He remembered getting relatively excited as he was assembling his notes on this aspect of his research. The extension of an important theory initially developed to describe the thermodynamic behavior of inanimate matter to the arena of forces controlling human behavior added an impressive universality to his subject material. His mind tried to picture the vast panorama of human history from the earliest genetic mutation of an ancestral ape to his own very finely tuned intellectual and cultural awareness -- from the earliest societies with their caves and rocks and bones to the astonishingly perceptive consciousness inhabiting the peculiar body of John S. Milton -- and tried to understand each stage of that development being ruled and guided by a single overriding imperative: increase entropy! ... No -- that wasn't quite the way to put it. The existence of life tended to reduce entropy within local environments while it raised overall universal entropy by accelerating the randomization of heat outside the immediate domain of such entities. Still, even though there seemed some perverse zeitgeist on earth that found it fit to oppose the greatest power driving the universe, the universe wins anyway by turning the tables and making such feeble rebellion serve its majestic imperative even more powerfully than otherwise would be the case.

"So maybe that's it!" he thought to himself, "-- maybe life on earth is the supreme manifestation of this overwhelming desire on the part of the cosmos to burn itself out as quickly as it possibly can." What a macabre joke! And what a curious new aspect of physics -- that a large-scale process can accelerate itself by initiating small pockets inside itself in which its inherent activity is reversed. Was there anything else in all of nature which behaved like that? Were there tiny pockets of intense cold inside a fire which make the conflagration go even faster? Do certain helium atoms in the center of stars break apart into deuterium and tritium and thus accelerate overall nuclear fusion? Are there certain galaxies for which time goes backwards which serve some vital function in the mad rush to get to the end of time as quickly as possible?

He looked out at the auditorium and put on his headphones to pick up what the pinhead Dr. Snipe might have to say about such a possibility. But the astringent blue-shift-boffo on stage was still mired in medieval math and had seen fit to wheel the rolling greenboard over to the lectern to illustrate his anal-retentive ramblings with chicken-scratches made with chalk. On and on he went about how such a reading fits naturally into the scheme of modern physics if this formula and that assumption are unilaterally adjusted to accommodate the world-view of his own experimental math department. Didn't he see that such a mini-galaxy was an agent of entropy? -- with retrograde timelines designed to help its gigantic playmate burn out more efficiently?

Evidently not, John decided, and took off his headphones. He glanced at Anne and saw she had just finished rewinding the film onto the reel. "Nice work, babes," he said "-- you've really performed yeoman's duty." He knew it wouldn't be long after the talk was over that Dr. Snipe would poke his head in the booth to retrieve his beloved film, so got out of his chair and quickly repeated the fix he'd made on the spot where the film had broken -- using extra tape this time -- and used the projector to wind the film onto the take-up reel and then back onto the original reel again, to ensure it was tightly rolled so no outside visible evidence of the rueful incident would remain.

"That was sort of fun," Anne admitted when he'd finished, "it was a real challenge to turn such randomness into beautiful, flower-like order."

"I'm glad you found it fulfilling," John replied, feeling a bit like Tom Sawyer after getting a naive friend to paint a fence for him, "-- maybe your vocation is to become a techie -- maybe you can travel with a rock band and do all their special effects."

Anne laughed and said, "Why, don't you want me to be your groupie when 'Fallen Angels' hits the big times?" He smiled at her and laughed.

"You've really helped," he said, "and I'm working so well I just want to continue. Can you just keep an ear on Dr. Snipehead down there and tell me when he's done?"

"Sure," she replied, "though I hope he doesn't put me to sleep like your Professor Bunsen did -- god, you were right about the monotonous delivery some of 'em have."

She went back to her seat and donned her headset, then peered out the window.

John sat back in his chair and tried to pick up his chain of thought. Oh yeah, about human life being the most effective multiplier of entropic decay in the universe. This was really an incredible insight, he mused, and a gigantic step forward in man's quest to understand his function in the scheme of things. He chuckled lightly to himself at the thought of all the hot air which had been expended by religious philosophers about the divine purpose of human existence -- the nobleness of the well-intentioned mind and the elevated aspirations of a righteous spirit. "They've all been agents of entropy," he reasoned, "carrying out the will of the prime source and furthering the cause of creation to an end diametrically opposed to the one they all believed in! Ha!!"

His eyes flashed again to the thin figure of Dr. Snipe furiously erasing a portion of the greenboard to make room for more equations. "He's just doing what the spirit in him tells him to do," John smirked, "and it's fine work -- though not as fine as what's being done by the men and women working on controlled fusion reactors." He found it in himself to admire poor Dr. Snipe for meaning well and trying so hard. "It's just human thermodynamics, my friend," John said stiffly, "you're inside the jaws of laws beyond your ken." That's an acer poem, he decided, which nicely sums up the plight of humankind and the worthlessness of being. "Maybe I've stumbled on a new law of physics!" it flashed on him suddenly: "-- that life-driven anti-entropic processes are an integral component of all second law activities and provide an engine with which to accelerate the overall degradation of energy into heat! ... Or wouldn't that be a 'fourth' law of thermodynamics? ..." He eyed the 'Proceedings' book jammed into the space between the lighting console and the wall. Could it be that this god-forsaken Ilya Meiliakin had beaten him to the flag and figured it out and published it before him?

His fingers trembled as he picked up the volume and searched the table of contents for the dreaded paper. Finding the page reference he quickly thumbed his way to it, and with baited breath started reading. The prose was dense and almost impenetrable and he had to struggle to grapple meaning out of the long and convoluted sentences. The abstract and introduction failed to shed any light whatsoever on what the author meant by a fourth law of thermodynamics so John had to wade in deeper to flush out his quarry. The first section was a long-winded diatribe describing the existing laws of thermodynamics -- the elegant first law of energy conservation; the ubiquitous second law which John felt the man glossed over without penetrating any of its secrets; the banal third law which merely asserts that when the absolute temperature of a system reaches absolute zero, entropic increase within it ceases -- or as it had been redefined, when temperatures reach absolute zero then the entropy of all subsystems within any system become equal and may therefore be arbitrarily assigned a value of zero.

To John's dismay the section then went into some detail about what had weirdly been pronounced to be the zeroeth law of thermodynamics -- a conception even more banal than the third -- that if two systems are both in thermodynamic equilibrium with some other, outside system, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.

"This is patently useless information," John fumed, "just an extension of elementary algebraic logic -- if A equals C and B equals C then A equals B. They don't need a fucking law of bloody thermodynamics to figure that out do they? No wonder they didn't have the nerve to continue the sequence and call that the fourth law -- it's right and proper to call it the zeroeth law 'cause it's usefulness is precisely that -- zero!"

He skimmed through the mathematical proofs and quickly got into the next section which he soon realized dwelt primarily with information theory -- the planned subject of the penultimate division of his own paper -- and read a little more carefully to see if Meiliakin had anything useful to say about that.

After struggling to understand the point the section was trying to make John finally decided to jot down a couple of reasonably well-phrased quotes from it in his notes file for later use. To this point, however, he hadn't found anything particularly striking or new so he pushed on into the subsequent section which was inexplicably devoted to a discussion of linguistics and the deep structures of human language. John sighed and rubbed his eyes. Maybe he hadn't been beaten to the pole by dog-eater Amundsen.

His attention was suddenly diverted by the very faint sound of applause coming through the window. Dr. Snipe had moved away from the podium and appeared to be finished his presentation. John glanced over at Anne and saw she'd laid her head on her arms and was possibly asleep. He put his headset on to confirm the presentation was truly over then raised the houselights. When he reached to pause the cassette, however, he found it had run out of tape -- and hadn't attracted his attention with warning beeps. He couldn't tell how much had been missed and really didn't care since it was only Dr. Snipe's inane meanderings, but worried over the fact it might happen at a more important juncture. Maybe he should get Anne to watch that as well.

Removing an earpiece he said, "Annie baby -- hey, wondrous egg-boat of the Nile! -- the house is on fire! -- quick, we've gotta jump out of the window!"

Anne roused herself and looked all around in stupefaction. "Whaaa ....?" she said, then regained her orientation and rubbed her eyes vigorously. "Sorry," she went on, "did I drift off? -- oh god, it's your fault you know, you kept me up late, 'member?"

John refused to accept blame but decided not to bother her about snoozing on the job. Instead he moved over to her and lightly massaged her neck and shoulders to get her circulation moving properly. She leaned back into the pressure and luxuriated in the sensation. A great many of those in the audience crowded to the exit to go to some other talk and a significant number of other delegates were evidently backed-up outside the door trying to get in for the next paper inside the auditorium.

He noticed the security guard had imposed a one-gets-in, one-gets-out rule. In John's imagination the man suddenly became a curious reincarnation of Maxwell's demon, trying to keep all the hot molecules in one compartment and all the cool ones in another. He wondered which compartment the auditorium was.

He couldn't recall what the next presentation in his domain was, so recovered the speakers list and hid the unfinished sandwich behind his console so Anne wouldn't notice he'd failed to finish it. The next talk was "Observation of Overexcited Charm Quarks" by someone named Gregory Ham. John didn't think he'd been given slides or anything by such a person, but checked with Anne to confirm his surmise.

"Do we have anything for a guy named 'Ham'?" he asked. Anne smiled wickedly and pointed to his crotch area.

"Somebody'd better do something for him soon!" she replied, "-- or else he'll get all introspective and get into a swordfight and get killed!"

"I beg your pardon?" said John, completely mystified -- even though he'd gotten the libidinous context easily enough.

"Like Hamlet! ... you mystical and almost all-knowing sperm barge," she laughed.

It took nearly five seconds for her inference to sink in, then he felt anger well up from being teased once too often about his condition. "Piss off!" he spat at her, "just gimme a break about that, OK?"

Anne's spirit fell and she pouted and stuck out her tongue. John regretted getting upset and after a few seconds said, "Hey, I'm sorry -- you're really being an angel and I'm treating you like shit. I'm just a little tender, you know? -- go soft on me."

This made her giggle effervescently which spurred him to review what he'd said. When he finally recognized the multiple double-entendres he laughed himself. It was ridiculous for him to be in a state of perpetual sexual arousal. It mocked the supposed specialness of that state and turned the extraordinary into the banal.

"It's just a nervous reaction to going without sleep," he postulated to her, "not a divine sacrament devoted to the perfectness of your buns and boobs." Anne smiled as if knowing otherwise and moved towards him, swaying her hips magnificently and exuding pure white light from her eyes. Her advance was interrupted, however, by a knock on the booth door. They turned simultaneously and saw the amazingly pointed head of Dr. Snipe poking itself into their private universe.

"Can I have my film back," he said, in a voice etched with an edge that could cut diamonds. John's sympathy for the man's pathetic endeavor to do his part to increase universal entropy evaporated in an instant, and he wordlessly retrieved the film reel and handed it over. Dr. Snipe examined it carefully but didn't seem to notice anything untoward about it, then left without even thanking them. John envisioned the final heat death of the sun engulfing and incinerating all of the molecules which billions of years before had been assembled in the person of John Snipe, and took great solace in the image. Then he resolved to incinerate his own memories of the man for all time.

"So, as far as you know," he said to Anne in a tone intended to indicate this was business and had to be treated seriously, "we don't have any audio-visuals for Dr. Gregory Ham." Anne curled the corners of her lips then shook her head emphatically. "Good," he continued, "then we can both have a break."

"That's excellent, 'cause I gotta visit the little girl's room really badly," she replied. Then she fished into her backpack and produced a laminated name tag and held it out to him. "By the way," she said, "Dr. Ferret gave these to us -- you'll need this to get in and out past the guard at the door -- sorry, yours is spelled wrong." He took the little rectangle and studied it -- the top line said "CONFERENCE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE" but below that, smack in the middle, in large bold letters it read, "JOHN MILTOUN." His heart sank. They must have recruited that bloody incompetent witch-women from the Grad Studies Administration building to type the fucking name tags, he decided.

Still, maybe it was better to have a name people didn't associate with the target of the largest stone meteorite ever to land intact on earth, he mused. "Thanks," he said to Anne, "you're right, I can't expect to live in here for four whole days."

She smiled and said, "So I'll just whip out and get back soon as possible, OK?"

He nodded and she left, crouched over a little like he was -- in her case to keep from wetting her pants. He stared at his name tag and realized what a blessing Anne was -- he'd never have been able to get this thing or a Proceedings book, or anything done on his paper, if she'd hadn't come along. She certainly seemed to have Dr. Ferret wrapped around her little finger. The nametag was worth many hundreds of dollars to delegates at the conference. Might be priceless by the time Saturday rolled around, he reflected. He pinned it onto the pocket of his shirt but then felt odd because the name was wrong and moved it to one of the belt loops on his jeans. Then he donned one side of his headset to catch when the next presentation would start so he could adjust the lights properly, and resumed his reading of Ilya Meiliakin's apparently mistitled paper on the fourth law of thermodynamics.

He'd left off partway into a confusing set of paragraphs discussing how the deep structure of human language might be considered comparable to the essential message an operator wishes to communicate while the surface structure with it's curious and seemingly idiosyncratic redundancies mirrors the interconnected and complex error-correcting mechanisms currently being used in modern telecommunicated computer applications -- which are all, in essence, governed by Boltzmann's simple equation for calculating the entropy of a closed system: S = k log W. John understood the applied information theory stuff but the analogy to human language usage didn't seem justifiable to him. It presupposed a kind of universal grammar inherent biologically in every child born, which was a compelling theory but one which no one had found a way to test experimentally. Why had Meiliakin wandered into such a cul de sac?

A loud voice erupted in John's earpiece amidst the rumbling background: "Well I guess we should get going so we won't fall even further behind," and John turned his gaze to the stage where he saw a bespectacled and walrus-mustached man poised to speak at the lectern. John lowered the volume of his headset and reduced the lights in the auditorium to their presentation level of one-quarter. Anne hadn't returned yet so he decided to listen in for just a bit to make sure he wasn't being expected to do anything for this talk. He saw the man -- presumably Dr. Ham -- had a pile of overheads stacked beside the overhead projector, so knew he was probably safe. He raised his headset volume and picked up the commentary in mid-phrase, "... comes primarily from the cleaner but much lower luminosity anti-electron/anti-positron colliders. Such precise measurements of the lifetimes and decay modes of excited charm quark states enables the differentiation between blueprints in the dynamics of the decay as well as viable rankings of their relative importance. Examples of such fine utilizations are the blueprints for simple quark spectators, quark annihilations, W boson exchanges, and ultimate state interaction vectors. Additionally, excited charm quark production has given us the chance to isolate the QBD photon-gluon fusion and test QBD itself. Such tagged photon beam experiments have been highly successful in giving us a wealth of new insight concerning the basic physics of charm quarks in general and the next step, naturally, was to increase the level of excitation by an entire order of magnitude to test what we decided to call 'overexcited' charm quarks in the identical theoretical environment. And as Dr. Ferret hinted in his opening remarks this morning, the results of this are indeed stimulating in more ways than one."

Dr. Ham moved away from the podium over to the overhead projector, turned it on, then resumed speaking. John realized with horror that he'd forgotten to set up a portable mic and not only wouldn't be able to record the narrative, but the audience wouldn't be able to hear much of what was being said either.

John hurriedly grabbed a neck microphone with long extension cable and hobbled down the steps, out the booth door, and down the aisle towards the stage. Dr. Ham was attempting to describe the first overhead but couldn't be heard at the back of the hall -- from which a voice boomed out, "Can't hear you!" John climbed the steps to the stage as nimbly as he could under the circumstances as a smattering of chitchat broke out behind him. He smiled meekly at Dr. Ham and showed him the microphone, then carefully attached the cord around his neck, positioned the mic in the center of his chest, then unraveled the cable and plugged it into a socket at the base of the podium stage right. Dr. Ham tapped the mic and the sound was amplified loudly throughout the auditorium. Then he said, "Hello?" and his voice boomed out from the overhead speakers along with a painfully loud audio feedback signal that drilled into everyone's ears. John held up his hands and pointed up towards the booth, then scurried back into his sanctuary. Anne had returned and watched him with a big grin on her face as he stumbled over to his console and quickly reduced the volume of the channel he'd plugged the mic into down from the very top to around the middle. Dr. Ham tapped the mic again and realized the level was now lower so tried speaking: "Hello?" -- which was just about right for the audience, who burst into light applause.

John slumped into his chair and breathed heavily from his exertion. The audience quieted down and Dr. Ham proceeded with his presentation. Anne was gleeful and said excitedly, "You're a hero -- you saved the day!" John shook his head and said, "Not really, should've done that first thing this morning -- good thing I wasn't buried in my paper when it happened." But Anne refused to think there was any blame on him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Well, you're my hero then," she said, and began massaging his neck and shoulders like he'd done for her. He leaned back into the pressure to luxuriate in the sensation and closed his eyes to block out the shrill universe of audio feedback and charming but overexcited quirks of nature.

In the blackness before his eyes his visual sense inserted rough geometric shapes, simple line drawings at first, spinning slowly in three dimensions, then solidifying into pyramids, cubes and other more complex polyhedral constructions in a graceful dance, whirling beautifully in and out of pleasing spatial arrangements that formed, held for an instant, then dissolved and rearranged into something equally as exquisite and wonderful. A strange and somewhat mournful melody then entered his thoughts, completely unfamiliar to him yet hauntingly common, to which his mental ballet now submitted as the multimedia extravaganza became more unified and intelligible. He knew the shapes were sending a message which he had the decoding power to understand, but the notation was so pure, so unadorned with ornamentation, that he couldn't be sure he'd understood properly without misinterpreting something essential and getting the entire communication all mixed up. And the message wasn't repeated.

The wonderful show faded back to black before his eyes and he lamented the loss of a thing of undefiled character. The message had been ... the crucial word he needed to entice the thought out of its vacuum into the concrete world of quarks and quasars eluded him. A sinking feeling engulfed him and he felt as if he was falling into an infinite gulf between the reality of his life and an indescribable outer actuality that lay tantalizingly close but beyond his reach. He succumbed to desperation and willed his eyelids to open but the command meandered through each of the trillions of possible neuronal side roads and seemed as though it could never arrive at the target muscles controlling his eyelids. He felt now as if his entire body was spinning as it fell and he longed for death or any escape from this purgatory of the soul. Finally, as if connected to a rusty hydraulic winch, his eyelids responded to his will and ever so slowly began to rise. The light flooding in blinded him, and with Anne's fingers still massaging his neck he turned his head from the glare. His consciousness entered a state of vertigo as his stomach heaved ... and full realization slowly sank in -- he was going to throw up.

He willed his abdomen to delay its evident desire and concentrated on focusing his eyes properly. The real world emerged reluctantly from its hazy, blurred appearance -- grudgingly forming itself into the crisp, geometric lines and surfaces of the tech booth. Anne's well-intentioned physical manipulations threatened to destabilize the very thin control he'd established over his retrograde digestive inclination so he gently shrugged his shoulders to politely ask her to stop. Then he willed himself to turn and smile at her in an attempt to convince her he was perfectly fine, and she smiled back and patted his head as if he were an adoring, pet dog. His entire concentration was centered on quelling the violent and eruptive urges swelling up from his stomach. He sat up straight and forced his eyes to focus on Dr. Ham who was rapidly switching overheads and pointing out essential spikes and measurements on his graphs and word charts. To John's immense relief Anne moved to the opposite end of the booth and sat in her chair. With a supreme effort of the will he turned to her and said, "This's going smoothly, I think I'll just visit the can while there's a chance." She glanced at him blithely and said, "Fine, I'll keep an eye on things," and donned her headset and turned her attention to Dr. Ham on the stage. He held his abdominal muscles rigid and closed his glottis to discourage any premature volcanic activity, then mustered his will and ordered his body to assume an erect, standing posture. Feeling like he was about to explode at any instant, he placed one foot in front of the other and painfully traversed the distance between his end of the booth and the head of the stairs just beyond Anne's station. As he passed her she flipped off an earpiece and said, "Glad to see your body's normal in one way at least," then returned her gaze out the window. He gingerly descended the steps one at a time and mustered the utmost of his strength to push the door open without fatally collapsing and exploding. He emerged into the relatively bright environment of the auditorium and heard Dr. Ham's voice echoing around the room. No one appeared to notice as he painfully shuffled over to the exit.

At the door he was eyed disapprovingly by the security guard but was allowed to leave without committing his eternal soul to everlasting damnation. The foyer was filled with fresh atmospheric molecules which re-invoked his dizziness, and he had to retreat to a primitive bench positioned halfway along the wall between the auditorium and the men's washroom. There he recouped his remaining powers and steeled himself for one final dash to salvation. The washroom door proved to be recalcitrant and he had to lean his entire body against it in a last-ditch attempt to remain civilized about his bodily secretions. It finally yielded and he swooned into the entrance vestibule and headed for the handicapped stall with its wide open spaces and handy handlebar by the toilet. He managed to employ the last vestiges of his ingrained civility to close and lock the cubicle door, then with a hymn of thanksgiving to the powers of the cosmos, sank to his knees in profound reverence and positioned his head over the toilet bowl.

Releasing the strictures he'd placed upon his body's actions, he opened his gorge and relaxed control over his stomach muscles. Convolutions of galactic proportions inside him released their pent-up fury and his abdominal walls contracted violently. A gusher rivaling the most prodigious oil discovery in Saudi Arabia swelled up from its subterranean dwelling and burst free of the constrictions which had held it prisoner for countless eons of eternity. A single mouthful of gooey, bile infested, liquid mush emerged and drained sickeningly into the enfolding arms of the eau de toilet mere inches from his face. His body heaved again and again but nothing more emerged. Then, after willing himself to violently constrict his abdominal muscles one last time in an attempt to consciously force any remaining contents out of his stomach, John accepted the fact that his regurgitation was complete -- for the moment at least -- and concentrated on steadying his breathing and relaxing his muscular stress. His perverse human curiosity then got the better of him and he opened his eyes to examine the effluent his body had so convincingly found unworthy of amalgamating into itself.

Slowly intermingling itself with the transparent water in the toilet bowl floated a perfectly black slick of oily goo. John blinked his eyes to assure himself he wasn't receiving some imaginary visual message, then slowly accepted the fact that what had emerged from him was indeed that pitch black glump of gelatinous grime. It undulated disturbingly in the still shifting flows of hydrogenated oxygen and small tentacles appeared to emerge from it, probing its new environment in search of new sources of enlightenment. The overall systemic fluctuations through which the tableau in front of him passed in its unyielding intention to maximize the probability of any portion of it mirroring any other portion of it with regards to total system regularity, seized onto John's entire being and focused his mind solely on its inexorable quest for mindless stability and meaningless distribution. However, oil and water don't mix very well, and while it didn't seem possible that what he'd thrown up was really oil, it certainly looked and behaved enticingly as if it was exactly that.

As his body began to revive, John's imagination revived and added its two-dimes' worth to his overall perception of the current universe. "At least the goo wasn't green," he thought, or else he'd have to consult an exorcist. Reassured to the extent that the devil inside him wasn't Roman Catholic, John was able to make great strides in calming his breathing and stemming the flow of perspiration from his face. His dance with the porcelain homecoming queen didn't seem quite finished, however, so he held his embracing arms tightly around his date and closed his eyes once more to partake fully in the magic of the romance. The tidal surge was unmistakably finished, however, and he perceived the first inklings of how ridiculous his prevailing posture would seem to a housewife searching for an ideal Christmas present for her therapist's pet crocodile. He reopened his eyes and tentatively elevated the angle of his waist by thirty degrees, then when no warning signals sprang forth from his central guidance system, dared to raise his torso to the fully upright.

As this initiated no preprogrammed response mechanism he was encouraged to consider becoming a normal human being again. He looked around and focused his eyes on a carefully handwritten, blue ink graffito which read, "Reasons aren't excuses but raisins are exclusive." He didn't get it. What did that mean? He couldn't think of a single link between the phrases. Below was scrawled more crudely, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." That at least made sense. It was one of the nice thing about the physics building, the anus-inspired musings etched onto the walls of the toilet cubicles generally had more intellectual content than those over in, say, the CompSci building, where everything was about oral sex with close relatives. John's breathing had almost returned to normal and he glanced one last time at the sickening entity he'd emitted into the potty throne. The blackened substance was slowly spreading itself throughout its new home and John decided to take on the role of bouncer angel on judgment day and eternally consign this particular sinner to the bowels of hell. He reached out with a bold and surehanded motion and depressed the flush lever. His face expressionless, his eyes fixed on the spinning vortex before him, John felt no pity for the well-earned, infinitely agonizing penalty being exacted. Like a supernatural entity gazing at a slimy slug, he watched as the disappearing barf in unutterable agony entered a state of never-ending horror and soundlessly shrieked.