Authors: John Connolly
The Infernals (32 page)
16.
If you’re bored sometime, and want to puzzle your parents:
1) Fill a small plastic glass with a little water.
2) Lift said glass as if to drink from it.
3) Bypass your mouth and instead touch the glass to your forehead.
4) Spill a little of the water down your face.
5) Tell your parents that you thought you were taller.
6) Take a bow. Ask people to tip their waitress. Tell them you’ll be here all week.
7) Leave.
Actually, we have a tendency to take our reflection for granted at the best of times, when it’s really quite extraordinary. When you see your reflection in a window at night, perhaps with a city visible through the glass beyond, it’s because 95 percent of the light striking the window has gone straight through while 5 percent has been reflected, hence the ghostly image of your face. This proves the particle nature of light, but what’s troubling is that the 5 percent of particles of energy, or photons, that create your image are reflected for no particularly good reason that we can understand, indicating the possibility of randomness at the heart of the universe. There’s a one-in-twenty chance that a photon will be reflected instead of transmitted, which means that we can’t know for certain how a given photon will behave. This is very troubling for scientists. If you want to give your science teacher a nervous breakdown, ask why this happens.
It was the great scientist Albert Einstein who discovered that matter can be changed to energy, and energy to matter, as in an atomic explosion. His discovery was based upon the work of the physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, who produced the world’s first artificial nuclear disintegration in 1932, and their work in turn contributed to the creation of the LHC. Thus, it’s really the law of conservation of energy
and
matter. But one of the forgotten pioneers in this area is the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794), who, in his spare time, became fascinated by the possibility that all of the bits and pieces of stuff on Earth—lions, tigers, budgerigars, trees, slugs, iron, and the like—were parts of a single interconnected whole. He and his wife, Marie Anne, began rusting pieces of metal in a sealed apparatus, then weighing them along with the air that was lost. They found that the rusted metal, rather than weighing less than before, or the same, in fact weighed
more,
because the oxygen molecules in the air had adhered to the metal. In other words, matter was changing from one form to another, but not disappearing. Lavoisier met a terrible end: he had offended a frustrated scientist, Jean-Paul Marat, and during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) that followed the French Revolution, Marat, who was prominent in the Reign, got his revenge: Lavoisier was tried, sentenced, and then beheaded, all in one day. When a plea for mercy was entered on his behalf, the judge responded: “The Republic has no need of geniuses.” The next time that you burn a match, spare a thought for Lavoisier.
Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), for example, experimented with blood transfusions, possibly in an effort to discover the secret of eternal youth. Unfortunately, some of the blood was infected with malaria and tuberculosis, and he promptly died. Meanwhile Carl Scheele (1742–1786), the discoverer of tungsten and chlorine, among other chemical elements, liked to taste his discoveries. He survived tasting hydrogen cyanide but not, alas, mercury.
Actually, the Collider experiment had been plagued by many difficulties in addition to the unfortunate scientists/demons interface, including a mishap caused by a bird dropping a piece of baguette into the machinery, so that one prominent scientist even suggested it was being sabotaged from the future in order to prevent it from being turned on and sucking the planet into a big black hole, or transforming it to ash. On the other hand, those of us who hadn’t spent too long hanging around with overly imaginative scientists, and who got out of the house occasionally, thought that the idea of sabotage from the future seemed to be pushing it a bit.
Actually, as we have established, it was generally considered unwise to drink Spiggit’s at all.
Well, I say “experiment,” but his fellow dwarfs simply sat on him and poured the sediment down his throat, then quickly stepped back to watch what happened. While this is still technically an experiment, it also qualifies as torture, as does almost anything involving the involuntary ingestion of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar.
There usually isn’t very much to read in
The Infernal Times:
the weather is always hot with a chance of fireballs; everybody is either miserable, angry, or tormented; and your favorite football team is in the process of losing its most recent match because, in Hell,
both
teams always lose. And keep losing. To a controversial penalty decision. In extra time. And extra time goes on forever.
Not even the jobs of the really lame demons like Watchtower, the demon of people who ring the doorbell just as you’re about to serve dinner; Eugh, the demon of things found dead in soup, with additional responsibility for flies in ointment; Bob, the demon of things that float when you don’t want them to; Glug, the demon of things that sink when you don’t want them to; and Gang and Agley, the demons responsible for disrupting the best-laid plans of mice. Mice really hate them. If it wasn’t for them, mice would rule the world.