Chapter One: The elephant on the flowerbed

It was an ordinary sunny day, not hot but certainly not chilly. There wasn’t a breath of wind, which was barely even blowing (at 0.76 miles per hour). Doves were cooing, trilling unhurried cascades of song. One chocolate-brown dove called Solo was practising his scales in a nearby beech tree. A cuckoo was glorying in the regular rhythms and stresses of her signature tune. And what wonderful odours were abroad! Astonishing aromas tickled the nose. A strong and bitter scent floated from the twelve pine trees clustered near a little house. Exactly seventy-nine marigolds grew in the little meadow in front of the porch; they shed a herby, medicinal scent when crushed. Dima knew just how a marigold smells when you scrunch it between your palms.

Dima was a small Maxwell Demon. He was small because he was very young. Dima was, in fact, no bigger than a rabbit. Picture a rabbit, standing on its hind legs, with pricked-up ears and tiny horns… Actually, he didn’t look at all like that. Maxwell Demons don’t look the least bit like rabbits! Their ears are tiny, their noses look like baby potatoes. Their paws are rather like human feet, built for running rather than bunny-hops. Each of their horns ends in a slender point, like the tip of a crescent moon. Dima’s fur was dark red, apart from a white patch on his head, right between his horns. His tail was also quite unlike a rabbit’s! It was curvy and slender, with an arrow-shaped tuft of fur at the end. The little fellow didn’t take much trouble over his clothes. He had on a lurid orange T-shirt and bright blue dungarees – his usual outfit.

And Dima did know exactly how a marigold flower smells. He didn’t even need to smell it again to refresh his memory. If the marigolds suddenly started smelling like roses, Dima might not notice unless he checked specially. Maxwell Demons know things precisely. This is their special ability: finding out facts from a distance. Any Maxwell Demon you might happen to meet can tell you how many nuts you have in your pocket. He wouldn’t have the foggiest notion where you got the nuts or where you were bringing them. But he could count, describe and analyse the nuts – or anything else you might be hiding – instantly. Nothing could be kept secret from Dima, wherever he went. But in order to locate a hiding-place and what was kept there, Dima had to know what he was looking for. The older and wiser a Maxwell Demon gets, the wider the area where he can source information.

If it had been a wet autumn day, maybe Dima would have felt like working. But he didn’t want to miss out on the beginning of summer… If truth be told, nearly every day the little Maxwell Demon preferred swinging in his favourite hammock in the back yard. He really couldn’t understand why people thought not working was a bad thing. What was so awful about the word ‘lazybones’? After all, a little laziness never hurt anybody, surely...

“Get up, Dima! You can do some work with me, my little helper,” his father called him from the porch in a tone that meant business.

The Chaos Pachyderms are the eternal enemies of Maxwell Demons. They really do try to mix everything up. They disorganize any and all orderly systems. Maxwell Demons, on the other hand, are instinctively drawn to tidiness – at any rate, most Maxwell Demons are. Once Dima’s mother even caught herself sorting out the letters in alphabet soup into alphabetical order. She got very agitated about the broken letters that wouldn’t fit into her system and had to be thrown away. Keeping the letters in 26 different jars wasn’t very convenient, and eating alphabet soup with just one kind of letter at a time was pretty boring. In the end they went back to putting all the letters in one jar. Generally, mothers are less crazy about order than fathers, even the mothers of Maxwell Demons.

Dima’s Papa started packing. If he was late, he would start running aimlessly around the house, trying to change into his work clothes, scoop a forgotten notepad into his bag and munch a cheese sandwich, all at the same time. Sometimes you wouldn’t believe that he was one of the Maxwell Demons who constantly strive for order, everywhere and in everything. He would rush chaotically from the kitchen table to the desk in his office, then to the wardrobe.

“I’ll need your help in a couple of minutes!’ his father called, dashing out of the bedroom. “I’m going to leave you in charge of the Family Coin,” he said, trying to slide his leg into his trousers. Finally, Papa was ready. On the doorstep, he glanced back. “So! Your job is to observe how many times in a row the coin falls heads up. Grandfather Meson once called heads a hundred times in a row! You can hardly beat that.’

“I’ll try!” Dima shouted, meaning it, at the closed door. “After all, I’ve heard that story about Grandfather Meson at least a hundred times,” he added a moment later, and a lot more quietly.

Dima tried for all of five minutes. Or maybe for five and a half minutes. We can’t be sure how long he spent trying, although any Maxwell Demon, even a young one, might have told us precisely. At last Dima put the Family Coin in a special pocket, sewn with gold thread, in his beloved bright blue dungarees with black braces. The Children’s Coin he hid in his back pocket. Then he headed for the back yard and, feeling he had done his duty, he sank into the cosy nest of his hammock. And fell out again straightaway. The hammock was like a humpback bridge: instead of hanging between two trees, it was bulging up to the sky. Who could lie down on something like that?

It so happens that Maxwell Demons have a second marvellous ability. When they are close by, one of the laws of nature changes – just one law on any given day. No-one can say which law will change or when it might happen. Water might suddenly freeze at room temperature. A wooden floor might suddenly become slippery, like a wet tile stove.

Imagine a salt-cellar. A change in a law of nature is like a change in this salt-cellar. Suppose it becomes ten times bigger, the number of holes gets smaller, and the salt becomes as big as grains of barley. But the salt-cellar would still be a salt-cellar filled with salt. That’s the way the laws of nature change around Maxwell’s Demons. They don’t exactly get broken, but they manifest differently.

The little fellow actually bounded in the air with surprise. Staring around, he spotted three plump-looking little elephants. Naturally, they were much bigger than the Maxwell Demon, but Dima had thought that elephants were even larger than these three. The smallest had perched on top of a flower-bed, right in the middle of a cluster of cobalt-blue hyacinths and canary-yellow daffodils. He plucked a bright red tulip with his trunk and tipped it up to his mouth, just like a wine-glass.
“Well, if it isn’t the Chaos Pachyderms! You break into our garden, you spoil my nap and… your ruin the flower-bed as well! Well! Why did you turn my hammock inside out?”

“First of all – hello!” said the plumpest Elephant, with a smile. “Anyone can see that you’re an ignorant Maxwell Demon. You’ve got lots of useless information, a thousand questions and you can’t say a single polite word.”

“What’s your point?” muttered Dima.

“Secondly,” the Papa-Elephant continued calmly. His logical manner was rather similar to Dima’s Papa. Probably all fathers are the same. Even fathers who are Chaos Pachyderms. “Secondly, I politely request that you refer respectfully to Chaos. You Demons perpetually organize things and put them in order… Although we still mix them up again.”

“And you perpetually… perpetually ... keep getting under our feet! There!” Dima flared up, angrily defending the Great Pattern. “And then you try to tell us what to do!”

The elephants looked sulky. They were offended: how can elephants be said to get under people’s feet – even not very big elephants? And when Chaos Pachyderms get offended, they become even rounder, as if they were puffing up with air.

“You don’t even really exist! The laws of nature can’t be violated! I’m probably just dreaming you. You don’t exist! You don’t exist!” Dima closed his eyes, stuck out his tongue and shook his head. When he opened his eyes again, the elephants hadn’t vanished; they had just puffed themselves up even more.

Here we must pause to stay a little bit about Chaos Pachyderms. One law of nature will stop working properly when an Elephant is in the vicinity. Any of the laws of nature may be violated in this way. Why had Dima’s hammock bulged up? Instead of being attracted towards the Earth, it was repelled away from it, upwards. It would have floated away completely if it hadn’t been tied down. Remember the salt-cellar, which still stays a salt-cellar in our example about how Maxwell Demons affect natural laws. You could even use it to sprinkle (giant) salt. But if a Chaos Pachyderm turned up, that salt-cellar could turn into almost anything – even a football. In the best outcome – a sugar shaker.

The song thrilled Dima from his horns to the tuft at the tip of his tail, but there was too much he didn’t understand. Or to be more precise, he understood almost nothing. What was a pelt, or a maw? What kind of black hole? And the word ‘perish’ had a very unpleasant ring. After all, the song was about him! Then something extremely improbable happened.