can do it while Sylvia talks to the farmers." The interaction with Aybee was a fight with sharp weapons. The other was aggressive—and smart .
"More time than you think," Leo added. "The farmers may not agree to meet with you, Mr. Wolf."
"They have to," Aybee insisted.
"With us , they have to," Sylvia said. "They might be able to refuse to meet somebody from the Inner System, and get away with it."
"Then don't tell 'em where he's from." Aybee sounded impatient. "You and Leo can sort that out. The Wolfman and me need to see the stuff from inside his skull. Right? Let's get at it."
CHAPTER 12
"I know more than Apollo
For oft when he lies sleeping,
I see the stars at bloody wars,
In the wounded welkin weeping."
—Tom o' Bedlam's song
"The Neg-en-trop-ic Man." Aybee dissected the word, saying it slowly and thoughtfully. "And there he goes."
He pressed the button. For the tenth time, the grinning figure in red danced away across the screen and waved his good-bye.
"Any ideas?" When it was not form-change theory, Bey was ready to admit that Aybee had the better chance of deciding what was going on. Sylvia might return at any moment, and Bey wanted to have a lot of his thinking done before he encountered a farmer.
"Too many ideas." Aybee scowled at him. "It's not a well-posed problem."
"You don't think he means what he says? That he's a man with negative entropy."
"I'm sure he isn't. For a start, negative entropy has no physical meaning." Aybee made a rude noise at the display and turned it off. " 'Negentropic' just refers to something that decreases the entropy of a system. So a Negentropic Man ought to be a man who reduces entropy."
"But what exactly is entropy?" Leo Manx had been listening carefully while the conversation made less and less sense to him. "Remember, I'm supposed to send a report back to Cinnabar Baker. I can't send her your gibberish about negentropy. She'd jump all over us."
"Hey, is it my fault if you're a dummy?" Aybee looked down his nose at Leo. "I'll give you a bunch of entropy definitions. You can pick any one you like. And don't blame me if you're wrong, because I sure as hell don't know how the word is being used here. Oldest use: entropy in thermodynamics . Entropy change was defined as the change in the heat in a system, divided by its temperature. Can a process involving heat transfer be run backward? If not, the entropy of the system must increase. Rudolph Clausius knew that nearly four hundred years ago. He pointed out that entropy tends to go on increasing in any closed system. If the universe is a closed system, its entropy must increase. So then the universe is running down to a state of maximum disorganization, and we'll all end up in uniform-temperature soup."
"But we're talking about a man here, not a universe."
"I know that, Leo. Hold on a minute, I'm getting there. Remember, this is complicated stuff. We don't want to make it so easy it's meaningless. Einstein said it right: Things should be as simple as possible—but not simpler. Maybe our Negentropic Man has something to do with thermodynamic entropy, maybe not. Entropy number two: Ludwig Boltzmann found a statistical definition of entropy in terms of the number of possible states of the atoms and molecules of a system. He showed that it produced the same value as the thermodynamic one, provided the system has a whole lot of possible states."
"How do we decide which definition we want?"
"We can't—not yet. We keep going, then we'll play pick and choose. Entropy number three: in information theory . Fifty years after Boltzmann, Claude Shannon wanted to know how much information a message channel could carry. He found it depended on a particular mathematical expression. The formula was the same as Boltzmann's entropy formula, except for a sign change, so Shannon called the thing he calculated the entropy of the transmitted signal. That confused the hell out of people. The information-theory entropy is a maximum when the
"More time than you think," Leo added. "The farmers may not agree to meet with you, Mr. Wolf."
"They have to," Aybee insisted.
"With us , they have to," Sylvia said. "They might be able to refuse to meet somebody from the Inner System, and get away with it."
"Then don't tell 'em where he's from." Aybee sounded impatient. "You and Leo can sort that out. The Wolfman and me need to see the stuff from inside his skull. Right? Let's get at it."
CHAPTER 12
"I know more than Apollo
For oft when he lies sleeping,
I see the stars at bloody wars,
In the wounded welkin weeping."
—Tom o' Bedlam's song
"The Neg-en-trop-ic Man." Aybee dissected the word, saying it slowly and thoughtfully. "And there he goes."
He pressed the button. For the tenth time, the grinning figure in red danced away across the screen and waved his good-bye.
"Any ideas?" When it was not form-change theory, Bey was ready to admit that Aybee had the better chance of deciding what was going on. Sylvia might return at any moment, and Bey wanted to have a lot of his thinking done before he encountered a farmer.
"Too many ideas." Aybee scowled at him. "It's not a well-posed problem."
"You don't think he means what he says? That he's a man with negative entropy."
"I'm sure he isn't. For a start, negative entropy has no physical meaning." Aybee made a rude noise at the display and turned it off. " 'Negentropic' just refers to something that decreases the entropy of a system. So a Negentropic Man ought to be a man who reduces entropy."
"But what exactly is entropy?" Leo Manx had been listening carefully while the conversation made less and less sense to him. "Remember, I'm supposed to send a report back to Cinnabar Baker. I can't send her your gibberish about negentropy. She'd jump all over us."
"Hey, is it my fault if you're a dummy?" Aybee looked down his nose at Leo. "I'll give you a bunch of entropy definitions. You can pick any one you like. And don't blame me if you're wrong, because I sure as hell don't know how the word is being used here. Oldest use: entropy in thermodynamics . Entropy change was defined as the change in the heat in a system, divided by its temperature. Can a process involving heat transfer be run backward? If not, the entropy of the system must increase. Rudolph Clausius knew that nearly four hundred years ago. He pointed out that entropy tends to go on increasing in any closed system. If the universe is a closed system, its entropy must increase. So then the universe is running down to a state of maximum disorganization, and we'll all end up in uniform-temperature soup."
"But we're talking about a man here, not a universe."
"I know that, Leo. Hold on a minute, I'm getting there. Remember, this is complicated stuff. We don't want to make it so easy it's meaningless. Einstein said it right: Things should be as simple as possible—but not simpler. Maybe our Negentropic Man has something to do with thermodynamic entropy, maybe not. Entropy number two: Ludwig Boltzmann found a statistical definition of entropy in terms of the number of possible states of the atoms and molecules of a system. He showed that it produced the same value as the thermodynamic one, provided the system has a whole lot of possible states."
"How do we decide which definition we want?"
"We can't—not yet. We keep going, then we'll play pick and choose. Entropy number three: in information theory . Fifty years after Boltzmann, Claude Shannon wanted to know how much information a message channel could carry. He found it depended on a particular mathematical expression. The formula was the same as Boltzmann's entropy formula, except for a sign change, so Shannon called the thing he calculated the entropy of the transmitted signal. That confused the hell out of people. The information-theory entropy is a maximum when the
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