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

biological weapon wouldn’t work either. Zerrissen returned the stare, expressionless. Unblinking. Silent.

Having confirmed the worst, Nicolaus held out his index finger in Zerrissen’s face.

“Tsk…” Deliberate pause. “Tsk…” Wagging the finger. “Tsk…You’ve been a bad boy…”

Zerrissen’s eyes looked away, the secret was out, but at least off his mind in the way that confessions are palliative for one’s soul, for those who actually have one.

Visibly disturbed, Nicolaus rewound the film, slowly placed it back into the cannister, and replaced the wrapping carefully. They parted company, Nicolaus not speaking, perhaps disgusted by Zerrissen, through the back door.

Zerrissen called after him, “Where are you going? The car’s this way.”

Nicolaus waved, avoiding his eyes, “What car?”

Zerrissen had to get back to his flat on foot or by bus. The stolen car was by now a liability that could lead to circumstances from which even Nicolaus could not extract himself. In any case, the automobile would become just another decaying artifact of the civilization abandoned in Kreuzberg.

The revelation that Wermut could be circling overhead opened the compartment in his mind where the repressed memory of Apparatus 33 lived. He could not avoid visualizing the transformation that Pyotr’s irradiated body must have gone through in that anaerobic, but highly septic petri dish of a spacecraft. His would be the fate of large swathes of the planet should the craft reenter the atmosphere, poisoning for centuries whatever territory onto which it was dumped.

Berthing a Submarine

Zerrissen covered the distance from the theater to his flat autonomically, oblivious to traffic and landmarks that decorated the path, especially useful when at his drunkest. He could not refrain from trying to understand how Wermut had not executed the self-destruct sequency he had mounted on the launch sequencer. Does any new rocket system succeed on its first test? Or even the fifth? When he finally emerged from the fugue, he found himself lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, so he backtracked to get back to terra cognita, where the reverie forced its way back into his mind.

If Todtenhausen had modified the self-destruct sequence for a launch protocol instead, could Wermut have achieved a stable orbit? Could the warhead survive re-entry? Could the Russian steppes, the breadbasket of Europe, or the American mid-west, be lost to generations of radiation?

The Soviets will sorely treat anyone associated with that multi-generational, ecological calamity of a planetary scale, especially if it was an enemy escapee from a battle scene where their soldiers were not just wiped out, but incinerated and vaporized. These and similar thoughts kept flooding his brain; there would be little point in trying to sleep tonight, so he turned around and took the bus back to the shop.

He saw from the corner that lights were on and Halina was playing music loud, dancing her dance of spirals and fluidic arm waving, which he had learned was her way of visualizing in three dimensions, in this case, their fish-shaped submarine. Exploring it, planning every joint, lever, and cable of it, for final fit and finish.

The anti-government protest song that had recently become popular on a prohibited station from the West that Halina managed to coax from the old radio.

“I stood on the bridge,

Alone beneath the listless cold of the sky.

Is the frozen river

Still breathing faintly

Through the throat of the reed…”

Buttercup marched in mocking goose steps from end to end on its perch while bobbing and weaving its head loops in time to the music, while Halina pretended to conduct the performance with a baton.

Her gift of eidetic imaging freed her ideas from the prison of pen and paper, of straight edges and orthogonality of a drafting board dictatorship. Starting with its purpose in life, the design told her what how it wanted to become incarnate, where to put linkages, springs, locks, and releases. In this trance, conflicts between moving parts, gears that did not mesh, levers that collide, rotors that did not generate sufficient torque, axles that would not rotate freely would expose themselves willingly as abscessed teeth, glowing in colors coded according to severity. She was free to engage individual components in rozmowa, sometimes ducking to get a better view from below. Rather than impose a solution, she invited the conflicts to express their needs.

This thorough visualization emphasized planning first before beginning any construction, in contrast to Zerrissen’s customary approach which was to start building, then continuously repair, revise, and maybe even start over.

Another difference just now occurring to Zerrissen - he always wore clothes when he was designing or building. Halina, at the moment at least, was completely naked, except for her leg brace.

For the first time, Zerrissen saw that Halina was actually rather pretty. Height-weight proportional, not a gram of body fat, curves in the right places, curvier, in fact than he would have guessed. Hair falling long around her shoulders. Clean, healthy skin, the only blemish being the palsied leg that was too thin, and the brace that encumbered it. Then he noticed her body had one curve too many. Halina was obviously a few months pregnant.

Halina yelped in surprise when she finally noticed Zerrissen standing there, silently admiring her performance. In a flutter of white, Buttercup flew from its perch onto her hand. The invisible floating, rotating apparition of a thousand parts surrounding her pirouettes, collapsed on itself, falling to the ground in an ectoplasmic pool only Halina could see.

They stood there staring at each other for moment. Zerrissen realized he was blushing, but she made no attempt to cover herself. Having been raised in The Bunker where all genders regardless of age showered together, she never learned inhibitions or modesty. She smiled and made the sign that Zerrissen had learned meant ‘Good Evening, Raynor.’

He returned the sign he hoped meant “Good evening, Halina”, which made her laugh.

“Please continue. I’m sorry I scared you” he said aloud.

Rather than resuming her dance, however, she turned down the radio, and made the sign that Raynor recognized was “Hello, Nicolaus.”

Turning around, he saw Nicolaus standing there, a bag of groceries in his arms.

“Raynor. Did