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Maxwell’s Gremlin

Jerry Madden knew he should never have let the fairies watch porn on his computer.  He'd been trying to compose an email for the last half hour, but was constantly being distracted by tiny Pea Berry and Daisy faking a peep show atop his monitor.  Evidently they thought human sexuality was the funniest thing they'd ever seen, since they simulated passion and fervor better than most triple-x actresses.  They coupled it, however, with exaggerated movements so wild only someone with wings could have accomplished them.

"Get off of there, NOW."

The two little sprites were laughing so hard they fell from the edge of the flat-panel onto the keyboard, sending the half-finished email to its intended recipient.  Jerry shooed them away and they buzzed up to the bookcase behind his desk to chat for a bit and, undoubtedly, discuss the failings of mortals.  He realized there had been just enough in the email to give the guys at the electronics shop exactly the wrong information, so he sent them a disregard notice, pulled up Sent Mail and started to compose again.

Margee Shimkus opened his door with a quick knock just in case anyone was watching from the hall.  They had been trying to keep their relationship quiet for the past four months, even though no one seemed to notice or care.  Unfortunately, it looked like there was going to be an impediment in the course of true love -- Jerry's temporary appointment was ending in two weeks along with the spring semester.  Denny DeLint, their boss, tried for months to find funding to extend his contract, but the last possible source had been rejected by the Dean yesterday.   Jerry was going to be out of a job very soon.

"Denny told me he wanted to talk to you this afternoon," Margee said.  "A buddy of his told him about an opening across campus.  Did he call you?"

"I was writing email and chasing naughty fairies with a flyswatter."  The two on the bookcase gave him the finger.  "Let me check."  He opened his Inbox.  "Possible technical support job in physics -- permanent.  Huh.    I'll go down and talk to him at 2:30."

Margee turned to go back upstairs.  "Lunch at the student union today?  I hate the thought of you not being just downstairs anymore, but four or five blocks is still doable."

"Yeah, we could keep using one car and save on parking.  With any luck at all, the job will be something we can afford for me to take.  It's not like I'm getting rich with a temporary position, after all."

Denny's office was half again as large as Jerry's.  Besides the bookcases that lined every academic's wall, there were large sofas and comfortable chairs.  Denny took a great deal of pride in saying that his office door was always open to his students and they returned the favor by voting him the best instructor in chemistry.

Being friends as well as co-workers, he and Jerry made small talk until Jerry brought up the subject of the transfer.  "What kind of work are they talking about?" he said.  "I only took three semesters of general physics plus thermodynamics as an undergraduate -- I'm not sure I can do anything complicated."

"You ever do anything with the electrical properties of gases?"  Denny nervously shuffled a few papers on his desk without noticing he did so.  "They're building a new kind of particle detector on the cheap and High-Energy's looking for a ramrod for the construction team."

"When I was overseas, we used sniffers to look for NBC weapons -- I became good at repair, since sand got into everything.  My senior thesis project at Purdue was on atmospheric chemistry changes caused by thunderstorms.  If I don't know what they need from me, I can fake it long enough to get into a position to learn.  Any idea of the money involved?"

"I'd guess it's a bit more than you've been getting here, since it's a permanent position," Dan replied.  "A lot would depend on the initial degree of funding.   It wouldn't hurt for you to go and check it out."

Jerry approached the long shed with hesitation.  It was the complete opposite of what he expected from a twenty-first century physics project.  The building itself was one-story, a half-block long with tarpaper siding missing here and there along its length.  Every hundred feet there was a garage door.  One of the newer-looking doors had a touch pad next to an opener control.  At the very end of the shed, next to a white door, was a skinny fellow in sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt.  He was sitting on a chair outside the door, smoking a cigarette while scribing with a stylus onto the most complicated PDA Jerry had ever seen.

"Pull up a patch of ground, dude."  The smoker didn't even look up.

"I'm looking for the Dark Matter Detector Project.  The physics office in Wilson Lab said it was across the parking lot in this shed.  You know where it is?"

"Who wants to know?  This is kinda, you know, double-plus super secret sorta stuff."

"I'm Jerry Madden.  I'm applying for the job as chief technician.  I was over in chemistry and my job ended.  Who're you?"

"I'm Dr. Michael Stevens, late of beautiful Berserkly.  I was exiled to this land of flatness and surflessness because of my penchant for Kools and pissing off powers-that-be."  He looked up.  "You really want in on this?  The last three guys they sent me took one look at the situation and ran like hell back to mommy.  Let me finish this."  He took a last couple of drags and then ground his smoke out on the tarmac driveway.  "Come inside, I'll show you the shop."

Jerry was surprised by the size of the room inside.  The lab was well over a hundred feet long by thirty feet wide. An area with flat granite plates on stands was isolated from the rest of the room by polythene sheets hanging from the ceiling.  Electronics racks with little blinking red lights filled twenty feet of linear space at the back of the room.  There were three desks with state-of-the art desktop computers on them and a set of wooden stairs led to a balcony overlooking the room.  At the top of the stairs was a door with a radiation warning sign and at the far end of the room there was a set of garage doors.

Once he was over the initial shock, though, he noticed that the space was still an old shed, even if it was dressed up.  The lighting was from old incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, making the room look dismal.  The inner walls were wooden with badly painted drywall.

"Ok," Jerry said, "I'll bite.  Why are you making detectors to solve a fundamental question about the universe in a place like this?"

"Simple, man," Michael replied, "they don't figure the design is going to work so they're spending as little as possible on us.  If you sign on, you'll represent the single greatest investment the university's made in our project so far.

"You see, Fermilab's old hat now.  The Large Hadron Collider's started up this fall at CERN so all of the hotshots are over there.  The guys at Fermi are converting their old accelerator to a fixed-target machine that will run interesting, but second-tier experiments.  Pure science in the United States is at its lowest funding in years.

"Nobody knows what Dark Matter is -- it and Dark Energy are two of the unsolved problems of the Standard Model of Physics.  I've got an idea for a set of detectors to trace the interaction of DM with the rest of the universe."

"That's really cool."  Jerry was fascinated.  "Why don't they think your design will work?"

"The metals for the tubing are as close to tolerance in composition and shape as can be currently manufactured.  The engineers told me the tube-end electronics I've proposed cannot be connected without leaking flammable gas all over the detector hall, so they left the project and I'm designing them myself.  Oh yeah, and we need a random number generator more unbiased by a factor of three than is possible with modern computing to test the damn tubes if and when we finish them."

"You know, Dr. Stevens, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I'd work on this project even if you weren't willing to pay me.  I hope that doesn't hurt my negotiating position on salary."

"You've gotta be kidding me.  Let's go sign some papers -- I'll make sure you've got enough to live.  Welcome aboard."  Michael rose, stepping forward to shake Jerry's hand.

After a couple of weeks, Jerry was convinced the project had been staffed from the extras that Central Casting used for TV sitcoms.  The surfer-dude physicist was just the start.

 

Jesus Torres, the electronics assembler, looked like a Native American version of his namesake.  He had been a watchmaker in Nogales, Mexico, before coming to the Midwest to seek his fortune.  He had a penchant for singing mournful songs in Spanish and revving his muscle car in the parking lot outside during the lunch hour.

Ed Morgan had the desk in the far corner.  He looked like a Disney pirate and, if he was not being careful to disguise his breath, reeked of whiskey.  It was likely he slipped alcohol into his morning coffee, since he always seemed to have the shakes until nine in the morning.  Once he was lit, though, he could machine a model of any device that a physicist could imagine to better tolerances than a contractor job shop.

Twelve hour days made time go quickly.  Jerry found the trick to surviving -- concentrate on the critical and let your mind go wandering with the tedious work.  He realized this was probably how his father had made it through thirty years at the steel mill.  After two months, they had completed a pair of prototype detectors that leaked ethane gas almost as fast as they pumped it in.  The crew became accustomed to the shed's windows and garage door being open to prevent their end of the building from being blasted into dust.

Finally, Jerry and Michael settled on o-rings to seal the connection between the tubes and the electronics.  They sent out bids to suppliers and Jerry and Jesus assembled the detector test setup.  Cosmic ray particles constantly came in from space and passed through the test bed.  When one did, it triggered an electronic pulse, turning on the detector electronics.  While it passed through the tubes, that particle was located in three dimensions and its track measured.  When it exited the bottom of the detector, it then turned off the detector until the next one came along.  It was a technique used by physicists for thirty years.

Those thirty years of experience were not explaining, however, the reason events kept occurring that lit up every tube in the detectors.  Particles that energetic should only occur once or twice a year, but instead, every other day the recorders would register one.

Jerry was puzzled.  He knew enough about both electronics and physics that he realized such things didn't happen.  Was there some kind of external input into the system?  He looked around the room for sources of error.  The power going into the detector was filtered, so there were no spikes to cause current to jump across the circuits.  Now that the o-rings were installed, the air was being deionized to prevent sparks -- the deionizer was across the room from the detectors.  The prototypes were built on granite surface plates to insure tolerances were met during construction.

Maybe there was some source of radiation in the room they weren't considering?  He'd seen a Geiger counter in one of the cabinets earlier.  After looking for fifteen minutes, he located it -- and made a mental note to label all of the storage areas in the lab to speed up searches in the future.  He turned it on, testing it with a container of potassium chloride they kept for that purpose -- the natural radiation from the salt substitute pegged the dial at the lowest setting, just as it should.  He approached the detector and moved the hand-held probe above the test setup.

There was radioactivity and it was the same over much of the surface of the detector.  This wasn't right -- there were small sources built inside the device that were used to calibrate it, but he was nowhere near them.  He set the counter down for a moment and called Michael, who had been across the parking lot lecturing to a class until a minute or two previously.  Jerry had five numbers punched before he remembered what the surface plates were sculpted from -- granite, which was full of naturally occurring thorium and uranium inclusions sufficient to register on the counter's dial.  They would also cause some of the high-powered events if neutrons from the decay of those elements penetrated the side of the tubes.

They needed to lift the prototypes from the plates in order to slide shielding beneath them.  It didn't take much -- just a dozen layers of polyethylene sheets to absorb the stray neutrons.  When the real detectors were being manufactured, the team would have to assemble them on bare surface plates and then transfer them to the shielded test area.  Construction returned to normal.  Electronics were being assembled quickly now, since it was July and the detectors needed to be at Fermilab at the end of September.

The event recordings had been clear of high-powered anomalies for a week when one was registered that lit up not only the detector array on the test bed, but the one powered up for the pre-tests next to it.  Michael lost all semblance of rationality for several minutes.  He began to hammer large nails into the two by fours used to build sawhorses for the lab.  "Get out," he said.  "Take two days off.   I'll shut down the power to the detectors.  We've been working too hard -- we'll start again fresh when we can think."

Two days was one day too long for Jerry when he was faced with a problem.  Despite Margee's pleadings, he was back at the shed's parking lot by 7:30 a.m. on the second day.  He wasn't surprised to see Ed Morgan's pickup in its usual spot with Ed sitting behind the wheel, smoking a Camel before going inside.

"You couldn't stay away, either, eh?"  Jerry walked over to Ed's side of the truck.

"Nope, I figured we could look at the connections between the detectors and the gate electronics behind the desk while Michael's out of there.  This may be our best chance, since if he was in, he'd be trying to collect data and to hell with anything else."

They walked to the front of the shed and Ed unlocked the door and turned on the lights.  The room was quiet without the sound of the electronics-rack's fans running.  The only equipment turned on was the desktop at Michael's desk, which had blue-screened.

"Better make some coffee."  Ed was trembling -- it had probably been a late night for him.  He seemed to drink less when he was working long hours, although Jerry was sure he kept a bottle in his lower desk drawer for late afternoons.

Jerry drew water from the tap, set the coffeepot on its heater base and flipped the switch.  A three-foot shower of sparks sprayed them both.  They jumped back and yelled involuntarily as the breaker clicked off at the back of the room.

"Jeez, man.  What the hell was that from?"  Ed bent to examine the heater base.  "Hey, that's funny -- look at this, man."  He held its electrical cord out -- the copper wires inside were visible.  The rubber insulation was crumbling along its length.

"It's not just that."  Jerry looked over and then lifted the mouse pad from Michael's desk.  Material from the bottom stayed behind, stuck to the desk.

The two of them walked a search pattern beginning at the coffeepot and continuing in wider circles.  The closer to the coffeepot's location, the greater the damage to any material made of polymers.  "That rust wasn't there before, either."  Jerry pointed to the cabinet containing the deionizer, purchased to remove ozone from the air around high-voltage devices.

Ed opened the door, saw a rainbow of light and stumbled backwards a step.  Inside the cabinet, there was a vaguely man-like shape, three inches tall and brilliant like a flashlight beam pointed in your face.  Its edges kept shifting and had colors like a kaleidoscope's interior moving constantly.

Afterwards, neither one of them remembered running for the door, but they were both in the parking lot within ten seconds.  "Ok, what the hell was THAT?"  Ed's voice cracked.  "You saw it too, right?"  He fumbled in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and offered one to Jerry, who shook his head and refused politely.  Ed tried three times to light it before Jerry steadied his hand.

"It's something weird, I'll agree -- I sure as hell saw it, too.  Maybe it's some kind of ball lightning -- it's in a cabinet with a lot of electronics.  Finish your cigarette and we'll go back inside.  I've got some ideas."

The lab was still lit by the bright, shifting light.  Ed took a detour to his desk, unlocked the bottom drawer, pulled out a flask, and took a long drink from it.  He caught back up with Jerry, who by this time had picked up a three-foot wooden dowel.  "I'm going to try to push it out of there."  Jerry stepped back in front of the cabinet and pushed the dowel against the glowing object.  Its arms moved, grasping the rod.  It didn't seem to have much of a grip so Jerry pulled the dowel away after a half-minute of gentle tugging.

"It's alive," Jerry said, "and some kind of space alien, magical beast, or other unexplainable phenomenon.  Ed, why aren't you running away?"

"Let's say I've had some...experience with this sort of thing.  There's a lot of the Old Sod in me yet.  What's the end of your stick like?"

Jerry held it up.  The lacquer on the end was gone and on the spots where the creature had held it, the wood was damaged and crumbling.  "I think we may have found our problem, now we just have to figure out what to do about it.  I know an...expert in these sort of things who might be able to help us."

"Some kind of parapsychologist or X-files type?"

"You could say that.  It wouldn't be completely accurate, but you could say that.  I don't want to tell you any more about 'em.  They want to remain anonymous."

"Yeah, I can understand.  A professor'd lose their job fast if he started talking about aliens in the electronics cabinet.  What do we do about this, now, though -- we can't leave it here.  It's fucking the project up big-time."

Jerry thought for a moment.  "Let's get a good-sized box.  Don't we have a home-made metal toolbox with a hasp behind those boxes over there?  Grab the drill and put a couple air holes in it in case this thing needs to breathe."

The two men lifted the box, but it was too big to get it any closer than three feet to the cabinet containing their prey.  Jerry poked and prodded and tried unsuccessfully to push the creature out of the cabinet.  Finally, Ed took a turn with the stick.  He pushed the dowel in with his left hand and the shining being leaned forward, reaching out towards him.

"Do that again, Ed, without the stick."

Ed moved his hand forward.  The creature leaned out again.  Ed came a bit closer and it stepped out of the cabinet.  Little by little, he lured it into the room and coaxed it into jumping into the trap.  Once it was inside, they closed the lid and caught their breath.  The room was dim now with the light source inside the box.

"I don't understand why it went for your hand but didn't chase mine," Jerry said.  "Only difference is...wedding ring?  Was it going after your ring?"

"Sorry, Jerry, I don't intend on lettin' you test your theory there.  My wife'd kill me if I came home and the ring was stolen or damaged.  The thing's destructive, for sure.  Now we've just gotta find some way to get rid of it."

"For now, we can put it in the back of the shed."  Running the length of the shed was a long, narrow room used over the years to store unwanted equipment.  It would be a perfect place to secure the box until they could figure out what to do.

Jerry left Ed sitting at his desk and stepped outside to use his phone in private.  Margee might be able to bring their expert on the weird over before anyone else came in to work.

An hour later, he spotted Margee walking across the parking lot towards him.

"You find him?" Jerry said.

"Yeah, he's in my front jacket pocket.  The little shit's been feeling me up most of the way here.  Let's get inside before I succumb to the urge to play fairy baseball."

They opened the door quietly, but there was no need.  Ed had his feet up on his desk and was leaning back in his chair, snoring loudly.  His uncapped flask was lying on its side atop several sets of blueprints.

"That's your machinist?"

"Yeah, Margee, he's the best I've ever seen.  He's just...quirky, like everyone else here."

They were whispering, since the large room seemed to amplify their voices.  It was surprising how loud everything was with the electronics off.  They moved through the maze of equipment to the door to the back area of the shed and Jerry opened it for her.

"It's in the metal box there."

Russet flew out of Margee's pocket and made a surveying run looking for bats, swallows, or any other immediate danger.  Finding none, he returned and perched on Jerry's shoulder.

"What baffles thee?"

"I've got something in the box, my friend.  It's certainly not of the mundane world so I was hoping you might be able to give us a hand with identifying it."

Jerry removed the bolt holding the hasp closed and lifted the lid.  The brilliant colored light from the creature filled the room.

Russet hovered a few feet above the source, studying it.

"This thing's kind I've seen before

Before I sailed to Liberty's Shore.

In Prussia's nickel mines they dwell

Rusting metal and tools as legends tell.

The more refined, they did prefer.

They shunned raw ore for ingots pure.

Called kobolds in Prussia, knackers in Wales,

I could tell you many such tales.

Dulling tools in minutes few,

Rusting nails and forgings new."

"How about diamonds?  Equipment, machined parts?"  Jerry asked.  "There were stories from World War Two about creatures in Europe that rode on planes and tore them apart in flight -- my grandfather was with the Eighth Air Force and talked about tails just falling off.  Margee, I think we've caught a gremlin." Jerry thought about the o-rings on the detectors.  "Oh, shit.  Rubber's a long-chain solid -- a lot of order there."

Russet chuckled and swooped, making low arcs over the box, but the gremlin didn't seem to notice.  Jerry went back into the lab and brought back a handful of 16-penny nails, which he tossed into the box to keep it from rusting its way out.  The bright creature knelt next to the nails and moved back and forth.  Jerry dropped the lid and slid the bolt back into place.

"Thanks a lot, Russet.  Here's some Frango Mints for you."

The red-brown fairy grabbed one out of Jerry's hand and stripped it of its foil wrapping in a second.  It stuffed pieces of chocolate into its mouth, nodding its approval.

When Dr. Stevens returned to the lab the next day, Ed and Jerry were waiting for him.  They had left the locked box with their unwelcome guest in the back room, as far from their lab's rear exit as they could get it.

"So it was the deionizer?"  Michael was staring at the coffeepot's cord.

"Yeah, when it was cleaned last time, the grid was put in backwards.  It was producing ozone rather than removing it.  We're going to have to replace this," Jerry tossed the pot into the garbage barrel, "and check all of the o-rings in any of the tubes close to the cabinets."

Ed stood behind Jerry and nodded.  "It shouldn't put us back too long, boss -- maybe a couple of days.  It's the only way to be sure."

"Do it then."  Michael sat down in front of his keyboard.  "I'll start working on additional testing programs if you're sure this will fix the problems.

Ed and Jerry examined the pile of finished detector tubes.  "So, you figured out what that thing was?"  Ed said.  "I was having dreams about it all night last night."  He took the first tube from the pile and removed the crumbling rubber ring from the connector on its end.

"Yeah, it's a being that eats order.  It feeds on anything with a regular pattern in its structure -- metals, diamond lattices, honed edges, rubber chains.  It's a big ball of personified entropy -- Maxwell would have loved it."

"Maxwell?"

"Yeah, Maxwell was a Scotsman who lived back in the 19th Century.  He studied the Laws of Thermodynamics.  His hypothetical demons lowered entropy though; this one raises it in its surroundings.  It's a classical gremlin."

"You mean like on Bugs Bunny and the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner?"  Evidently, Ed was a fan of the same ilk as Jerry, although a generation older.

"You got it."

"So, what do we do with it?"

Jerry carefully laid his tube down on the granite surface plate to begin a new pile.  "We feed it and keep it locked up for now.  We don't want to let it loose when there's all of this equipment.  Once we get the project done, we can drive it to the country and open the box far from civilization where it'll do the least damage -- it's dangerous."

As the summer continued, the prototypes were finished and the construction phase of the project began in earnest.  Michael brought in the half-dozen undergraduates he had interviewed in June and Jerry set up an assembly line to build the dozen detector arcs required.  By the middle of August, there were two completed arrays on the test bed.

Unfortunately, there they sat -- powered up but untested.  Michael hit a snag on his end.  The fact it was expected didn't make it any easier to deal with.  By the end of his third night without sleep, he confided to Jerry.

"It's not going to do us any good to build the arrays if I can't give us some idea of what we'll see when a dark matter particle goes through one.  There's not a commercial program available for it and it's beyond my capabilities to write one."

"What exactly does it need to do?  I might be able to help figure it out if you describe the situation really slowly."  Jerry's attempt at humor went unnoticed by the young professor.

"To test detectors, we use Monte Carlo programs -- yeah, they're named after the casino -- to provide us with random models of events.  The problem is, however, that random numbers aren't, really.  All of them depend on something physical, like the timing of a computer chip.  When we install this array at Fermilab, we won't see more than one dark matter particle for every trillion events, so anything with a degree of randomness equal to or less than that will put a bias in the program that will hide the signal in the noise.  I don't know if it's doable."

"Well, you won't get anything done if your head is falling onto your keyboard.  Go home and get some sleep.  I'll talk to the computer guys over at Wilson and see if they've got any ideas."

Once Michael had left, Jerry walked over to Ed's desk and opened AUTOCAD.  He thought he could solve this problem.

"The front's held on by those screws."  Ed held the electronics crate containing Michael's random number generator sideways while he examined it.

"Looks that way to me.  We take the ribbon cable from here, unscrew these last two little ones and, voila, lots of circuit boards and fans."  Jerry placed the front cover on the bench next to him and peered inside.  "The idea is to lock our gremlin inside a new testing box.  He'll remove what little order exists in the timing chips and allow the numbers to be more random -- at least that's the theory I've got."

"The circuit doesn't look complicated," Ed said.  "Those right there are the timing chips -- they're in parallel.  Over there is a kind of RC circuit…What?"

"How'd you learn so much about electronics all of a sudden?"

"Dude, I'm old.   We learned a lot of different things when I went to school -- we didn't worry so much about tests and such.  Those of us with ADD and a cigarette habit could go to electronics shop.  My first stereo was a Heathkit.  Puttin' another one of these together should be no problem."

Jerry wasn't convinced.  "Can you build a box that'll still fit on the electronics rack and is large enough to contain our buddy from the back?"

"Sure.  The biggest problem is going to be keeping his light from leaking out into the room.  Let me take this sample over to my machine shop."

Ed and Jerry reassembled and replaced the old generator in the rack before Michael came back in the next day.  They continued to construct the detectors, even though the Monte Carlo program wasn't working.  By the weekend, the two conspirators were ready to test their design with its special component.

"Yep, he still follows your ring.  Up, over the edge."  The glowing creature was mesmerized by the diamond Ed held in front of it.  It climbed up the side of the metal toolbox, leaving flecks of rust where it touched.  Ed led it five feet down the back and into the electronics box containing the new randomizer he built during the last week.  The gremlin jumped inside and examined the tin of screws and machine bolts the two of them had placed inside.

"Got him."  They screwed the front of the box back on and checked for emerging beams of light -- any would be visible in the gloom of the shed's back room.  They carried the box to the electronics rack next to the test bed.  Ed attached the ribbon cables and BNC connectors to the front of the box while Jerry fired up the program to supply random inputs to the detector electronics.

For a few minutes, everything worked as expected.  The voltage output from their device soon began to oscillate, however, with the magnitude of the oscillation increasing more and more as time passed.  They disconnected the circuit just before it reached a value high enough to damage the detector on the surface plate.

"Well, crap.  There was a good idea that didn't amount to anything."  Ed fumbled in his pocket for a smoke while heading for the front door.  Jerry trailed after, shaking his head.

"The little guy is just making too much entropy for the circuit.  He's changing the values of the resistors or something.  What we need is a way to regulate how much order he's taking out of the circuit."

"What if we gave him a measured amount of something else to heat up?  Something really cold, like dry ice?"  Ed drew deeply on his cigarette and blew it out into the summer air.

"Dry ice isn't going to work," Jerry said.  "You'd have to be opening and closing the box to replace the blocks.  Sooner or later, we'd be somewhere else when a block was finished and we'd have a shorted-out detector.  All we'd need to do is blow one of the sectors out and we'd be on the street building computers for cost."

"How about liquid nitrogen?"  Ed pointed across the parking lot at the backside of Wilson Lab -- a twenty-foot tall tank stood beside the parking lot.

"We've got enough money in the account.  We'd need a fancy regulator for the flow, an exhaust for the heated nitrogen, and we'd still have to change the source tank once a day, but I think that'd do it."

They returned the little creature to its holding box while they moved the generator back to the machine shop.  Ed ran piping from the left side of the box to the right, using the most resilient materials he could find.  Jerry, meanwhile, coaxed the nitrogen distribution crew into coming in on a Saturday afternoon to supply him with a fifty-gallon tank on wheels.  All that remained to do was build a sensor circuit to analyze the amount of nitrogen used and open the valve to replace it.  That was the hardest step and took most of a day and several false starts for Ed to complete.  On Sunday evening, Jerry finished drilling the hole through the shed wall for the exhaust and was ready for the completed assembly.

The gremlin seemed anxious to move to its new home -- Ed didn't have to coax it at all.  It sensed the finished box and crawled over the side of its old metal box to jump inside the finished generator.  Jerry screwed the faceplate on, laughing when he read what Ed had painted carefully on the front:

Schrodinger's Catbox

"Let's just hope this doesn't end up being a whole lotta catshit, eh?"  Jerry started the flow of liquid nitrogen to the box.  Ed hooked up the electronics cables and they fired up the generator circuit again.  When the oscillations began, Jerry increased the nitrogen flow until there was enough unheated liquid to regulate the amount of entropy reaching the circuit.  The voltage settled to within normal boundaries.

"Somebody needs to stay here all night to watch this," Jerry said.

Ed volunteered, of course.  "Don't worry, Jerry.  I'll have a nip now and then to keep me fresh but I'll be able to stay awake until dawn.  Michael should get here about eight or so, come on back and we can explain this to him together."

The most supernatural thing about the entire operation was the physicist buying the explanation without opening the new random number generator to look inside.  Within a day, they could tell that the randomness of the supplied numbers was good enough to test all of the detectors and the project would be completed on time.

"You know, you ought to write up this design in a paper, guys."  Michael was insistent.

"Won't work, man," Jerry said.  "Ed doesn't have a degree at all, and I've only got a Bachelor's.  They'll never buy this as our work or take us seriously.  We just had the idea of cooling the circuits to cut down on noise.  That idea is nothing new, really."  Jerry didn't want the kind of attention a paper would provide in any case.  After a while, Michael became engrossed in the preparations for the detectors' shipment to Fermilab and dropped the subject.

The construction and testing parts of the project finished with a week to spare.  The student workers cut class loading-day morning to place the detectors into the padded wooden crates that would ensure their safety on the journey to Fermilab.  The team opened the garage door and slid the crates into the back of the rental trucks.

Ed washed his hands in the sink after the last truckload of detectors were loaded and gone, along with all of the other personnel.  He looked around the now-empty lab and, as he crossed it, stooped to pick up nails, bolts, and here and there, a piece of paper.  He sipped the last of the whiskey from his flask and then set it on the computer desk next to the electronics rack.

"Ok, you're done, little fellow.  Let's move you to the other box.  We'll go for a ride down to the Ohio River.  I know where there's an old coal mine you might like."  He disconnected the electronics, flushed the system of the remaining liquid nitrogen and pulled the box from the rack.

He wasn't prepared for the chaos within it when he removed the cover.  Rather than one large creature, he was only able to count a half-dozen small ones before they and a lot more of their newly born siblings leapt out of the box, heading for the corners of the lab.  Within a few moments they had burned their way through the walls, broken through the windows, or pushed the door open and headed out into the daylight.

Ed walked slowly to the front of the lab and stepped through the door.  He sat down outside on the folding chair there and leaned back.  None of the little escaping creatures were visible by this time.  He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or not.

He looked over at Wilson Lab.  "I guess some of those physicists are going to be getting some interesting results for a bit."  He lit a smoke and chuckled to himself.

 

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