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.