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

the remaining portion of the cigarette, the embers winking out one last spiral of smoke towards the wooden plank ceiling. My mind being at such chemically induced peace, I noticed for the first time the hand-carved and painted embellishments on the exposed joists of the roughhewn local timbers. Though coated in grease of cigarette smoke, I could make out German coats-of-arm carved in bas-relief, and the suspended chandeliers made from the horns of local sporting bock.

He poured a yellow-brown fluid from a metal cannister into his hand and rubbed it into my bare flesh.

“This is Drager’s cavity embalming fluid. Some people prefer Pfennig’s, but I say no. Drager’s is best. I can spot a mounting that used Pfennig’s from across the room. Drager’s is much better for preserving human skin. It’s German of course.”

He screwed the cap back on the cannister; my flesh had evidently received enough of the wondrous Drager’s.

“You’re probably wondering about your brother, and I must tell you that the numbers broadcasting from Wermut as it comes in range each orbit tell a remarkable story. You must be very proud of him, no doubt?”

“Hmm?” He patted something he had sewn up on me and smiled in satisfaction with himself.

I heard a shuffling sound and the scraping of furniture on the wooden floor in the background.

“Oh, look. Tea. Do you take schnapps? Oh, sorry. I’ve disconnected those muscles already. Sorry I can’t offer you any.”

Todtenhausen slurped some tea onto his tongue. Savored it. Set the cup down, admiring his work.

“See that? Almost finished. Taxidermy makes me hungry. Kathe, what are we having for supper tonight? Can we have your hearts-of-goose in wine sauce? We can use the wine Nicolaus brought. It’s only good for marinade anyway.”

He looked at me. “She makes an amazing hearts-of-goose.”

He stood up and, wiping his hands on a bloody apron around his waist, over a spotless lab coat, addressed his last words to me.

“So, while you are still able to hear, you must know that you were both being trained to fly the Wermut warhead to orbit. That is all. Nothing to do with polio which you didn’t even have in the first place.”

The grandfather clock ticked loudly. Not yet, I thought to myself. I needed to know about Pyotr.

“You see I had no choice, yes? We could not enlarge the cavity of the warhead enough for a mechanical autopilot, but I could modify a human pilot, no larger than a nine-year old, to fit the cavity.

The grandfather clock ticked away our lives.

“So, Kathe and I quickly modified your brother to lie on the upholstered pallet, which was the best position for the high g-forces of rocket flight. Like the ones in the training modules, but about half the size. You remember those?”

Any minute now.

“You see, as long as I am alive, I will keep Wermut in orbit. Kathe will recite numbers when the Wermut warhead is within range to disarm the automatic reentry sequence. But, and your people must know this, if I were to be killed or captured, Kathe will not broadcast those numbers, either from here or from a repeater in Czechoslovakia, and Wermut will engage the reentry sequence on its own.”

“Verstehen33?” That smug smile appeared again.

The grandfather clock chimed thirty minutes past the hour. Time now for Halina’s sculpture to tell its story, as they always do. The fireball consumed and converted the fine collection of stuffed animals and all other forms of organic flesh, including mine, Kathe’s, and Todtenhausen’s into constituent gasses, stripped of electrons, sending me to that place where me must all go someday, for a fraction of a second, a place between what you, as a living person, know now, and the rest of us must visit briefly for a fraction of a second, less time than it takes for a photon to travel from the grapes, glistening on it vine out the window, to my eye, but just long enough for me to recall all of these events that I share with you now.

You will ask whether there are others here. There are not. Neither Todtenhausen, nor Kathe, and neither is Pyotr. We evidently die alone. I imagine Todtenhausen and Kathe are dealing with their own transitions that Isaac Newton assured us was inescapable, that a living body at rest cannot become a dead one instantaneously. Pyotr died in his cramped capsule somewhere between the Earth and the Moon, the farthest any human had died from any other human in the history of humans, a record that stands to this day, and will hopefully never have to be exceeded.

Though the time for his 2nd Law to expire is brief, it is nonetheless long enough for me to marvel, the miniature sun formed and obliterated the blood that the Mossad might have wanted to someday collect and forensically understand what had happened here.

Enough time to understand the blast wave that followed a microsecond later sent windowpanes and doors thirty meters into the vineyard, setting some of the vines themselves on fire, and scattering the rental car in a thousand pieces across several acres. Its license plate impaled an oak tree all the way in the neighboring vineyard.

Metallic objects, including the transmitter and repeater devices, converted to gaseous metal and glass before they were sent into the sky to eventually cool and coalesce into metal and glass rain, similar to what drenched and entombed the Soviet trophy brigade into radioactive henges twenty years earlier.

Listening for, but the recitation of numbers of numbers no longer being broadcast, Pyotr was coming home.

Don’t ask me how I know these things. You will know for yourself soon enough.

Revelation

While Halina and Nicolaus executed their defections to the West, the attention of the remainder of the planet in general, and US taxpayers in particular, was riveted on the sudden blossoms of success by the US against the Soviet man-in-space projects. Adherents could not get enough space pornography, a distraction welcomed by the CIA, NSA, and the US Air Force not wanting any