Apparatus 33: Dead Man Switch by Lawston Pettymore

Author:Lawston Pettymore [Pettymore, Lawston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-04-14T22:00:00+00:00

A Cock or Two

Zerrissen was awakened by as shaft of afternoon sun glaring through the torn corner of foil over his window, having passed out in the chair, never making it to the bed. Nicolaus was gone, leaving him to wonder if the conversation was real or a hallucination, and whether he had committed to making a three-man river submarine. He felt the hangover worse than usual. Muntenstrasse was currently impassable, in worse condition than any car ever brought in for repair. He will not open the shop today.

We pretend to work while the State pretends to pay us he thought to himself

He rubbed his temples to massage away the headache and recalled the dreams the sunlight had interrupted. He dreamt of solving problems of buoyancy, pressure, hydrodynamic drag, thrust, and energy states. Problems of oxygen consumption, conversion, Boyles law, Newtonian laws of thermodynamics. Problems of trigonometric navigation.

This was the engineering he regretted leaving behind, scratching an intellectual itch that the repair of automobiles and appliances could not reach. Maybe going to the shop will help the hangover, and he could at least scratch out some numbers to prove to Nicolaus to give up on the idea of a river U-boat.

Zerrissen picked his way between trenches, through blocks, pulleys, and the rubble left by the road workmen laboring to extract anything that looked like a reclaimable metal. When he arrived at the barn-doors of the garage section of his shop, he was greeted by workmen carrying everything away. Zerrissen raised his hand in protest, but before he could utter a single word, one of the workmen handed Zerrissen an official looking document. It was an order from some bureaucrat at the Central Committee condemning the property, with a terse explanation that he can resume operations at a similar shop 100 meters up the street, where the shops contents were now being carried.

Arguably it all belonged to the State, so he could not object too vehemently. Last to be loaded was his usual workbench and his favorite tools. He picked the piston ashtray and one-station radio off the top as it paraded by. The men carrying the bench, stopped, looked at each other, but before they could scold him, Zerrissen opened a drawer and pulled out a vodka flask, setting it on the bench in the spot left by the ash tray he had just plucked. The movers thought this a suitable trade, and the workbench joined the rest of the items marching their way down the street.

He studied the paper as he walked in the direction of the new venue, one of the movers handed him a box of carburetor parts from his old shop, with an as-long-as-you’re-going-that-way scowl.

The accretion of junk in the old location was organized chaos twenty years in the making. Sorting through the new piles the workmen dumped unceremoniously here will take nearly as long.

He kicked through the objects in his new shop, some he had not seen in decades, until he saw two large unfamiliar cylinders, poised like obelisks, silhouetted against the high windows.

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