Originally appeared in Amazing Stories, Vol. 67 No. 2, (1992) GREAT LOST INVENTIONS By James Killus TWENTIETH CENTURY: CLASS ONE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE Perpetual motion! Harris could barely contain his excitement. He wanted to throw back his head and laugh a mighty laugh, like all the mad scientists in the movies. Nuts? Sure. But then he'd just tossed centuries of physics out the window! It seemed like too loony a thing to work, yet there it was. He made another adjustment on a field coil and watched his power gauges. The machine responded with a slight metallic shriek and the arc lamp that he was using as the load became nearly blinding. All on a power input of about a tenth of an amp. What kind of gain was that? He checked his figures. Yes, he was now up to six thousand percent. How was it possible? He really had no idea, but who could argue with facts? Energy out greatly exceeded energy in. He tried out his mad scientist laugh again. He shouted, "I've invented perpetual motion!" He went upstairs to get his camera. This moment should be recorded for posterity. The Previous Day Harris looked over his notes in wonderment. It didn't seem possible. When he had first begun to study the fractal topology of magnetic field coils he had held a vague idea that it might make a more efficient transformer for low hertz A.C. But his results were beginning to look very odd. It seemed that the energy output from one particular configuration went up according to a slightly greater than quadratic functionality. On the other hand, the power input requirements were exactly quadratic. He had at first assumed that it was a just brief glitch in the coil efficiency, that it would smooth out pretty soon and input and output dependencies would begin to match up. Instead, it looked like the divergence was increasing with increasing power to the device. If this kept up then. . . There was a sudden shimmering in the air in front of him. He tried blinking his eyes, attributing the sudden effect to eyestrain. But instead of going away, the shimmer congealed into two men dressed in black. One of them had a friendly look on his face. The other looked like he was smelling a skunk. "Gregory Harris?" the mean looking one said, but Harris could tell that it was a rhetorical question. "We have come for you." "Excuse me?" was all Harris could think to say. He always had been the sort that would think of the perfect riposte about two weeks late. "Who are you?" he asked. "We are of the enforcement division of the Council for Spatio-Temporal Security," the man in black replied. "Huh?" The friendly one shook his head. "Look, Joe. There's no need to scare him into idiocy." He looked at Harris. "We're Time Cops," he said. "We're from the future." It seemed almost an apology. Harris was beginning to again regain the use of his frontal lobes. They were cops all right, no mistaking the old hard/soft whipsaw. Still, no use letting them think they were getting away with the whole con. "You expect me to believe that?" he demanded, looking straight at the mean looking one. The tough time cop sneered. "You're just about to invent a perpetual motion machine and you're having credulity problems? Get real, Mac." "His name is Greg, Joe," said the friendly cop. "Greg Harris, remember?" Then to Harris he said "Look Mr. Harris, I know this is a shock and an imposition, but it's also very important. You are about to invent a device that will completely screw up the universe. We're here to stop you from doing it." "Look," said Harris. "Even if I believed that I was about to invent perpetual motion, which I don't, how can that screw up the entire universe?" "Simple," said the friendly one. "You're familiar with the inflationary hypothesis?" "Too much money chasing too few goods?" This earned him a scowl from Joe. "Nah, this is cosmology. The inflationary hypothesis says that, owing to the nature of the big bang and the topology of the universe, the kinetic energy of the expansion of the universe just equals gravitational attraction. So the universe neither expands without limit nor does it ever fall into itself again. It reaches an asymptote." "So what does this have to do with me?" said Harris, but he was beginning to have a sinking feeling. "So your device taps energy from another universe. Its vaguely related to time travel, which we'd also have to quash. This is bad enough without having to deal with people untrained in anachronism theory." "You're starting to babble, Ed," said the mean looking cop. "Oh. Sorry. Must be the oxygen in the air. Anyway. More energy shows up as mass, that upsets the balance and sometime in the far future the universe implodes. Sorry, but we have to kill you now." "What!" screamed Harris. "Wait! No, look. I'll destroy my notes. I'll quit my job. I'll leave the country. . ." Joe consulted his notes. "It says here that if we take your offer, you'll tell one of your grandchildren about your research, and then we have to kill her." He looked at Harris as if he were pond slime. "Really, your own granddaughter." "How can I be convicted for a crime I haven't committed yet? How can I have a granddaughter if you kill me? I won't say anything to her. Honest." "How can we trust someone who'd do that to his own flesh and blood? Besides, only one chance and no appeals. Breaking the law of mass/energy conservation is a capital crime" Both men lifted their hands. Harris never even knew what killed him. GREAT LOST INVENTIONS OF THE TWENTY FIRST CENTURY: CLASS TWO PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE U Chim consulted his notes and wiped his brow. Amazing, simply amazing. The field seemed to be a perfect heat sink. Perfect. What a fortunate accident. How pleased his family would be. He had started out merely dabbling in some of the principles of magnetic refrigeration. That was natural enough, his country was so devilishly hot. Sometimes he longed for the cool he had experienced in his school days at Oxford. He soon replicated most conventional phenomena of material cooling with tuned magnetic coupling. Then he began to experiment with different topological configurations of the magnetic field. That is when he made his breakthrough. One particular field configuration produced amazingly efficient cooling. In fact, it seemed to be more efficient than the second law of thermodynamics would allow; it behaved as if it were at absolute zero. This seemed impossible, but he had to find out. It had required a fairly simple sterling engine to make use of the heat sink field. From there, well, the efficiency of the engine approached one hundred percent extraction of thermal energy. It was difficult to measure precisely. Since the field did not require much power to maintain, the work extracted from any source of heat greatly exceeded the field requirements. How was this possible? It seemed like perpetual motion. It was perpetual motion. U Chim did a little hop in delight. He began making plans to celebrate. The Previous Day U Chim was bending over his laboratory bench when the air behind him began glowing. He noticed the change in light and turned to find two men standing where no one had been moments before. Both men were dressed in black. "U Chim," said one of them. It was not a question. Then they identified themselves as Time Police and accused him of felony conspiracy to break the Second Law of Thermodynamics. U Chim was dumbfounded. "How can this be illegal?" asked U Chim. "How can it do harm?" "Time's arrow," said the policeman who did not look as if he were crawling around in a sewer. "Entropy is time's arrow. If it doesn't continue to increase, you can't tell the difference between past and future at the cosmic level. Make's time travel even more dangerous than it is already." "But if I did not use the device excessively..." began U Chim. "Nope," the policeman replied. "Even if you don't, someone will. That's why it's a conspiracy rap." "And that's not all," said the unpleasant one, the one who was wrinkling his nose as if at a bad smell. "Your device also violates energy conservation. You are using an outcropping in another universe as an anchor to selectively transfer momentum from molecule to molecule. It's very efficient because of the great differences in mass between molecules and your anchor, but it's not one hundred percent. The heat sink field loses one part in ten million of energy throughput. Entropy is reduced, but so is the total energy content of the universe. So you're in for misdemeanor violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics as well." "I do not understand," said U Chim for the seventeenth time in ten minutes. "It's the old inflationary hypothesis," said Ed, the one who did not look like he had just murdered his mother. "Expansion and gravitation are in balance. If you lose net mass and energy from the universe, the velocity of the outer edges increases and becomes faster than light. There's a positive feedback effect, even, that gets worse over time. So use of your gizmo now causes the loss of a lot of valuable real estate in the very far future. This makes our sponsors very upset. So it's a capital offense, just like the Second Law violation." He seemed apologetic. U Chim opened his mouth to beg for his life. To offer to destroy his research. But the one called Joe held up his hand. "Save it," he said. "We've found that only one in seventy of you guys that make deals can actually keep them, and that's not worth the expense. So now we just do it and it's over." Already over that is. GREAT LOST INVENTIONS OF THE THIRTY FIRST CENTURY LEGAL PERPETUAL MOTION Ed Mundy, now with the Research Division of the Council for Spacio- Temporal Security (the Time Corps), did not like to feel like a criminal, but he did. He had an idea running around in his head that wouldn't go away. Technically, it was illegal. On the other hand, technically, it wasn't. That's the way the law worked, you never really knew until you were convicted sometime before you broke the law. Sometimes he wished he were still in enforcement. But not often. The idea that haunted him was this: the two ways of using interdimensional fractal fields resulted in either a gain in energy or a loss. But suppose you were to combine the two functions? You'd still be able to reduce entropy locally, but you'd balance out the energy flows so that the conservation laws were maintained. So you'd be off the hook. Maybe. Only one way to find out, though. So he tried it, and it worked. The Previous Year Joe and Ed were having a beer, and Ed was griping again about maybe quitting enforcement and getting a cushy lab job. Joe said something encouraging. Then the air beside them started to shimmer in a way that was both familiar and unfamiliar. Suddenly, there were two strange looking aliens standing there. They were dressed in what looked like pressure suits, and condensation mist began to form around them. The room chilled perceptibly. A little box that they had with them began to speak. "Joe Cannon and Ed Mundy," the box squawked. It was not a question. Joe opened his mouth to speak, but another shimmering appeared and another set of aliens appeared. Their suits were so hot they nearly glowed. The new guys also had a box and it started to speak. The jumble of sounds from the two boxes began to overlap. The racket was hard to understand. Something about Interdimensional Security, multiple universes, and the inflationary hypothesis. Something about conspiracy and partners in crime. Joe looked at Ed. Ed looked back sheepishly. Joe closed his mouth. He knew that nothing he could say would really make any difference.