Ken Kesey - Demon Box

"About one hundred years ago there lived a British physicist named James Clerk Maxwell. Entropy fascinated him also. As a physicist he had great affection for the wonders of our physical universe, and it seemed to him too cruel that all the moving things of our world, all the marvelous, spinning, humming, ticking, breathing things, should be doomed to run down and die. Was there no remedy to this unfair fate? The problem gnawed at him and, in British bulldog fashion, he gnawed back. At length he felt he had devised a solution, a loophole around one of the bleakest laws on the books. What he did was… he devised this."

Carefully cradling the checkbook near the flame so all could see, he began to draw on the back of a check, a simple rectangular box. "Professor Maxwell postulated, 'Imagine we have a box, sealed, full of the usual assortment of molecules careening about in the dark… and inside this box a dividing partition, and in this partition a door' "

At the bottom of the partition he outlined a door with tiny hinges and doorknob.

" 'And standing beside this door… a demon!' " He sketched a crude stick figure with a tiny stick arm reaching for the doorknob.

" 'Now further imagine,' said our Professor, 'that this demon is trained to open and close this door for those flying molecules. When he sees a hot molecule approaching he lets it pass through to this side' " – he drew a large block H on the right half of the box – " 'and when he sees a cold, slow-moving molecule our obedient demon closes the door, containing it on this, the cold side of the box.' "

Mesmerized, we watched the puckered hand draw the C.

" 'Should not it then follow,' Professor Maxwell reasoned, 'that as the left side of the box got colder the right side would begin to get hot? Hot enough to boil steam and turn a turbine? A very small turbine, to be certain, but theoretically capable of generating energy none the less, free, and from within a closed system? Thus actually circumventing the second law of thermodynamics would it not?' "

Dobbs had to admit that it seemed to him like it ought to work; he said he had encountered such demons as looked like they had the muscle to manage it.

"Ah, precisely – the muscle. So. Within a few decades another fascinated physicist published another essay, which argued that even granted that such a system could be made, and that the demon-slave could be compelled to perform the system's task without salary, the little imp still would not be without expense! He would need muscles to move the door, and sustenance to give those muscles strength. In short, he would need food.

"Another few decades pass. Another pessimist theorizes that the demon would also have to have light, to be able to see the molecules. Further energy outlay to be subtracted from the profit. The twentieth century brings theorists that are more pessimistic still. They insist that Maxwell's little dybbuk will not only require food and light but some amount of education as well, to enable him to evaluate which molecules are fast-moving and hot enough, which are too slow and cool. Mr. Demon must enroll in special courses, they maintain. This means tuition, transportation to class, textbooks, perhaps eyeglasses. More expense. It adds up…

"The upshot? After a century of theoretical analysis, the world of physics reached a very distressing conclusion: that Maxwell's little mechanism will not only consume more energy than it produces and cost more than it can ever make, it will continue to do so in increase! Does this remind you of anything, children?"

"It reminds me," my brother Buddy said, "of the atomic power plants they're building up in Washington."

"Just so, yah, only worse. Now. Imagine again, please, that this box" – he bent again over the picture with his ballpoint, changing the H into a G - - "represents the cognitive process of Modern civilization. Eh? And that this side, let's say, represents 'Good.' This other side, 'bad.' "

He changed the C to an ornate B, then waggled the picture at us through the steam.

"Our divided mind! in all its doomed glory! And ensconced right in the middle is this medieval slavey, under orders to sort through the whirling blizzard of experience and separate the grain from the chaff. He must deliberate over everything, and to what end? Purportedly to further us in some way, eh? Get us an edge in wheat futures, a master's degree, another rung up the ladder of elephant shit. Glorious rewards supposedly await us if our slave piles up enough 'good.' But he must accomplish this before he bankrupts us, is the catch. Und all this deliberating, it makes him hungry. He needs more energy. Such an appetite."

His hand had drifted down to float on the surface, the checkbook still pinched aloft between thumb and finger.

"Our accounts begin to sink into the red. We have to float loans from the future. At the wheel we sense something dreadfully wrong. We are losing way! We must maintain way or we lose the rudder! We hammer on the bulkhead of the engine room: 'Stoker! More hot molecules, damn your ass! We're losing way!' But the hammering only seems to make him more ravenous. At last it becomes clear: we must fire this fireman."

We watched the hand. It was gradually sinking, checkbook and all, into the dark waters.

"But these stokers have built up quite the maritime union over the past century, and they have an ironclad contract, binding their presence on board to our whole crew of conscious faculties. If Stokey goes, everybody goes, from the navigator right down to the sphincter's mate. We may be drifting for the rocks but there is nothing we can do but stand at the wheel, helpless, and wait for the boat to go… down."

He held the vowel, bowing his voice like a fine cello. "O, my sailors, what I say is sad but true – our brave new boat is sinking. Every day finds more of us drowning in depression, or drifting aimlessly in a sea of antidepressants, or grasping at such straws as psychodrama and regression catharsis. Fah! The problem does not lie in poo-poo fantasies from our past. It is this mistake we have programmed into the machinery of our present that has scuttled us!"

The book was gone. Not a ripple remained. Finally the court recorder broke the spell with her flat, cornbelt voice.

"Then what do you advise we do, doctor? You've figured somethin', I can tell by the way you're leadin' us on."

That voice was the only thing flat she'd brought from Nebraska. Woofner leered at her for a moment, his face streaming moisture like some kind of seagoing Pan's; then he sighed and raised the checkbook high to let the water trickle out of it.

"I'm sorry, dear. The doctor has not figured anything. Maybe someday. Until then, his considered advice is to live with your demon as peacefully as possible, to make fewer demands and be satisfied with less results… and above all, mine students, to strive constantly to be here!"

The wet checkbook slapped the water. We jumped like startled frogs again. Woofner wheezed a laugh and surged standing, puffy and pale as Moby Dick himself.

"Class dismissed. Miss Omaha? A student in such obviously fit condition shouldn't object to helping a poor old pedagogue up to his bed, yah?"

"How about if I walk along?" I had to ask. "It's time I checked on the bus."

"By all means, Devlin." He grinned. "The fit and the fascinated. You may carry the wine."

After getting dressed, I accompanied the girl and the old man on the walk up to the cottages. We walked in single file up the narrow path, the girl in the middle. I was still in a steam from the hot-tub talk and wanting to keep after it, but the doctor didn't seem so inclined. He inquired instead about my legal status. He'd followed the bust in the papers – was I really involved in all those chemical experiments, or was that merely more San Francisco Chronicle crap? Mostly crap, I told him. I was flattered that he asked.