Maxwell's Demon

A story by Keith Croes

"Shientists are a funny breed."

Bill Onriksen wasn't drunk. If he were, the yellow disk set into the table in front of him would have been blinking. It's just that the team leader hadn't spoken for more than two hours. He had been the last to arrive at this impromptu meeting in the company cafeteria, and then had sat there, listening to the nimble minds around him engage in what sounded to him like silly, pie-eyed chatter, like peasants going on about the meteorite that had flattened one of the village huts. And now he was committed to making his point with this strange new larynx. The table immediately grew quiet.

"Ah-hem," he gargled. "Scientists, that is. As children it takes them two or three seconds after coming to an understanding of language to formulate the concept that nothing is impossible. But put them face to face with the impossible and out pops the Neander... the Neander... the Neanderthal."

The laughter came in a pleasant wave around the table.

He was nonplussed. "Why do you think the company requires every team to have an artist? Artists go to bed with the impossible. That's where they live--or at least camp out occasionally. They pack their bags and hike out to the chasm once a week or so, pitch a tent, light a fire, and listen to the cries of everything that never was. The good ones, anyway. And Andrew is good. That's why he's with the company."

Andrew Bowers was the sole member of the team absent from the gathering. The events of that afternoon had precluded his invitation. That afternoon, with the rest of them standing around holding their teeth, Andrew had displayed a small rectangular box. About the size of a breadbox.

"So we test it?" Raleigh Briggs had requested that a shot of tequila accompany each cup of beer. As he spoke the disk in front of him began a dull yellow blinking. He splashed back the remainder of the tequila.

"Say goodnight, Raleigh," someone said.

Bill raised an open palm. "Of course. We can test it any way we want. I'll take your recommendations tomorrow morning. Every friggin' test you want. Right-side up, upside down. We'll figure it out. Right Raleigh?"

He stood, placing his hand on Raleigh's shoulder, and the others stood also. "No, no. You guys don't have to leave." He leaned over and whispered in Raleigh's ear. "You okay?"

"No." Raleigh shook his gladiator's head over the table, a drunken Hercules with a granite block of wavy black hair and dark beard. "Bowers has the devil in there," he mumbled.

The others were breaking up, heading out of the cafeteria.

Bill hooked a hand under Raleigh's muscular arm. "We'll test it, Briggs. We'll find out what's going on. Let's get out of here."

Bill rolled around in his bunk, aware that his naked body squirmed only several meters from the outer skin of the station. All the technology, all the science could only dress it up a bit. Directly beneath his sopping pillow was the sucking blackness--the chasm of space. In his dreams he heard its wail and knew it was impossible, knew that the void was noiseless, that he heard only his dreams. But he had dreamed the sound before.

It was in the painting. Bowers was partial to oils for his larger works, and the tart, rich smell had pervaded one end of the lab for the last three weeks. Bowers worked on it every morning, and they had watched it go up--the molybdenum frame, the tight white canvas and gesso, and then the effortless impertinence of the broad swipes. They had watched as they always watched, skeptical and privately amazed. The creature grew from the most whimsical of brush strokes, one seemingly random filament after another providing exactly the right texture and color and ominous dimension to the whole. And if the thing could be a sound, Bill tossed and dreamed, it would be the wail of space.

Others had their own ideas, perhaps, about the creature that came to life upon the white canvas at one end of the lab. But none of them had noticed Bowers back in the metal shop each afternoon, cutting and welding while the beast was born.

Until he gathered them together with a ceremonious baritone.

He was a husky, handsome man. His rough hand bore an orangish smudge; his finger pointed at a plain box interrupted only by a pressure gauge protruding from one end.

"There are two chambers," he said. "Between the two chambers is a partition with a hole large enough to let molecules through. Oxygen, nitrogen and so forth. Air." He grinned.

The hand raised and thumbed over his shoulder toward the painting behind him. "This came first, I guess. Maxwell's Demon, I call it." Satan battling a wave of spheres spewing from the darkness on the right side of the canvas.

The pressure gauge poking out of one end of the box. An Ourtsyun pressure gauge reading absolute vacuum.

Satan was the light, Bill dreamed. Let there be light.

And the black on the right of the painting was the blackest black.

Bowers had invented this pigment. It was some new color that absorbed all colors, all light. That would explain it.

He smelled the steely, bad-breath smell of oils.

Ed, Mary, Stan, Raleigh, and Alf. And he. And the fresh paint on the canvas at one end of the lab. They stood under the fluorescent lights and looked at the Ourtsyun. One-half of the breadbox, a little less than two liters, contained zero molecules. Zero. In a box with no moving parts. Entropy reversed. History. Impossibility.

What the fuck's in there?

In his dream Bill saw it, the wings beating noiselessly.

Andrew sat at the folding table in front of his sketch pad, doodling, as they passed the box around, one to the other.

"What was that you called it?" Mary asked.

"Invasive art." Andrew grinned into thoughtfulness. "Ah, hell," he said suddenly. "Call it what you want. It's based on Maxwell's drawings--a box that was never built. It was drawn only to make a theoretical point, so far as I know."

"Which was...?" Stan took the box from Mary.

"If a demon were stationed between two airtight chambers at a one-way door large enough to allow the passage of molecules into one of the chambers, with the assignment of opening the door to molecules on the other side when their random motion brought them in contact with the door, that eventually you'd get--" He shrugged. "--what we got. All the molecules in one chamber."

Ed, the assistant team leader, took the box from Stan.

"And what we got is a real challenge to our field-compression equipment," he said.

"It may come to that." Bill had taken a seat at the other end of the folding table from Andrew.

Ed handed the box to Alf, a short, slight man with an un-self-consciously glowing pate.

"Yeah, well, I'll be right behind Raleigh," Alf said.

Bill spun a compupad on the smooth surface of the table, his hand astride the tablet like an anxious spider. "James Maxwell, mid-19th century, used the demon as a device to demonstrate the reversal of entropy--a system which produced more energy than it used. It was and is and always will be a theoretical concept."

Raleigh waved off the box. "I've seen it," he said, then changed his mind and took it from Alf. "Did you make a one-way door in this?"

"Good question," Bill said. Fingers like legs, the compupad spinning with a hissing sound.

Andrew shook his head. "If you're going to have a demon, why not have him fast enough and...formidable enough to keep molecules from passing through an open hole all by himself. Hell, he could do it with one hand if he wanted--if I wanted."

The box slipped from Raleigh's grip and fell loudly to the table.

"Hey, it's my creation," Andrew said, gesturing broadly and grinning. "It is what I want it to be."

Behind them the painting loomed, the outer, lighter coats sticky.

"Sit. Everybody sit." Hissing, the compupad spun, like a spider spinning. "We'll find out what it is."

They did what they could with the equipment in the lab, then carried the box in a gym bag around the station--to nucleonics, electron tomography and gamma resonance. By the end of the day they had determined that it consisted of two airtight chambers--one empty and one not--separated by a hole.

They were back at the folding table under the tart, sticky painting. Stan stood, a tall, gangly tower of long bones. "Which side is he on?" he asked.

"Of the box? He's on the side with the molecules, defending the hole--standing in front of it." Andrew jabbed impatiently toward the painting.

"How do we get in?" Mary asked.

"We laser drill into the vacuum side and come in with the entering molecules," said Raleigh.

Ed shook his head. "No. With outside air streaming into the vacuum side, the other chamber could explode. We've got to think that the thing will try to pack all the air in the station into that one chamber, given the chance." He keyed a compupad. "The air in this room could be enough to blow it, depending on how good Andrew can weld. We should drill into the pressurized side and let it empty."

"Look--" Bill was standing, and he placed his hand on the box and leaned on it, relaxed. "We all know the risks of field compression. None of you has to do this."

His eyes traveled from one team member to the next, getting acknowledgement.

"Are we gonna be armed?" Raleigh asked.

Bill made a face. "No. We laser drill through the pressurized side at zero Gs in vacuum, center station," he said, looking at Ed. "That okay?"

Ed nodded.

"Unless somebody interferes. You know, we're not alone in this station no matter how it seems sometimes." He paused. "I've got a daily report to make."

No one spoke.

"We'll need the field compressor about ten hundred hours tomorrow."

"Oh?"

Bill expected the arched eyebrow and still his response was slower than it should have been. The only things that turn out right are the things you don't plan, and even then you take your chances, he thought.

"We've got an anomaly we'd like to check out. It's pretty extraordinary, really."

"For 18 million dollars a minute, it ought to be."

"Then again, it might be nothing. Wouldn't be the first time."

There. Unplanned and perfect.

Philip Faust, the station executive officer, was reddish on the monitor. Bill leaned forward and touched the tint control at the bottom of the screen.

"What's the matter?"

"Color."

"Oh." The eyebrow again. "Exactly what kind of anomaly?"

"Phil, I have no fucking idea. Bowers was messing around in the metal shop and came up with a gadget that has us all baffled. We've got to go in. It's all in my report."

The station exec was greenish.

"Okay." The face transmuted to a passable fleshtone. "Remember, this is a defense plant. We're not looking to supplement someone's nightclub act. Get in, get what you need, and get out, okay?"

"Sure. Thanks."

The image disappeared with a frown and Bill sat for a moment before calling up Andrew Bowers' psychic scans. The artist had only moderately high telekinetic abilities, and average everything else. But something about Faust's fading frown kept Bill awake most of the night.

The seven hovered in the hub at center station, suited up and floating in the cylindrical room. The box was secured to a platform mounted in front of a laser drill. Bill had a gloved hand around the pressure gauge.

"Hey!" The other six reached for the volume controls on their helmets.

"Geeze, Bill," someone said.

"Ouch!" That was Mary, pissed.

"Ed, this fucker's reading fourteen hundred millimeters of mercury. Has anyone looked at this gauge this morning?" Using his free hand to help turn his helmet, Bill looked around, up, over, down, behind at the floating figures. "How much air would've been in the other side of the box, Ed?"

"'Bout that much, boss."

"Well, it's reversed. We've got reversal here. The side that was vacuum is now pressurized."

They hovered. Bill hung perpendicularly over the gauge, holding it in his palm. Again with his left hand, he drew the nozzle of the laser drill over until it was pointed at the other chamber of the box, the side with the pressure gauge, the side that was now full of madly bouncing molecules.

"Thing must've been bored."

"Shut up, Raleigh. Ed, is the compressor ready?"

"Hold it."

The crackling control frequency came up in their earphones, and they all recognized Philip Faust's band-saw voice.

"After analyzing yesterday's report, I've decided that this will be an armed mission. Please make appropriate mass changes to the field compressor settings--seven hundred and two kilos, thank you. Weapons are entering through lock two."

"Yeah!"

"Shut up, Raleigh. Ed, make the adjustment, please."

Bill watched the hatch open and the netted weapons drift in on a tether. Two figures waved from the lock. Stan was closest. "Get 'em Stan," he said, "and hand 'em out." Looking down, Bill pressed the square orange key that activated the laser. An invisible infrared beam several angstroms wide penetrated the pressurized chamber of the box, and the molecules began their soundless exit. Bill plucked a fluorescent marker from the magnetized platform and drew a circle on the side of the box around the hole.

"What the--" Mary was holding out the butt of a tesla rifle, an olive-drab tube two meters long and standard issue for ground troops in Planetary Advance Forces. Bill had invented it. "Hey, Phil, we don't need--" He saw the others floating around him, bristling with barrels. "Just give me a hand weapon. Goddamn it!"

"I've finished the new settings," Ed said.

"Seven hundred and two kilos, thank you," came the grating voice. Bill snatched the rifle from Mary and snapped it to two clasps along his right leg.

"Follow the leader." They drew together at the center of the cylindrical room, Alf relinquishing the control bar of the tugalong to Bill. One after another they attached themselves to the nylon strap reeling out of the small craft. "Think back to your last weapons certification, folks, and try not to fry your friends. Let's go, Ed. Intercoms off."

Field compression caused a momentary leap in blood pressure that could pop a weak vessel, and so was preceded by an imperceptible cardiovascular scan. One, two seconds, and then a feeling that Bill thought would be akin to finding yourself in the belly of a star--imploding under the grip of a white-hot nuclear vice. Some people would see spots before their eyes for a week from the retinal capillary leakage.

Everybody screamed.

Light streamed as through water. The box appeared miles away. Flicking on his intercom, Bill aimed the tugalong and brought it to full speed in several seconds, then shut the single rocket down and listened to the others come on channel.

"Mary?"

"Love it."

"Stan?"

"Uh-huh."

"Raleigh?"

"Okay."

"Alf?"

"I'm right behind Raleigh."

"Andrew?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"Ed?"

"Looks good from here, boss."

Bill slowed the tugalong and the team whipped around behind him until they hung before the huge fluorescent circle.

"Quite a piece of work, Andrew," he said.

"It's a fucking megalith. Your circle's not bad, either."

"Here goes." Holding the control bar and twisting his wrists, Bill brought the nose of the tugalong in line with the center of the circle. "Look," he said, "I don't think weapons are necessary. But as long as we got 'em, get 'em ready. And, uh, lights everybody."

The hole was a tunnel that seemed about a kilometer long, its sides gaudy with the crystalline latticework of molten metal. With one or two course-correcting bursts, they drifted through in a loose line. Gas molecules continued to rush out in the opposite direction, bouncing like tumbleweed off the dense mass of their bodies. Soon they were suspended in blackness.

"We're through," Bill said. He twisted the tugalong down and to his left. "Let's go say hello."

"Fuck," Raleigh breathed. The curse trembled in their helmets.

With his left hand holding the control bar, Bill unsnapped the tesla rifle on his right leg and brought it forward. Light danced. It came streaming from two headlights on the tugalong, two shoulder lights on each suit and a single headlamp on each helmet. Together, the team cast a shimmering blob on the metal partition between the two chambers, which they could barely see.

"Andrew, the hole you made is near the floor, isn't it?" Bill said.

"Yeah. Yeah. Down."

The blob of light turned to separate dancing spots as the tugalong changed direction, then congealed where the center partition met the bottom of the box as the group fell in line. The intersection between partition and floor was still far away, dark as if under water. Shadowless molecular fuzzballs traveled in and out of their vision and bounced imperceptibly off them. Bill found the safety on his tesla rifle.

He saw the hole.

"What the fuck is that?" It was Raleigh. Then Andrew's voice came on in their helmets.

"Come, come," he said with faltering timbre. "So much ferocity. I'm down a little."

In order to slow and stop in the zero gravity, Bill had to twist the tugalong around until it pointed in the opposite direction. His neck craned around to watch the trailing team behind him. They came to a stop.

"Bowers?" he said.

"Remarkable to make a sound--for you to react to my sound."

"Release." Bill freed the clasp on the tugalong's towline. He was drifting down with the others, caught in the gravity of their magnetic boots' attraction to the floor of the metal box. In the streaming light he watched them fall, and saw their lights on the man near the hole. Once down he shouldered forward, pushing them aside. "Behind me. Behind me." He saw the man blinking.

"The creation meets its creator." It was almost Andrew's voice on the intercom. The man's lips were moving in sync with almost-Andrew's voice in their helmets. For a split second Bill saw the rotting cadaver head of Frankenstein, the spikes through the neck, the way he imagined the monster when he first read the book.

"Power up!" he bellowed. The red dot in front of the tesla rifle's sights streamed in waves that were nearly countable--four or five, maybe. Bill looked around at the dark visor of Andrew's helmet. "Andrew, what the fuck is going on?"

"For the moment Andrew lets me speak through him. And he can really speak, eh?"

The man was leaning against the wall near a hole that came only to his knees, and the man himself was short and paunchy. The voice in their helmets was Andrew's or something like it. Bill thought of the night before, of his voice made strange by his extended silence at the table.

"Oh, he can go up!" The voice climbed the scale. "And he can go down!" Descending notes, the deepest of which--"dowwwnnn!"--resounded like a pipe organ in their helmets. "And I can hear it in his ears! Oh my!"

With the tesla rifle tight to his side, Bill rammed Raleigh to the right and shoved Mary to the left. "Spread out!" he yelled.

Andrew lagged behind, his suit lights weaving crazily on the wall. The rest were homing in on the little man, taking careful, sticky steps on the magnetized floor.

"Such ferocity."

They formed a semicircle around him. Mary, Alf, and Ed waggled excimer rifles, Raleigh and Bill brandished the threatening tesla rifles, and Stan carried a 347-AK pulse mortar in one hand and a Rourke autopistol in the other. Alf had a ruby-tube blinder slung on his shoulder, and Stan and Raleigh each wore a blinking chest pack of shrap rockets. For one moment they became aware of each other and simultaneously felt the tug of a smile, a joint expression of bemused incredulity.

The man looked to be about 35. He wore a gray suit, rumpled, and a pink tie with black dots. He blinked in the waves of light.

"This is Mars Station, United Research Corporation," Bill said, and you must be the new station accountant. "Who are you?"

The man peered around, displaying a high, amiable hairline.

"The wail of space," he said.

A molecule shot into the group and the man lashed out, kicking it expertly off into the darkness. Andrew's lights were searching wildly up and down the wall.

"You've let them all out, haven't you. After all the trouble I went through! First one side, then the other. Haven't missed one yet, you know."

Bill fought against the suit to look back over his shoulder. "Andrew, are you okay?"

"He's fine! In good voice! Couldn't be better!"

"Who are you?" Bill repeated.

"Wait!"

The man fell to the floor in front of the hole and his head elongated, then his body, and he slithered through and was gone.

"Christ--" It was Raleigh.

Just as suddenly he reappeared, squirming out, expanding and rising to his feet. "None over there either! You've made another hole! Of course, you've made another hole! Where is it?"

The blue bolt of a tesla rifle lashed out, just missing the man's head and hitting the wall behind him. Metallic atoms glowed red in tiny patches like pixels on a video monitor, expanding red then blue then blue-white, heat conquering new territories in quantum leaps from atom to atom.

"Raleigh!"

The beam snapped off.

The group had fallen back as a unit, squatting. They watched the coherent, lingering waver of the tesla weapon's discharge and listened to each other's breathing. Raleigh huffed in convulsive little gasps.

"Hold your fucking fire, Raleigh. I mean it," Bill said, then lifted his own weapon, nestling the butt into his shoulder. "Last chance, fella. No more warning shots. Who the fuck are you?"

"Oh. Well--" His hands wrung, the white cuffs of his shirt extending a proper distance from the sleeves of the gray suit. "I'm only here to help. I'm--" He looked puzzled for a second, then satisfied. "Yes. I'm a device. Are we going to have a conversation?"

Bill recalled the SEO's arched eyebrow and felt a fleeting gratitude that no one could monitor their radio transmissions during compression. "Yes. But it's going to be a short one. Can I touch you?"

The man extended his arm without hesitation. Bill stepped forward and slapped the man's hand. Before he could speak, Mary asked, "What gives you physicality?"

"Andrew sculpts. Andrew paints. All of Andrew's work has physical structure. I'm a minor work, size-wise."

"Why don't you look like the devil?"Alf said.

The man regarded himself. "I could use a change of clothes," he said, and then with a defiant, outthrust chin, "Why don't you look like scientists?"

"Are you alive?" It was Ed.

"As alive as...hmm, you don't read much. What's this? Ah, Huck Finn."

They saw it simultaneously, a tawny, naked boy sitting with crossed legs on a raft of lashed logs, holding one foot to his mouth and chewing hungrily on a toenail. Then it was gone.

"Yes, as alive as Huck Finn."

Bill studied the soundless lips and white, poreless skin in the streaming light. The man appeared to be one solid entity, like a figure carved from soap. The suit and tie were part of him. A cartoon character.

"Look at him," he blurted. "He could be anything."

"I'll show you what I am."

The lights died, all the lights, even the tiny power lights on the weapons, and they stood alone in the thick blackness with nothing but the sound of their shifting suits and breathing in their helmets. Spots fled fixation in various patterns before their eyes, but the spots swam this side of the deep, closing blackness. "Don't panic," Bill said.

"No indeed," came Andrew's unfamiliar voice. "Just watch. Give me half a minute. Nine million company dollars. Not out of your pocket, is it? It's quite a show."

They stood, shifting.

"Was that yours, Ed?" Bill asked.

"What? Huck Finn? You better believe it. Just the way I saw him--see him. Just the fucking way."

"Look, mister, we want the lights back on." Bill thought about adding "or we'll open fire." But he couldn't know exactly where the man was in relation to the rest of his team, knew that none of them could, and further knew that none of the weapons would work right then in the pressing black.

"Quiet, now," almost-Andrew said. "Here it comes..."

The blackness was nowhere all at once, and there was nowhere in the blackness, like a dream pigment that absorbs all light. Bill felt it reaching through his pupils and realized with a certain horror that the only light was now inside him. Black shafts of nothingness, not reaching but existing, twin black shafts existing in his head like transpupillary appendages, and the light--let there be light--could only fill these black shafts with...

...the rush of dreams, ghastly, mundane, incomprehensible, but more than dreams, night-oozed images from the workaday world, the hard workaday world where dreams dry, sloughed off until the night oozes them back, faces withered and full, familiar and strange, and science always the rock-hard foundation of his life, but itself based on the inscrutable whimsy of photons, coherent light...

...in the workaday world. He'd always been such a hard worker. Get a load of this dusty old thing from the time he first became a weapons designer: the woman who was burned wherever he looked at her, his laser gaze first bringing up welts, then blisters, then popping splatters of the collected serum, then charred tissue peeling back and a loving look making a blood-curdling transformation to self-absorbed terror, and anger focused on her stupid, weak forehead, coherent hatred drilling two coagulating holes through her brain, the back of her skull, kindling her hair on their exit. Photoablation. Photo...

...obliteration. Wings beating noiselessly. He was such a hard worker. Everyone said so. Yet there he was, looking for God in every instrument, every printout, and finally seeing only the instruments, the printouts dusted with dried dreams, blown clean with someone else's breath, billowing puffs of sneezy particles and his wrinkled nose knowing not much, if anything. Out by the chasm...

...once a week or so, smelling the smells of burnt hair, or the rich wail of oil paints, listening to the wail...

Cooing sounds in his helmet---ooohs and ahhhs--sounds of people on an amusement park ride, black shafts like appendages filled with his own light, turning with his turning head, sounds of...

...space, the geometric forms he sketched in sixth grade, just for a few months, complex twisty-turny shading, intricate structure flowing from his eyes and then gone, gone for good, and his young-man eyes looking toward the heavens, black shafts that would absorb all light, looking for God over the shoulder of the world, looking toward space, and no one knew, no one ever suspected...

...because he was such a hard worker, working even into the dark nights, the complicated physics flickering across the black insides of his eyeballs, night oozing him back to the chasm, because he knew the chasm, knew its jagged edges, night pitching a tent along its precipitous boundless black, and down--"dooowwwn!"--there was...

...light, light inside dark inside light inside dark, dreams inside vacuum in a station around Mars, the thin skin turning, turning in the white streaming sun, turning always the sharp terminal moraine of shadow on the skin, where the black began, the wail of space, and molecules streaming, slow at first then rushing through, the noiseless beating of wings and the...

...twin coagulating holes of dried choking dreams, the turning terminal moraine where brains smoked behind strange dying faces...

"Hey!" He recognized his own voice, his head impaled on black shafts, turning as he turned. "That's enough!"

The lights streamed on, shimmering as though under water. The man was gone.

"Andrew?" Softly, with a strange new larynx.

"I'm okay. He's gone."

''We're gonna have to do a new psychic scan on you."

A warm, rumbling chuckle. "Yeah."

"Do you remember anything?"

"Yes. I was...on the back porch listening in. Just after the lights went out, he disappeared. Did the rest of you...?" Affirming noises in their helmets.

"Sensory deprivation," said Alf.

Bill shook his head against the suit. "He said he was here to help. And he did."

They sat for moment.

"That just cost Philip a quarter of a mil," Bill said finally. "Saddle up, people."

They found the leak where Bill had seen it, where they had all seen it, on the outer rim of the station near personnel quarters. A micrometeor shower had weakened a strategic joint between two of the outer panels, turning their edges into a metallic lace that had folded back progressively and, the chief engineer later said, risked imminent total failure of both panels. Air must have been leaking out almost molecule by molecule for awhile, they said. But the panels would've failed eventually, and hundreds would have died. Hundreds.

Bill watched them work through the window of his cabin, the tethered figures swinging outward like bristling hairs on the station's skin, clinging through darkness and light, darkness and light.

"We hate to lose you," Philip said, and Bill smelled the rich, rancid smell of oils and for the first time recognized the face in the painting. He had seen it in the greenish tinge of a badly tuned monitor. It was Philip. Philip Faust.

By the time the next shuttle arrived, the workers were nearly finished. He tried in vain to draw their attention to his goodbye wave with a noiseless knocking on the window.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keithcroes@medscape.com