“Bullshit!” Ian said, which of course meant “give me some concrete examples of that.”
“You will observe that I am currently eating breakfast. My body, in the meantime, is turning this breakfast into me. I am obviously a more ordered system than this breakfast is. Q.E.D. Thus it is demonstrated.”
The waitresses and other ladies who constantly surrounded us were used to our continual arguments by now. I sometimes wonder if they kept recordings of them, so as to write up an academic paper or two, once their present charade was over.
“Your body is turning a small portion of your breakfast into you, which person, incidentally, never struck me as being particularly orderly. Most of your breakfast will be converted into carbon dioxide, water vapor, and one of your major constituents, shit. These are blatantly disorderly, not to say downright messy on occasion, being end products, as it were. On the average, your strange eating habits have decreased the order of the universe, not increased it.”
“I deny all of the above. One glance at the evolution of life on the Earth should convince you that the universe strives upward, not downward,” I said.
“If things are becoming more orderly in one place, they must be becoming less orderly in another. Earth is only one tiny bit of the universe.”
“You are suggesting that on Mars, perhaps, there are animals that are evolving into beings that are slower, stupider, and in general less well adapted? Earth is the only part of the universe that we humans know much about, so I suggest that we confine our arguments to its surface. Or, if we must go into outer space, I point out that current cosmological theory has the universe starting out containing little else but hydrogen, the simplest of the elements. After a few eons of star formation, stellar burning of various sorts, and the occasional supernova, the other elements were gradually built up. Notice again, please, that we went from a disorderly cloud of hydrogen to very complicated constructions like stars, planets, the hundred-odd higher elements, and me. I stands my ground.”
“In the short run, you might be right, but eventually the universe will consist of nothing but lukewarm iron, the element lowest on the energy curve.”
“In the short run? I’m talking about fifteen to twenty billion years, here! And as to the famous heat death of the universe which you allude to, just how do you adjust, rectify, and justify this Second Law of yours with the Law of the Conservation of Mass and Energy? If matter is convertible into energy, why can’t I take some of that lukewarm iron of yours and turn it into energy to warm up the rest of it?”
“I confess that I have occasionally been troubled over that one.”
“As well you should be. In truth, your rational self was rebelling against the brainwashing it had received in that overvalued university that you are so proud of having attended. They did a similar job on you young earnest types with their Laws of Momentum. They gave you a formula that said that the mass of a bullet times the speed of that bullet must equal the mass of the cannon that fired it times the speed of the cannon moving backwards. Thus, for hundreds of years, every properly educated young engineer knew, absolutely knew, that you couldn’t possibly shoot a gun without that gun having a kick. It wasn’t until World War Two (when someone was given the problem of making the plume of smoke from a tank’s gun a little less obvious to the enemy), that the gas brake was invented. This was nothing but a bent piece of metal with a hole in it that fit over the muzzle and let the bullet go on its way, while sending some of the propelling gasses out sideways. It sent a smaller plume of smoke into the sky, but the tankers soon noticed that their guns kicked less than they had before. Notice that the improvement was made by accident, or at least for the wrong reasons, because every engineer in the world had been blinded by a formula.”
“MV is still equal to MV,” Ian said. “Gun designers were just a little bit slow in noticing that you not only shot the bullet out the end of the gun, you shot the propelling gasses out as well. If you send those gasses out sideways, or better yet backwards, you can significantly reduce the total kick of the weapon, and even eliminate it in some cases. So what?”
“So what? So a whole lot! Had that advance been available around the turn of the century, in the days of the All Big Gun navies, it would have made possible a ship the size of a destroyer that could have taken out a battleship! It could have shifted the basis of world power! But it wasn’t done because the engineers of the world had been blinded by their own neat little formulas.”
“And what does that have to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”
“A lot,” I said. “People were as brainwashed by the Laws of Momentum as they currently are by the Second Law, when all along, there were ways around them both.”
“Oh, I suppose you’re right, of course. After all, in a few months, we’ll be powering the whole damn island with a system of generators that the Second Law says can’t work. I just feel less comfortable without a new law to replace it with,” Ian said.
“You’re just asking for a new set of horse blinders. ‘Beyond this point you must not see, much less think about.’ ”
“Knock it off. A man needs guidelines.”
“Well then, have one of mine. If it works, it’s not only good engineering, it’s also good science as well.”
“I guess I’ll have to take that as a working hypothesis.”
“Hey. It’s all that John Roebling, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Major Armstrong, and all the rest of the great old engineers had to go on, and they did good work. Finish your breakfast, and we’ll go do some of it, ourselves.”
* * *
I was sketching up plans for an entirely new type of military aircraft, based on what we had learned from the escape harness.
It would be a small craft, consisting mainly of a chair inside of a hermetically sealed geodesic ball for the pilot, a big temporal sword, and a bomb rack. This was entirely surrounded by plates that acted like the shoulder boards on the harness. They provided the lift necessary to keep the thing in the air, and they provided all the forward acceleration, braking, and maneuvering required. Also, they could be selectively switched on by a proximity sensor such that if anything solid came quickly at the craft, a bullet, for example, it would be atomized and sent safely into the future. When this happened, a plate opposite was also switched on, to keep the plane from accelerating in the direction of the bullet.
Streamlining? We didn’t need no stinking streamlining! Who needs streamlining when you can make all the air in front of you disappear? At that point, you are moving into a hard vacuum, no matter what your altitude is!
This puppy would be small, inexpensive, fast, maneuverable, and indestructible.
“Tom, it looks great to me, and in time I think we should build one of them. But we have been working on military equipment for months now, and we haven’t ever asked ourselves why we are doing what we are doing. What do we need with all these super weapons, anyway? Nobody is bothering us.”
“Well, we had all those purchase orders . . .”
“Orders? Those weren’t orders! Those were written requests sent to us by our subordinates!”
“Huh . . . Okay, I suppose you could think of them that way. But you were the one who was so adamant about filling the damn things.”
“So I was. I just hadn’t thought it all out, back then. We wanted to get our own company going, and here suddenly were all these military orders. Back home, military orders are government orders, and patriotism, the law, and common sense says ‘fill them.’ I hadn’t figured out yet that when you own the whole country, all that changes.”
“I suppose it does. But I still don’t see where we’ve done anything wrong. Having a more effective military never hurt any country, even if we do own it, ourselves. The military contracts have given all of our people here some valuable experience with temporal equipment, and all of it has been relatively simple stuff, and free of the kind of brain busting headaches our earlier work entailed. The fact is that it has been fun, and you enjoyed it as much as I did.”
“True. There’s something about making weapons that sort of grabs a man’s attention. It’s probably something in us left over from the Paleolithic Age, when man first learned that a pointed stick and a sharp rock are handy things to have around.”