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

survived? Had anyone else heard that freight train plunge its way to the Spree? And what about the Spree? What must it look like there? Zerrissen looked over at Halina, who was laying on the freezing sidewalk, curled up to Nicolaus, Buttercup whistling and objecting to its treatment with loud squawks.

“Someone give that damn bird its bourbon.” Zerrissen barked.

Nicolaus restore the calm with dark humor. “If we are all going to die in the submarine, at least we’ll arrive in Heaven well-leavened.”

Chuckling, then laughing, Nicolaus sat up. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Stay there. I’ll get you an Alka-Seltzer.”

Birthing a Submarine

Zerrissen’s increasing cynicism of life after hearing news that the Amerika Rakete may not have been scuttled, manifested in his continuous scatological references. Saugglocke had successfully opened the duct to the Spree, which he now openly referred to as an enema, and to Halina’s unnamed schiff, with frowning disapproval from the visibly pregnant Halina, as the Anal sonde, and sometimes the Freedom Suppository.

In his depressed regard for the otherwise wondrous work of mechanical fabrication, he sullenly clambered in and out of it to finish connecting the remaining feedback loops, gyroscopes, and power connections to the sequencer.

The austere interior consisted of three seats, two facing forward, the pilot’s seat facing the two passengers aft, salvaged from a junk automobile. Who would pilot the craft, between Nicolaus and Zerrissen, had not yet been discussed.

The control panel was fashioned from the same automobile’s dashboard, and its gauges had been repurposed for an autobahn of water. The large speedometer, one of two large dials in the center, had been scaled to show velocity in meters per hour. The large tachometer to its right was recalibrated to tail flips per minute. Together, these instruments would inform the Sequencer to compensate for the flow of the river at that moment either slowing or speeding progress. The clock was repurposed to track elapsed time required for the traditional deductive reason formula: distance equals velocity multiplied by time.

An automobile oil pressure gauge was adapted to indicate the remaining air pressure for the pneumatic controls. On the right of the pilot’s seat was a lever crafted from a parking brake that would couple or decouple the magnetic grappling mechanism that would release or retrieve the craft from the duct.

Only the automobile’s battery voltage meter kept its original purpose, reporting the energy remaining in the two car batteries that powered everything, including two lightbulbs, which were the only sources of illumination for the length of the craft. Zerrissen switched these bulbs on and saw for the first time some changes to the plain walls of the tube. The bulkheads had been covered in sound deadening foam covered with fabric, which had no practical effect other than reducing the unpleasant acoustic effect of talking passengers who otherwise sounded as if at the bottom of a stonewalled well.

Pillows with fringe and tassel covers matching the wall treatments resembling those one would throw around an artist’s loft in the tonier section of Berlin upholstered each seat. The instrument panel had been painted to compliment the pattern on the fabric with delicate pin stripe accents.

Zerrissen cast a glance at Nicolaus as he poked his head inside. Nicolaus interpreted the puzzled look on Zerrissen’s face to be critical of the unnecessary, purely cosmetic appointments.

“What can I say? We like to decorate.”

Crouching nearby, Halina listened to the conversation and its meaningful pauses, then she lifted her head from her hand and signed to Nicolaus.

Zerrissen waited for the translation.

“Halina says it’s time we give the schiff a name.”

Zerrissen scoffed. “How about Mayfly? It’s an aquatic insect.”

Nicolaus sneered, “Yes, with a lifetime of a few hours.”

“Exactly. And ironically tomorrow is May first, the day it’s named after.”

There was more silence. Giving it a name made it alive. A living thing that could kill them all or save them from being killed. Water dripping from the duct roof echoed the sounds of a cave forming stalactites. Each one of them was revisiting their escape through their respective time filters of twenty years.

Halina spelled out a short word to Nicolaus, who pronounced for Zerrissen’s benefit. “NIX? You mean Latin for ‘nien,’ nothing, or ‘cancel,’ or the Naiad river nymph in the Strauss opera?”

Thinking for a moment, Halina nodded “yes” to all three options, then signed a long sentence for Nicolaus to translate.

“She is quoting a lyric from the protest song. I think she’s saying it represents our own ‘journey on the frozen river, breathing through the throat of the reed.’”

Zerrissen glanced ruefully at the erstwhile sewer pipe hammered into more of an oddly shaped black fish than any kind of reed and suggested an alternative protest.

“If it’s a protest, I would have thought Mittlefinger30, but Naiad?”

Nicolaus explained. “A magic sea creature of Polish folklore, half fish, half beautiful female, a Naiad, with the power to become invisible. A nymph of the River.”

Ever the cynic, Zerrissen asked her “The River Styx or the River Spree?”

Nicolaus provided the answer “I guess it depends on which direction you’re going. Please teach your sequencer the correct one.”

Zerrissen waved his hand in dismissal, conceding what Halina wants, Halina gets.

“So be it. NIX it is.”

Halina clapped and began searching for a can of paint and a brush. Nicolaus translated to Zerrissen “She’s going to paint NIX on her bow.”

“Oh great. So it’s also female now.”

Name Dropping

While Zerrissen was performing final center-of-mass and center-of-pressure calculations, the machine on the 14th Floor of Stasi headquarters was doing some computations of its own. Using one ruse or another, Nicolaus saw a second name card drop into the person-of-interest sorting bin. Dismayed, though not surprised, Nicolaus read the name on the card, Raynor Zerrissen, complete with the workshop address, his official assignment by the Central Committee. Authorities would eventually go there for an initial interview.

Nicolaus could confuse and obfuscate locating Zerrissen for a short time, but a stopwatch on Zerrissen’s inevitable incarceration had been started. Whether it would time out first or the stopwatch already running for Halina’s