grainy but distinguishable, appeared on the silver screen in silence.

In its center was a rocket standing vertically on its pad and shaped like an obelisk. It consisted of a tall, central cylinder, surrounded by four similar tubular structures strapped to the central cylinder’s sides. For all the claims that each superpower used stolen technology from the other, this rocket shared zero DNA with its American counterparts. The two space programs could not have been more distinctive.

“So that’s a Soviet booster?”

“Evidently. They call it the R7.”

“It does look familiar, doesn’t it?” marveled Zerrissen.

“You tell me.”

Zerrissen nodded in appreciation. Its scale was hard to estimate, but its proportions were, like anything that flew well, appropriate.

“It’s elegant. Almost beautiful.”

The rocket stood still, coated in army green with black markings, shimmering lightly behind heat waves even though it was October. This indicated that the camera had recorded the scene from far away through a telephoto lens. Apart from a smoky fog boiling from a vent towards the top of the rocket stack, there was no apparent human activity anywhere. A flock of starlings flew through the shimmer, then suddenly dove to the ground, causing those on the ground to rise in a pandemonium. Plumes of flame and smoke appeared at the base of the rocket assembly, and four mechanical arms, one for each side booster, rolled back like a flower opening in the sunlight. Then, the beast began to lift off the pad.

The camera tilted on its tripod as the rocket accelerated soundlessly through the cloudless sky, the lens zooming in to keep the rocket centered and recognizable. After several seconds, the object split into five parts: a central core and four boosters falling away. Nicolaus stopped the movie, freezing the image on the screen.

“Does this remind you of anything?” Nicolaus asked Zerrissen.

“Did it explode?”

Nicolaus laughed. “So you would think.” He advanced the film a few frames. A casual observer could clearly make out the central core continuing its skyward journey, the four boosters falling away in perfect symmetry.

“They call them the Korolev Star. These four boosters dropping away to send the central core into orbit.”

“The who star?”

“Some Russian guy named Korolev who’s in charge of their space program.”

“Like von Braun?”

“I guess so.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Do you remember how we thought we saw Wermut explode above Die Kuppel twenty years ago?”

“Vaguely, yes.”

“Was there a ‘Korolev Star’ amid the smoke and flame?”

Zerrissen dredged the images, marinaded in vodka and myriad other bad habits, from deep memory.

“Maybe, maybe not. What’s your point?”

“I don’t think Wermut exploded. I think we witnessed the stage separation.”

“Are you suggesting that Wermut worked?”

“Possibly. With Pyotr in it. Pyotr could be circling overhead, like a Sputnik, at this very moment. Who knows?”

“No. I loaded the self-destruct procedure reel into the ground sequencer myself.”

“Were you the only one who knew how to change or program the reels?”

Zerrissen thought about his staff of twenty years prior. The list was short. There was Mosner, Bebarfald, and Pardo, but they had all escaped the day before the launch. There was Markuse and Keyler, but they had both shot themselves, or had been shot by the SS guards ordered to prevent defections. And then there was Todtenhausen. Not only did he know how to change the reels, but also how to edit, develop, and prepare them.

“Todtenhausen. Todtenhausen knew how to work the sequencer. But where did Wermut impact? With its warhead, we would have heard about it. That kind of explosion does not just blend in with the wallpaper of a typical day’s V2 attacks. The whole world would have heard about it. The poisoning of the food chain, water supply, and farmland would still be occurring today, in a sense.”

“Farmland? I’m sorry, what kind of warhead was this?”

Zerrissen caught himself, sensing that he had revealed too much. Nothing had been verbalized about that warhead since it was installed while the Reich was still alive.

Deciding there was no point in keeping it a secret any longer, Zerrissen conceded. “Cesium and cobalt. Mostly cesium.”

“What on earth is cesium?”

“Think radioactive.”

“Like an atom bomb?”

“No, we never got that to work. More like a biological one.”

Nicolaus drew an audible breath, looked into Zerrissen’s eyes to confirm he was not joking, or waiting for him to take it back, or clarify, or explain that the