夏笳 : 關妖精的瓶子

The Demon-Enslaving Flask

By Xia Jia

Translated by Linda Rui Feng

ALTHOUGH James C. Maxwell was a rigorous physicist, he could nonetheless

remain unfazed when confronted with supernatural phenomena. This was

probably all due to his wife’s enthusiastic interest, over the years, in all types of

folk tales and legends.

Right now the uninvited guest was sitting next to the fireplace, looking

somewhat shabby. It was only after repeated entreaties from his host that he

finally—and reluctantly—took off his hat. It was a heavy wrinkled pointed hat

of olive green, which he was now fiddling with on his knee, leaving exposed his

sweat-soaked brow and a pair of furry, iconic ears.

‘Excuse me for a moment,’ Maxwell said to him and left the living room. Mrs

Maxwell was by this point standing at the end of the hallway, holding a cup of

coffee.

‘So this is the legendary demon?’ she asked with curiosity.

‘At least he says so himself.’

‘He’s rather large in stature,’ she commented, ‘though ineffectual-looking.’

Indeed, sitting next to the fireplace, that—what might one call it? Thing?—was

devoid of any appearance of grace, enigma or even the ability to instill awe. He

was wearing a rough coat and looked like a farmhand who had just emerged from

a field of corn, despite the fact that he had indeed landed in Maxwell’s laboratory

in a shroud of smoke accompanied by the proverbial boom.

‘This must be some kind of a joke,’ Maxwell said, ‘though I cannot understand

what it is.’

‘Still, be prudent. We shouldn’t judge people by their appearance, much less

demons,’ Mary said without any hint of anxiety. The two of them returned to the

living room together.

After downing a cup of hot black coffee, the demon seemed visibly more at

ease. So Maxwell took up the original conversational thread: ‘Mr Ro … pardon

me, you said your full name was …?’

‘Cornelius Gustav Rumpelstiltskin,’ said the demon, looking almost

embarrassed.1

‘This is what people ended up calling me; an ancient Germanic

name.’

‘Yes, yes, sir, but let us continue—we were talking about Archimedes just now.’

‘Right, he was my first master, you see. But to be perfectly honest with you, he

was a bloody old lunatic,’ the Demon said, pulling a long face. ‘For dozens of years

I was at his beck and call, and I built pile after pile of useless things. The night

before the Romans barged Syracuse, he sealed me under slats of stone. It’d

be another hundred plus years before I could come out, you see.’ 2

Quite amazingly,

the demon’s eyes grew misty at this point, and he hastily used the back of his

furry hand to wipe them away.

Maxwell cleared his throat. ‘I quite understand. But you haven’t told me about

the wager you two made back then.’

‘Wager? Yes … it was so long ago and all rather … fuzzy to me,’ the demon

stammered and continued to fiddle with his hat. ‘The odds were against me from

the very start—I’m sure you know what a curmudgeon he was.’

‘Very well, then. But how did you emerge again out of Mr Faraday’s laboratory

notes?’

‘That was a long story, with many things happening in between. If you knew

the long list of people I served, you’d probably guess it all, and I wouldn’t have

to ramble on needlessly here.’ The demon lifted his face toward Maxwell with a

plaintive look. ‘You physicists are a crazy lot, when it comes down to it. You take

for example that Mr Faraday. One day I was wrapping wire coils for him, as

usual, when he suddenly said to me, “Well, you’ve been with me long enough,

and I don’t have much more for you to do here,” and just like that he sealed me

up in that notebook without so much as a farewell. And then I somehow ended

up here. I’m not kidding, all those years I was with him, it was all coils, coils,

coils. It’d never occurred to him to ask me for even a copper.’

Maxwell was about to express his own opinion on this matter, because, as we all

know, Faraday was his mentor, but just then Mary appeared elegantly at the door.

‘James? Are we not going to ask our visitor to stay for dinner?’

The demon was instantly ill at ease. ‘No … don’t go to all that trouble, good

madam, sir. I would rather that we take care of our business right now.’ He fished

out a piece of parchment from his pocket. It was oily and ancient, much the worse

for wear.

Maxwell spread it out and began reading the paper carefully, while the demon

continued speaking next to him: ‘In any case this is how it works. We make a

wager, and if I lose I become your servant; if you lose, your soul and property are

all given over to me and I gain my freedom.’

‘Must we do it this way?’ asked Mary, leaning over.

‘Old rules, madam, for thousands of years. I’m sure you’ve heard it all.’

‘Wagering with a demon is not necessarily a profitable thing,’ Maxwell lifted

his head. ‘So what can you do for me?’

‘Lots of things.’ The demon stretched out his furry hand and a few glittering

gold coins materialized in his palm; he deliberately let them drop to the ground,

clinking loudly. ‘Wealth, power, status—whatever you desire.’

Maxwell looked his palm curiously. ‘Well, whatever else it may be, this

does seem like an opportunity,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Very well. Dinner can

wait, Mary, and bring me a pen.’

The rule of the wager was this: Maxwell raises a difficult problem; if the demon

fails to solve it within twenty-four hours, Maxwell becomes the victor. Of course,

the condition being that this problem must have a specific solution.

‘Don’t try to stump me with ambiguous problems, sir. You can ask me to

circumvent the American continent, but don’t ask me to raise a question that even

I myself cannot answer.’ 3

Maxwell agreed.

‘This may not be so simple, dear,’ Mrs Maxwell seemed uneasy. ‘How can you

be sure you will win the wager?’

‘Listen, Mary,’ Maxwell cautiously lowered his voice. ‘I read over the contract

carefully. Guess what the most interesting part was? That long list of signatures—

Galileo, Newton, Copernicus. Almost every physicist I know is there, with

encyclopedic completeness. This is nothing extraordinary, but think of it this way:

over several thousand years we’ve never heard of any physicist losing his or her life

from having made a deal with the demon. So I hardly think I’m going to be the first.’

Mary blinked rapidly.

‘Poor demon,’ she said, sighing. ‘How are you going to put him to the test?’

‘We will see. Actually I’m not so sure myself.’

Just when the demon was scrunching up his sweat-soaked hat for the one

hundred and eighth time, Mrs Maxwell, with an amiable smile, invited him

her husband’s laboratory. On the way, she carefully hung up the much-abused hat

she had rescued from the demon’s hands. At this point Maxwell was adjusting the

experimental equipment that was just beginning to take shape.

‘I think this ought to do it,’ Maxwell said, taking out the rubber-stoppered end

of a flask from the sink.4

‘Come—the entrance is here.’

The demon looked with near despair at the set of glittering glass vessels. The

equipment’s main component was a large glass flask with rubber stoppers at both

ends. It contained a colourless liquid. The middle of the flask was divided by a

vertical glass partition.

‘Are you going to put me in there?’ asked the demon weakly.

‘Correct. To see if you can find a way out,’ Maxwell replied. ‘And it will be a

most worthwhile experiment.’

The demon stood at the side of the empty flask and hesitated for a moment.

With resignation he shrank his body and slipped the flask and after a brief

flurry of sounds, the opening was stoppered.

The demon floated in mid-air and looked around. The curvature of the

glass’s shape distorted the objects outside. The Maxwells were looking the

flask with curiosity.

It was impossible for him to get out directly. It is a truth universally known

that in any fairy tale, once a demon spirit is imprisoned inside a flask, he

can never escape. (This odd fact perhaps shows the limits of the demon’s

transformative powers, since he could theoretically shrink himself to an atomic

scale and exit through the orderly lattice of silicon dioxide molecules.5

Although

we cannot be sure that he wouldn’t be suctioned onto a covalent bond from the

forces of static electricity.) Obviously, Maxwell had already considered this detail

in this intriguing experiment—I mean—life-and-death wager.

So, there was only one way to escape, predetermined by the experimenter.

The only way.

To be fair, the demon Cornelius Gustav Rumpelstiltskin in fact possessed a

sound scientific mind, or, at the very least, after having been around physicists for

several thousand years, he had acquired some scientific habits of mind. Now, after

he got over his initial gloom, he tried to shrink himself even further, investigating

every inch inside the flask.

By the time the Maxwells finished a cup of coffee and went the laboratory

to check the experiment’s progress, the demon had already restored himself to a

size visible to the naked eye. He looked quite gloomy.

‘I found two small holes on the partition, not much larger than the size of air

molecules,’ he declared. ‘But the air is really terrible in here. I feel a bit dizzy.’6

‘There is ether in the flask, of course,’ Maxwell said somewhat apologetically, ‘for

the purposes of the experiment.’

The demon scratched the back of his furry head.

‘I think I will soon be able to understand what you mean,’ he said. Then he

disappeared again.

When the Maxwells were walking out of the laboratory, Mrs Maxwell winked

like a mischievous girl and said, ‘I’m beginning to think that you’ll win for sure,

my dear. Though it’s not so extraordinary that a fisherman couldn’t do just as

well.7

How did you manage it, if I may ask?’

‘I wanted to see if it was possible for him to separate the cold and hot

air molecules—you know, the fast-moving ones and the slow-moving ones.

This is about reducing entropy,’ he went on. ‘As you know, the Second Law of

Thermodynamics dictates that systems of low internal energy cannot be converted

high internal energy without loss. In other words, the degree of disorder in a

system—entropy—can only ever increase. This is why a cloud of hot gas can freely

expand, but can only be compressed through external work. Bread goes stale, roses

wilt, people grow and age, the universe will eventually diffuse a mass of thin

uniform gas, and the stars will stop burning: all this is due to the Second Law.’ 8

‘It sounds rather sad,’ Mary said quietly, squeezing his hand. ‘I don’t like this

law.’

‘Well, at least I didn’t come up with it,’ Maxwell smiled gently. ‘But maybe

it doesn’t have to be absolute. I was thinking, if there were a clever and agile

demon the size of a gas molecule, someone who could channel fast-moving

molecules to one side and slow-moving molecules to another, then after a while

the gas could be partitioned cold and warm halves. As a result, entropy

would decrease, and this unpleasant law would be nullified.’

‘Can that be done?’ Mary’s eyes grew wide.

‘Hypothetically, yes, but I had never thought that I would have the chance to

confirm it experimentally. Theoretically the Second Law is irrefutable—and now,

you see, our lives and possessions are all riding on it.’

‘Not a comforting thought.’

Smiling, Maxwell put his arm around his wife’s shoulder and planted a kiss on

her forehead. ‘Why don’t you go to bed now, dear. I’d like to observe a bit longer.’

An hour later, when he went to look again, he saw that the demon had already

gotten the hang of it.

‘I shrank to the smallest size possible, and these molecules are just dashing

around me like mad marbles,’ said the demon, out of breath.9

‘I was thinking that

if I could control the molecules passing through and only let the fast ones enter

this side, the temperature on this side would go up and make the liquid ether

evaporate. Then it would turn gas, force open the rubber stopper and then I

could get out!’10

‘Looks like you really do know some things,’ Maxwell praised him. ‘Well, carry

on. If you get the chance, do also note the velocities of those molecules coming

your way, so that I can perhaps verify my theory on velocity distribution,’ he said,

then left the room.11

The next day, after having breakfast and having enjoyed a Schubert piano

impromptu, the Maxwells walked toward the laboratory with a spring in their

step. A fresh morning breeze carried the scent of roses from the garden the

room.

‘How goes it?’ Maxwell leaned over the equipment to take a careful look. The

pool of liquid ether had not changed noticeably. ‘It appears that you were not very

efficient last night.’

The demon did not show himself, but only shouted, ‘You ought to try this for

yourself, sir—it’s like a forest of flying bullets—ow! To you the molecules may

look well-behaved, but in actual fact they fly around like mad—they never stop.

If only I could stand still for a minute … ouch! Ouch! It’s like separating a herd of

stampeding cattle! This work is dangerous!’

Maxwell shook his head. Mary came up from behind him.

‘You look disappointed, James?’ she asked him gently.

‘Perhaps a little.’ He turned and kissed his wife’s sweet-smelling curls. ‘Our

demon may not be very nimble, but he’s been working hard.’

‘Our?’ Mary blinked mischievously. When her husband left the laboratory to go

to his study, she carefully closed the curtains, to prevent the warm morning light

from interfering with the experiment’s accuracy.

When they returned from their evening walk that day, they finally saw some

small change. The temperature on one side of the bottle did increase, but not

nearly enough.

‘I should have thought of this: the demon needs to do work in there, too. This



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