Thermodynamic Miracle

And then, a Thermodynamic Miracle! A short story by Mark Hale

The drive from Surrey to the AutoWeek offices at Blackfriars had never been fun, even before the internal combustion engine had been rendered virtually obsolete. Everyone called it a paradigm shift. Everyone, that was, apart from Ben Morrison. There was something fundamentally wrong, he opined, with the universal acceptance of a vehicle that was smaller and slower than even the most basic petrol-driven car, even if the PM Developments Viaus and its derivatives were taking the credit for a significant reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions. Now all the environmentalists had to worry about was all the carbon dioxide they themselves were pumping out as they congratulated each other on a job well done. Before PM Developments went public, Ben would console himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t melting the polar ice caps and drowning Madagascar on his own. Now, however, his Aston Martin DB9 was a fuel-burning ichthyosaur vying with a stream of eco-friendly dolphins. Now he sat in the traffic jams and glowered at his fuel gauge, trying to ignore the pitying looks of other so-called motorists. Everyone else on the road viewed fuel-burning vehicles as oddities and their drivers as misinformed luddites at best, contemptible polluters at worst. The traffic began to move again and, on the opposite carriageway, Ben saw a

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TVR Chimera. With its gilled flanks and snarling front grill, it looked like a shark within a school of tuna fish, but its driver wore the same defeated expression that Ben sometimes caught in his own bathroom mirror. He raised a hand in a weary salute. The TVR driver acknowledged with a listless flick of his wrist before passing out of sight. This was how the Wermacht must have felt after Stalingrad. Not only defeated, but resigned to the steady erosion of all they had once believed would last forever. The parking attendant sniffed pointedly and grimaced a grudging “Good morning, Mister Morrison.” The receptionist ignored the petrol fumes and pointedly looked through him as Ben strode into the foyer. This was what it must have felt like to be Jewish in Berlin in 1938, he opined to an empty lift as it carried him to the 5th floor. On mornings like this, he wondered how long he had until the editor-in-chief called him into his office for that final brief chat, before sending him on his way into freelance obscurity. The AutoWeek office suite was filled with bright, eco-evangelical young things these days, all too engrossed in surfing the net while they munched on their Quorn tortillas to even think about popping out to the pub for a lunchtime drink. Ben Morrison was just a fuel fossil in their eyes and some of the pre-shavers were openly contemptuous of him. They thought that he was just an old hack, out of touch with modern ways, soon to be shown the door. In the open plan office, his desk was meant to occupy a prestigious position, indicating his seniority. Today, however, he spun round from admiring the river view and realised that he was cornered, out of line with the ranks arranged around him, hopelessly

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outnumbered. The long-hoped-for phone call from his insider came as the editor-in-chief came to hover by Ben’s desk, preparing to strike. Ben snatched up the handset and answered as casually as he could. “Ben Morrison,” he purred, giving the editor a complicated ‘just a moment, this is really important’ hand signal. The man in the suit grunted dismissively and turned back toward his office. “Mister Morrison, hi, it’s Edie.” He couldn’t help but look round furtively. Despite his boss’s back being turned, Ben made an effort to look relaxed and composed. He spun his chair round toward the window with its normally soothing river view. The surface of the Thames churned like molten lead that morning, seemingly out of spite or possibly in sympathy with his stomach. “Are you still there?” The young woman’s impatience was evident in her voice. Ben knew that she held him in little less contempt than his colleagues did. You didn’t work for a hippy-dippy company like PM Developments without being a daffodil-carrying member of the Save the Planet Club. To someone like Edie, Ben Morrison was the motoring equivalent of meat products, Third World exploitation and animal testing. For her to contact him, something very bad had to be happening at PM. “Edie, hi, sorry about that. Busy busy here. How can I help?’ “I can’t talk now, Mister Morrison -,“ “Call me Ben.”

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“Whatever, look, we have to meet. I have - er, - things to show you.” “Lucky old me,” he chuckled. There was a chilly silence at the other end of the phone line. His little joke having been ignored, Ben swallowed and got serious. “When and where, Edie?” After that, the dreaded meeting went well. Under his crust of political correctness and eco-friendliness, the editor-in-chief of the magazine wore the brazen scales of a hardened media reptile. “This is your last chance, Ben. Absolutely your last. The board of directors have got you on their hit list and if you don’t come up with the goods this time...” “This time I’ve got an insider. There’s something rotten about PM Developments and their whole set-up, and this time I’m going to find out what’s going on at the heart of the company.” “Has your insider given you any clues?” “Nothing concrete, but I know that she’s part of their R and D team.” “You report to me on this, alright? If this story’s as big as you reckon it is, I want to see your copy before it goes anywhere near print.” “Now look, I’m a bloody good journalist, not some postgrad junior and -,“ The editor-in-chief slammed a fat hand on his desk. Ben imagined pictures jumping off their hooks in Singapore. In the silence that followed, outside the office the twitching of eyes away from monitors was almost audible. Inside the office, Ben began to understand what a lame wildebeest feels like. “And we had to take your opinion column away from you after your memorable article on PM Developments putting something in the water than made everyone

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buy flywheel cars. You’ve alleged drugging, brainwashing, cartels, monopolies, religious frenzy and almost every other wacko conspiracy theory ever dreamed up to discredit an organisation which is, in all fairness, a harmless bunch of hippies who generate a lot of wealth for this country. You have pursued what amounts to a vendetta against PM without as much as the tiniest hard fact with which to back yourself up. The guys in the legal department use your libel file as a doorstop and want to invite you to their lavish Christmas party, which you’re helping to pay for. Need I go on?” Ben looked down at the clenched fists in his lap and shook his head, knowing that his boss was going on anyway. “Before you try and print whatever black-magic-voodoo-child-sacrifice-devilworshipping nonsense you’re working on now, you’re going to have to convince me first. I have to think about this magazine’s reputation and I am sticking my neck out a very long way for you. Not a word in print until I’m sure that the mud’s going to stick this time.” Ben opened his mouth to retort, but the fat hand rose dismissively from the polished surface of the desk. His boss already knew that he had all the best lines in this particular script. The editor-in-chief folded his arms and sat back in his leather chair before taking a couple of deep breaths. “So, we do this my way” he purred, “Or you go back to your desk and start clearing it right now, okay?” Ben rehearsed his resignation speech on the way down to Somerset. Once he broke this story, he wouldn’t need to work for a rag like AutoWeek any more

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anyway. A story like this could lead to TV appearances, maybe even a TV career. Maybe he should just flip AutoWeek the finger and go straight to the dailies? With their massive circulation figures, the tabloid editors were more prepared to take a chance on a good old-fashioned journalistic hunch. No, TV was the future. Forget good old-fashioned journalism, get yourself an agent and find a niche in one of those motor shows where they were still allowed to say nice things about cars that did 9 miles to the gallon. The car must have picked up on his thoughts. The DB9 slowed slightly, as the engine coughed air through its injectors before picking up again. Fuel starvation. He cursed and turned off at the next service area he came to. Children stared as the Aston Martin rumbled past the Gordano Driver Recreation Area. Some held their noses and some made rude gestures until their parents told them to lay off. One or two, however, stared at the car with the same sparkle in their eyes that Ben remembered from his childhood. He looked at them and saw a ghostly image of himself, a 7-year-old reflection in the window of his local Ferrari showroom. His reverie faded as he reached the petrol pumps of the old service area. The price of Unleaded, scrawled on cardboard and lashed to a lamppost, had risen since he had left London, so he fumbled around to check his available cash before filling up. The petrol station’s shop area was shut and dark, the shelves and magazine racks empty. At the kiosk, a surly youth wearing a grubby Shell polo shirt and a greasy BP baseball cap appeared behind the scratched perspex

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and silently took his £500. A 5p coin and a handwritten receipt were shoved through the cash slot at him before the young ghoul faded back into the gloom. If he was honest with himself, he couldn’t afford to keep the Aston on the road for much longer. Only a fat TV presenter salary would keep filling the petrol tank now that the government was charging 210% duty plus VAT on forecourt fuel. Well, they had to keep the revenue coming in somehow. Perhaps, he wondered, he should write a scare story about a pay-per-mile scheme for flywheel cars and allege that their thin low-friction tyres were beginning to wear deep grooves in the nation’s tarmac. On the slip road, a light pressure on the accelerator pedal brought the DB9 up to and easily over the speed of the other traffic. Ben muscled the car into the overtaking lane, ignoring the feeble horns and dimly flashing headlights of the eco-mobiles that he had forced to lose valuable momentum. The third lane was clear, apart from the occasional brave soul who judged his moment just right and managed that rare event, a double overtake. Apart from the dwindling number of petrol or LPG powered cars, the only other vehicles with the power to stay in this overtaking lane were the diesel-electric hybrids used by the emergency services. To his left, the stream of eco-mobiles seemed to reverse past the DB9. Why would anyone want to drive a vehicle with a power source based on a child’s toy? Flywheel driven cars might be cheap to run, but where was the excitement in a top speed around the motorway limit and a 0 to 60 time that you needed a calendar to measure? So what if they were cleaner and more energy-efficient than motorcars? The average flywheel car was a slow, soulless little people pod,

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no matter how much good press the damn thing attracted. He forced his jaw to unclench and tried not to grip the steering wheel so tightly. This was what galled him most about the rise of the flywheel car. PM Developments arrived from nowhere with their mad as yo-yos drive concept, endured the derision of the scientific mainstream and the motoring press, and still managed to charm Britain’s biggest remaining volume car manufacturer into collaborating on a concept car. The resulting vehicle, the Viaus, was a slow, bland, featureless 5-seater capsule on wheels. To save weight, the occupants of the Viaus had to do without air conditioning or even a basic radio. It went into production despite a lack of even the most basic comforts, not to mention the beasting it was given by the motoring press. The investors kept their nerve despite the poor reviews and were vindicated when the Viaus rolled off dealership forecourts in a steady stream. Ben drove past the PM Developments site on his way to meeting Edie. Tower cranes loomed over a new complex that was being built to house the company’s truck research facility. Now that the flywheel had achieved dominance in cars, the race was on to develop the technology for freight haulage. Here, it was rumoured, PM had hit a wall. Ben allowed himself a slow smile as he glanced over at the construction site. For the first time since its founding, PM share values were shelving as the company re-invested heavily in truck research and development. The CBI had already issued warnings about the private sector’s confidence in flywheel technology waning. The cost of moving goods around was increasing

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dramatically, in line with the cost of diesel fuel. HM Customs and Excise had had to set up a task force to deal with all the illegal duty-dodging BioDiesel refineries popping up in isolated farm outbuildings and quiet rural industrial estates. In parliament, the leader of the opposition was getting a lot of mileage out of monetary inflation edging dangerously close to double figures for the first time in decades. PM’s supporters were beginning to get edgy and all that was needed was one push to get the wrecking ball rolling. The company was uncharacteristically tightlipped about its lack of progress with heavy goods vehicles, but Ben was about to interview the one PM employee who might be willing to tell him what was going on. The pub where they were due to meet wasn’t far away. Edie Birchell was small and slim and dressed, Ben thought, like a typical hippy. With a long patchwork skirt and matching waistcoat worn over an oversized man’s shirt, her outfit looked like some sort of alternative corporate uniform. Looking around the pub, Ben noticed that other customers were wearing similar outfits. He glanced back at Edie in time to see her unpinning the PM Developments ID badge from her waistcoat. “They don’t really make you dress like that, do they?” he said, loudly enough to attract a couple of sharp glances from people at the bar. The young woman ignored his comment, grabbed his arm and steered him toward the door “We can’t really talk here, but you’d never have found my place without me guiding you,” she told him, releasing her grip on his arm as they crossed the car park. She glanced around as she unlocked a folding bicycle from the beer garden

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fence. “Yours, I take it?” she sneered, jerking her head at the DB9 which was wedged in between a Viaus and a 3-seater cycle rickshaw. “I’m happy to follow you if you don’t wish to get into the Satan-mobile.” “Just meet me round the corner. I’m not getting into it in front of the pub.” In a quiet side street, Edie checked both ways before she hefted her bike into the DB9’s boot, scuttled round and settled herself into the passenger seat. She began to talk as soon as the doors were closed. “You’re here for the dirt on PM Developments, aren’t you?” “Yup.” “Well, this is supposed to be a set-up.” Ben glanced over at the young woman. Apart from her appalling clothing, she was very attractive. “Do you mean,” he purred, “a honey trap?” “In your dreams. I mean that I’m supposed to be casting a glamour over you. Turn left here.” “A what-er?” Ben asked as he spun the wheel and aimed the car down a narrow lane. “Right at the next crossroads. An influence spell, something to bring you round to the PM way of thinking.” “Are we talking witchcraft here?” “What else? Look, how much do you really know about PM’s operation?” “Well, any company that trademarks the phrase ‘Too Good to be True’ has to be up to something. I mean, come on, you arrive from nowhere, charm the pants

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off almost everyone in the motor industry and within 5 years get most of the western world driving around in Mighty Mos…” “Mighty what?” Suddenly, Ben felt very old. This girl had to be at least 15 years younger than him. “When I was a kid,” he told her, “There was a toy car called a Mighty Mo. One push would send this thing from one side of the school playground to the other. It worked pretty much the same way as a Viaus does now.” Edie smiled radiantly as she replied. Ben could not believe what she told him. They sat in Edie’s lounge, drinking mugs of camomile and honey tea. Ben was still trying to work out how he could put what he had been told into print without losing what little credibility he had left. “Um,” he muttered, “you said something about proof?” “Oh yes.” Edie said brightly. Leaving her mug on a low table, she skipped out of the room and returned with a gyroscope and what looked like a wooden letter opener. “Here,” she said, offering the gyroscope to Ben, “can you get this going?” He placed the toy on the low table and jerked the string wrapped round its central shaft. The gyroscope rotor span and when he took his hands away the whole assembly remained upright, swaying gently. He looked up to find Edie counting, noiselessly enunciating the numbers. As the gyroscope wobbled and fell over, she called; “Right, 24 seconds, or thereabouts. Can you set it up again?”

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Ben did as he was asked, winding the string around the central shaft before placing the gyroscope on the table and whipping it into life again. He looked up to see Edie pointing the letter opener at the gently swaying toy and whispering; “Annal nadrach, urthas bethud, dochiel dienveg.” Then she sat next to him and picked up her mug again. “Now what?” he asked. “Start counting, of course” At the count of 60, he could see no change in the gyroscope wheel’s speed. He picked the toy up and balanced it on his finger for a further count of 60. No change. He tried to pinch the wheel between his fingers and yelped as it gave him a friction burn. Dropping the toy to the floor, he put his injured fingers to his mouth and blew on them. Edie got up and retrieved the gyroscope, placing it back on the table where it continued to spin. “So that’s why no one else can get the bloody things to work. They don’t have witches in their R & D teams! Look, you have to come to London with me and show my editor this.” Edie’s face darkened. “I didn’t bring you down here to reveal the basics of witchcraft, Ben. This,” she told him, gesturing dramatically at the gyroscope, “is nothing compared to what PM are up to in the HGV research facility.” “So what’s going on there then?” “You’re going to need this,” she said, handing him a black balaclava helmet that smelled faintly of patchouli oil. Once it was dark, they walked across the fields to a small copse on the west

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side of the PM Developments compound. Edie had changed into a black BDU suit covered in pockets and a black ski mask before they left and looked, Ben thought, like a short SAS groupie. Something, however, deterred him from sharing this insight with his companion. Edie gave a low whistle and Ben saw 6 similarly attired shadows detach themselves from the trees and gather around. “Who’s this?’ One of the shadows enquired. “Not a good time to be bringing strangers in on our plans now” “He’s a journalist, Hando. We only get the one chance and if it goes wrong, then at least he gets to report what he sees.” “Now look,” Hando hissed, “We’re not bloody amateurs. We were fighting for animal rights before you knew a wand from a chalice, girlie!” Ben was about to ask just what the hell the Animal Liberation Army was doing there, but Edie got in first. “Maybe so, but you won’t even get over the fence here without my help.” “Bollocks. We’ve already done a survey and there’s no cameras or wires to be found. We’ll be over it in no time. You can stay and watch if you want.” “Fine,” Edie replied testily, “I could do with a laugh.” The 6 shadows moved up to the fence. Ben went to follow them but Edie gently restrained him with a tug on the sleeve of his jacket. “Watch,” she muttered. A small folding ladder was quickly extended and a heavy blanket tossed over the barbed wire strands at the top of the fence. Hando was up the ladder and put one, then the other hand on the blanket before he turned into a piglet and

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dropped squealing onto the grass among his comrades. There was a collective gasp of “Bloody hell,” as Hando sprinted away from the fence as fast as his newly-formed trotters could take him. “Okay,” Edie told the remaining animal liberators, “Now that we’ve established that we’re not breaking into just another bloody beagle farm, can I do what I’m here for?” After waiting for 5 sheepish murmurs of assent, she produced the wooden letter opener and walked toward the fence at an acute angle, repeating the same incantation that Ben had heard her use in her lounge. After a minute or so, she went to the ladder, climbed it, eased herself over the blanketed barbs and dropped down on the other side of the fence. “What are you waiting for,” she hissed, “An invitation?” The outlying building were low, their roofs covered in turf. The new HGV facility loured over them, a 3-storey concrete blockhouse, a missile silo in the middle of a model village. Edie let the group into the structure with a set of disappointingly conventional keys and led them past some impressively big and unidentifiable machinery to a heavy steel door. The now- familiar procedure with the wooden knife and the chanting ensued, before Edie motioned to the wheel in the centre of the door. 2 burly ALA members stepped forward, spun the wheel and, shoulders heaving, between them managed to get the foot-thick door open. Ben followed the rest of the team into a room full of ferns and mosses. The floor was thickly coated with bark chippings and he could hear water trickling in the background.

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“What is this?” he wondered aloud. “A crime against nature,” one of the ALA activists muttered grimly, “a place where defenceless animals are cruelly experimented upon. I hope you’re taking notes.” Ben noticed the hard, fanatical gleam in the activist’s eyes and tried to move away slowly. He backed into Edie, who firmly took his arm and guided him to the back of the room, where a small water feature had been built. A spout from the wall splashed water down a tumble of rocks and into a wide, shallow pool on the floor. “What,” he queried, “sort of animals are PM Developments experimenting upon, Edie? Apart from the whole bloody human race, I mean.” Her reply was to gesture toward the water feature and then point out the small black-and- orange reptiles that were gathered around the mini-waterfall. “Never a herpetologist around when you need one,” he sighed. “What are they?’ “Salamanders,” she told him, as if that explained everything. Completely bemused, Ben watched as the ALA team produced an array of glass jars from their rucksacks. 2 of the team then went on to kit themselves out with incongruously floral-patterned oven gloves. Each clumsily clutching a jar in one flowery mitt and a wooden spoon in the other, they advanced on the small colony of salamanders. “Watch this,” Edie murmured. As one of the creatures was prodded toward the neck of a jar, the spoon used

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to prod it emitted a puff of smoke, then a small yellow twist of flame. The salamander herder cursed and extinguished his fiery spoon in the pool. Touching the little animal again, the dampened spoon squeaked and steamed. “They’re magical creatures, you see,” Edie sighed as the salamanders were gingerly retrieved, each one placed in its own small glass cell, “and when you irritate them, they produce a lot of heat.” “Enough to power a lorry? You’re not serious. You don’t mean to tell me that PM Developments plans to power the next generation of heavy goods vehicles by torturing small lizards’?! That’s crazy!” “No, not crazy. Just desperate and inhumane.” “So there’s a limit to what the flywheel drive can do, and now your bosses are trying to find new ways of maintaining this tree hugging, hamster kissing, happy clappy world they’ve created?” Ben felt 6 pairs of glittering eyes lock on to him. “No offence,” he added. “The Board of Directors claim that the Wheel of Life can be made to produce the power we need for bigger drives, but it’s moved us onto a new plateau of magical research where wands and spells of making just aren’t enough. The salamanders are meant to be a stopgap until we can create bigger flywheels -, “ “But you object to them being poked with sticks to produce the heat needed for a fuel-free power plant,” Ben concluded. “Fair enough. The dreaming and the deceit will stop when I expose what’s going on here.” “No one’s asked us for our opinion,” a small voice piped up. “Yes, what if we don’t want to be rescued?” another tiny voice enquired.

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“Before you ask,” Ben told the other humans in the room, “ventriloquism is not part of my skill set.” “I think that we should put the salamanders back,” Edie advised. “Bollocks,” one of the oven-gloved activists opined, shortly before his hand protection burst into flames. In seconds, the salamander he was carrying turned its prison into a glowing orange glob. As the ALA man screamed and tried to put his hands out, the glob fell to the floor and the small reptile extricated itself from the fiery goo. “As I was saying,” it continued in a conversational tone as it wiped the remaining molten glass from its back with sinuous motions of its rear legs, “what if we don’t want to be rescued?” “Urn, why would you want to stay?” Edie asked, sheepishly. “To fulfil a prophecy, young lady,” the salamander replied, condescendingly. “The Age of Aquarius,” Ben murmured, awestruck and mildly embarrassed. As the words formed on his lips, he realised how much they made him sound like a hippy. “Exactly so,” the salamander said, fixing Ben with a particularly beady stare, “Aquarius. The New Millennium. A long-promised and much-needed age of great change and a reawakening to the old ways of Earth magic. A time when the once-harmonious balance of humankind’s relationship with Nature can be restored. Well done, young man, very perceptive of you.” “Oh, thanks very much, but what about all the prodding with sticks to make you generate heat?” Ben asked.

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“Oh, we can regulate our heat output easily enough when we choose to,” the salamander replied smugly. “We will provide the heat that you need to keep your civilisation going until you find a magic that can make the great wheels turn on their own.” “But what if we make you captives and use your heat to power our machines forever?” Edie implored as the salamander made its way back to the pool. “Young lady,” the tiny reptile replied, a vestige of a smile playing across its wide mouth, “Everything man can make will melt when gets it hot enough...”

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