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

The first product of this American secret troika put human spies in orbit for two-week sojourns, an orbit as ideal for window peeping as it was for dropping surprise warheads onto any doorstep on the planet.

Benignly named “Manned Orbiting Laboratory,” or MOL, officers of the US Air Force under this program lived inside a two-man, cone-shaped capsule. Cut in its curved base was a circular hatch that allowed access to the empty upper stage of a rocket, modified into living quarters complete with galley, head, bunks, and gear one expects to find in an orbiting spy headquarters. This gear monitored radio traffic on any spectrum and observed ground activity through an extreme zoom lens in light both visible to the human eye and invisible.

An on-board dark room processed the fine grain, wide-format negatives that could be parachuted back to the Earth’s surface and caught by helicopter. External antennae in the shape of loops, hoops, and even barber poles harvested the dust bunnies of electronic telemetry for decoding and interpretation by on-board computers. At the end opposite the nose cone were the retrorockets, tickets for the MOL stack to ride the waterslide home when the consumables on board were exhausted.

The most tantalizing assignment of MOL was to maneuver close to satellites from other countries to understand their capabilities and develop strategies to intercept or modify these capabilities towards US interests, not unlike an emerald wasp with a cockroach, or a cuckoo insinuating its eggs into the nest of an unsuspecting bird species to avoid the personal expense of raising the egg to adulthood.

On this occasion, MOL operated in this latter capacity when it was asked to intercept an object on an Earthbound trajectory from the Moon and only recently detected by their garden of antennas. The mysterious object’s albedo was too low to image from afar, the most likely hypothesis was that the object was an errant satellite orbited by a competitive US space espionage program known to be less expensive and less risky known as Corona.

The pilots sidled up next to the object as ordered and described the object to ground controllers as clearly man made, of Earth origin, windowless, sleek and aerodynamic, closer in shape to an arrowhead, but more muscular, defying all known profiles of known satellites from the US or any other country, including those of the Corona program which more closely resembled a stack of concentric rings like a collapsible drinking cup. The MOL pilots and their ground control counterparts were highly intrigued by this discovery adding color to mission routines already saturated with near fatal levels of boredom.

What baffled them the most were the side markings in Germanic alphabet that, though scarred from the heat of launch and just pure age, was just readable as WERMUT II.

The MOL crew imaged the craft in all wavelengths and found it was very bright in the infrared, with a surprising level of gamma rays, which as high-energy beta-particle radiation, consistent with nuclear reactors emitting highly disruptive to molecules that made up human tissue. Structures on one end of the craft appeared to be retrorockets made for reentry but were obviated and useless now as the craft was tumbling slowly with no obvious way to stabilize itself.

The possibility that it was inhabited never crossed more than a few minds, though the only occupants would have had to be little green men, the operative word being little. By way of counterevidence, however, the craft was also emitting a steady oscillation at precisely 455 kHz, the world-wide standard for super-heterodyne frequencies for radio receivers, ruling out, for those who needed to dispel their first and most outrageous guesses to the contrary, it being of anything but earthly origin, while at the same time indicating that the object was configured to receive information from the ground, which was the wrong direction for most conventional satellites.

After a brief discussion of the evidence, the ranking officer on the MOL recommended contacting Werner von Braun, given the Germanic markings and one observer commenting that the craft closely resembled images of von Braun’s fabled A10 America Rocket.

The static-laced audio from the MOL received by the communications officer was heard and written down as “8:10” rather than “A10.” Thus, when passed along to von Braun, never far from the phone when the NSA called, he claimed to have no knowledge of any German craft named “8:10.”

Wanting to investigate further before anyone by the NSA competition sniffed their way into the mission, the Air Force controllers proposed that MOL stop the object’s tumble, and attempt to bring it home.

After some ground simulations and a practice run, the pilots devised to touch the object, physically but gently, with the spent rocket motor bell of the MOL, to absorb and transfer some of the rotational energy into the MOL stack, which they would then null out using its own reaction control thrusters. Should they grab the ancient retrorockets that were on one end of the mystery craft, risk of damage to either object would be minimized. The unneeded engine bell of the MOL could sustain damage without consequence as it would have been jettisoned before the MOL re-entered.

The two objects made contact two hundred kilometers over Indonesia, both heading north, exactly as Wermut’s on-board timer fired its retro motors. Had the MOL not stabilized the craft, the firing of these rockets would have sent it into a destructive spin, sending all components harmlessly into the Sun. However, the good intentions of MOL positioned Wermut retro motors perfectly for Earth re-entry instead.

The hypergolic fuels mixed as super heated plasma directly onto the engine section of the MOL, causing its own hypergolic retro-engines to ignite, blasting open the pressure hull containing the two pilots. The men were sent into space in their shirt sleeves, along with their films, backgammon board, deck of cards, and uneaten tubes of beef and soup, creating a brilliant flash in the sky.

Inside the warhead, protected from the heat of reentry, the