The Protector's War (12 page)

Larsson pointed to a piece of apparatus on a bench, one that involved a gasoline lantern burning under a blackened cylinder. He turned up the wick with the tip of the metal multitool strapped in place of his left hand, and tapped the metal casing with it. The flywheel off to one side gave a halfhearted turn and then stopped.

“This is what they called a Stirling-cycle engine—sort of like a steam engine without the water, using a gas as the working fluid in a closed cycle. This one comes from a museum in Eugene; I traded some moonshine to a scavenger who had it in a load of miscellaneous junk. I wanted it because it doesn't depend on fast combustion—explosions—like IC engines. Result: It doesn't work anymore either.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Havel said.

He sounded patient, in a heavy sort of way.
But then, he puts up with Astrid, too.

Larsson went on: “A Stirling engine is like the theory of heat engines made manifest. Put concentrated heat in
here,
raise the temperature of the gas, and you get mechanical work out
there.
OK, mechanical work and diffuse heat. All you need to make it work is a temperature gradient between one end and the other. And like all heat engines since the Change it just doesn't work to any useful degree.”

“What about guns?”

“Guns
are
heat engines—first ones to be widely used. But.”

He swung the lamp out from under the cylinder, engaged a crank and worked it with his good hand. Crankshaft and piston and flywheel spun up with a subdued hum; after a moment he released it to run down.

“You see, one of the interesting things about a Stirling engine is that if you run it in reverse—if you put mechanical work
in
—it acts as a refrigerator. You get
cold
out the other end. They were used for that in labs and some manufacturing back before the Change. And that still
does
work.”

Havel's brows went up. “Well, that could be very useful,” he said. “We could really use some refrigerated storage for food, particularly if we could do it in bulk. It just doesn't get cold enough in the Willamette to make icehouses practical—one of the few advantages we had back when I was growing up on the Upper Peninsula, and man, did
we
have ice and to spare. We could run this Stirling thingie in reverse off a waterwheel or a windmill?”

“Yes, or the sort of horse gin we use for threshing machines now. But think about it for a moment. Why would the heat-to-work cycle not function, while the work-to-cold cycle
does
? And when you're cranking it, it works
exactly
the way it did pre-Change. It's like you can only play a film backward.”

Havel shrugged again. “Presumably your Alien Space Bats, or Juney's gods, or the Reverend Abbot's Lord Jehovah wanted it that way. I never did think the Change just
happened.
”

“Neither did I. It's too…
focused.
A random change in natural law would mostly likely just collapse everything into quark soup. And everything is too neatly scaled, the effects kick in at the precise level necessary and no earlier; it lets any biological process go on just fine, our nervous systems work, fish can still use their swim bladders, but that”—he pointed at the engine—“is screwed. Somebody
did
this to us.”

Havel slapped a hand against the brass bars that made a protective basket around the hilt of his backsword. “Give me a clear run at whoever did it, and I'll carve them a new one.”

“Yes, yes,” Larsson said, a testy edge to his voice. “But this gives me a handle on
how
the Arbitrarily Advanced ASB's are screwing it up—the heat engine side, at least, that's easier to get a grip on without instruments than the electrical problems. It isn't nanobots with unobtanium force-field generators watching our every move and selectively intervening whenever we try to fire a gun or run a generator. What's happened is a change in the Ideal Gas laws—or more accurately, a forced change in the behavior of near-ideal gasses—”

“Whoa, partner,” Mike said, raising a hand. There was a rustling chink as the elbow-length mail sleeve of his hauberk brushed the vambrace on his forearm. “I knew my way around a motorcycle engine, but that's about it, tech-wise. You're talking to a high school graduate who just squeaked by in math and fudged a lot to get his pilot's license.”

“OK, it's a change in the way gas molecules act under certain very specific circumstances, so there's no increase in pressure with heat beyond a low threshold. Like there's some added force that glues molecules together, so instead of producing work, the heat energy or the work put into mechanical compression gets locked into some weird form of
potential
energy.”

He pointed to another apparatus, a cylinder with a gauge attached, a piston rod sticking above it, and a framework for dropping weights on that.

“This is the one that's really been driving me nuts. It turns out the pressure limitation is same-same with pumping air mechanically into a reservoir. After a certain point, all you get for more pumping is sweat—same glue-the-molecules effect.”

Havel looked at the apparatus and frowned. “You mean if you drop that weight, it doesn't compress the air in the cylinder? OK, we've got infinitely efficient shock absorbers?”

“Oh, yeah, it does compress it—up to a point. Then the
volume
of air keeps getting smaller as you push, same-same as it would have before the Change if you exerted the same force, and it resists a push just as it would have before, but more like a liquid or solid than a compressed gas. The
pressure
doesn't get any higher after that cutoff point. There's a falloff in the extra push-back pressure you get for each input of energy applied; it starts small and then goes up in an asymptotic curve—ever-steeper curve, to you scientifically illiterate types. Pretty soon it reaches something close to infinity—like trying to go faster than light with a rocket.”

Havel ran his hands over his hair. “That's
crazy
.”

“Well,
duh
, my armor-plated son-in-law. Of
course
it's crazy. It simply fucks parts of the laws of thermodynamics, just for starters. That's what confirmed my mental certainty about the glue-the-molecules effect. Watch.”

He walked over to the cylinder and tripped a release.

Whank!

The weight slammed down, and the gauge twitched. Ken jerked a thumb at it.

“OK, as far as I can tell, the piston went down
exactly
as far as it would have before the Change under the same weight. But see the pressure gauge? Barely a fraction of what it would have been with that reduction in volume. As far as I can tell, what happens is the air gets sort of…
thicker…
as it gets compressed…the molecules get closer together and the energy input goes into mashing them tighter and tighter, but they don't leap apart when it's removed. They just expand again, they fill additional volume but they don't
push
at it the way they should. The same thing happens with any other compressible gas, by the way, but
not
with non-compressible liquids like water. Which means you can use hydraulic systems just fine.”

Larsson rubbed his good hand on the leather support of his multitool. “You know, if you could get that energy back
quickly,
this would make a hell of a battery, or an explosive.”

“You can't get the energy back? It's
gone
? Conservation of energy I have heard of—”

“Oh, you can get it back; thermodynamics isn't
totally
screwed up. You just can't get it back very
fast,
or in any form that's any fucking use at all.”

He turned a valve, and there was a long hiss; the piston rod sank down. “When you do this, the exit valve and the air around it heat up more than they should. For that matter, the air in the cylinder gets hotter than it should when you drop the weight; not
much
hotter, just barely enough difference that I can detect without electronic instruments. I
think
the potential energy trapped by the glue-together effect leaks away gradually in the form of diffuse low-level heat as the molecules 'unbind.' The slow burning with explosives is probably part of the same effect; the extra force keeps the molecules of a fuel from spreading fire as fast. There seems to be a relation between pressure and…never mind. I think something similar was done to set an upper limit on permitted
voltages,
too, maybe by increasing the degree of electron localization in solids. That would—”

“
Whoa,
Ken. Look, this is all very interesting, and I even think I understand parts of it…”

“That's more than I do,” Ken said, grinning. “I understand
what,
but I've got no earthly idea
how,
much less the theories behind the effects. I'm like Imhotep the Pyramid Builder confronted with a TV set, trying to understand how the wizard got all the miniature people in the funny box. We're multiple paradigm shifts away from being able to understand it. We just don't have the intellectual vocabularies—hell, the
grammars
. And with our toys taken away, we can't get from here to there.”

Havel frowned and continued: “…but I'm trying to keep thousands of people alive around here. And we're running out of
stuff
. Things are wearing out. We've got plenty of food and enough basic shelter now, and a fair start on weapons, but we don't have enough tools or cloth or shoes and we
certainly
don't have enough medicine if the plague breaks out again, and every time we shift people from one thing there's another that goes undone, and Christ Jesus but that bastard Arminger up in Portland
is
going to take another slap at us soon, so I have to keep our military up to snuff, which costs. So could we please concentrate on things that'll actually
help
us?”

“Eventually this could be useful, a heat sink can—oh, all right, Mike. I get your point. It does have some practical implications, though. It means we can get enough concentrated heat to run a foundry, say…but a lot of other industrial processes, most high-pressure chemistry for starters, are just…forbidden.”

“Thanks. That'll save us time and effort.” Havel slapped a hand on the older man's shoulder. “We couldn't have done it without you, Ken.”

Kenneth Larsson unscrewed the multitool from the hardened-leather cup strapped over the stump of his wrist. As he fastened on the hook-grasper he used for everyday work he shook his head.

“No, Mike, we couldn't have done it without
you.
” He held the hook up like an open palm. “Yeah, I've done a lot of useful work for us, and I'm damned proud of it—prouder of it than of anything I did as CEO of Northwest. So have my kids, and so have Will Hutton and Josh Sanders and Pamela. But you're the guy who found us all—”

A knock at the door interrupted them. The apprentice opened it. “My lords, it's A-lister Naysmith. He says you told him to look you up, Lord Bear.”

Ken got up and left, giving his son-in-law a slap on the shoulder. He waved his hand at the man entering, who ignored it—but that was probably from the terror that left his face like a mask carved out of lard. With the crowd at Larsdalen for the holiday, this was about as private a place as could be found without ostentatiously riding out somewhere beyond the defenses. For a moment Larsson paused at the bottom of the veranda steps. Somewhere a rooster crowed; behind the workshop was a broad stretch of pasture where horses grazed, slanting up southwestward to a fringe of forest. The foundations of a citadel showed there at the highest point of the Larsdalen plateau—raw earth and sacks of cement, rebar and quarried rock. Beyond, the steep scarp of this outlier dropped to the flatlands around Rickreall; beyond
that
was the low green line of the Coast Range.

And behind him he could hear Mike Havel's voice. The workshop's walls were thin.

”—there's a reason you got the big farm and the help to work it and the rents and the Justice of the Peace appointment, Naysmith. And it
wasn't
so you could sit on your ass and drink beer and chase girls who didn't want to get caught. You're supposed to keep yourself and your people ready to fight, and administer
justice
. Christ Jesus, you
do
know what the word means, don't you?”

An inarticulate murmur, and then Havel's voice rising to a roar: “—will not abide trash behavior, Naysmith! This is your
last
warning; next inspection, I expect your holding's A-listers
and
the militia to perform by the numbers and on the bounce. And the next complaint about you bullying your people or taking more than the compact allows will be the last; if there's a petition against you I
will
have that hauberk off your back and I
will
strike you off the Brotherhood's rolls. And your assessment is doubled for this harvest—it'll come out of your share too, not the farmers. If you want to work for a squeezing bandit, you can take your sorry ass over the border and try your luck with the Protector.”