Ernie's Sanctum

Inspired genius, or murderous madman?

Even geniuses have to eat. Ernie, a scientist, engineer and a genius, surely wouldn't have placed himself in that last category. He certainly didn’t look the part, and he typically missed important details. It was his biggest failing, and one he worked constantly to correct. Ernie had just one thing on his mind, it was high time to get some food.

Today he was dressed the same as every day, faded jeans, tennis shoes and a dark plaid work shirt with long sleeves rolled up. He stood solemnly before a small charcoal grill, an opened bag of hardwood briquettes in his left hand, a bottle of starting fluid in his right. This was serious business. For sure, Ernie was hungry. It had been a day and a half since he'd last eaten. As involved as he'd always been with his work and with the wife gone, this would be happening more often. If he grilled rather than cooked indoors there would be less to clean up. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out.

Arrange the briquettes in a checkerboard pattern to admit air to the layer above, then offset the second layer to receive the air. That was the ticket. Then, soak it all with petroleum distillate, stand back and toss a match.

Wumph! Orange flames burst skyward. A simple act that worked every single time.

"Hahh, neighbor!" The rasping sound of Ernie's next-door nemesis split the early afternoon calm, a ragged bolt of lightning cutting through still air. It might as well have been electrical interference, because Ernie felt his remaining hair trying very hard to stand on end. If Ernie had showered recently, it might have.

"Hello, Chuck." It was the least excited tone of voice Ernie could muster in response. Indeed he had business to conduct with Chuck, but he really preferred to eat something first. He knew Chuck wouldn't allow that. If anything in the entire world was unwelcome, Chuck was it.

"Man, you sound happy to see me! Why, I'd half-expected you'd have a banana in your pocket, you'd be so excited!"

"Do you want a banana, Chuck? Is that what you really want?"

"Hoo-ahh, trying to keep up with the Chuckster, are you completely sure you're up to that?"

"Oh, hell no, Chuck. Hell no. I know better..."

"Well then, don't fuckin' try! When do we eat, there, buddy?"

Practicalities, Ernie thought to himself. Ah, well. It would take the charcoal a while to be ready for bratwurst anyway. He could make this fairly quick.

"Tell you what, Chuckles. I could offer you some food, but while the briquettes come up to heat, there, I wanna show you my project."

"Wait! Wait!" Chuck walked briskly around Ernie's slightly rotund figure, this way, then that, in mock excitement. "I didn't even get to harass you about not havin' a decent gas grill, like mine! You're actually gonna grant me admission to...the la-bore-uh-tory?"

"Why yes." Ernie displayed an easy, crooked smile. "I think it's time."

"Whoa, cool! Say, where's Toni? Haven't seen her around for a coupla days."

"She went to visit her mother," Ernie replied, as he began to walk toward the garage.

"I thought her mother was...you know, passed away."

"Selling a lot of cars, Chuck?"

"Oh, baby, yeah! What kind'a car ya lookin' for?"

Ernie turned and smiled in a patronizing way at his obnoxious neighbor, as he turned the key in the lock. "Oh, I don't know. Probably not a Chevrolet, though. I'm thinking more like, a new Bentley."

"Bentley! As if you could swing a car like that!"

"Well, I can."

"What, a 1955?"

"Chuck, some of the older Bentleys are worth more than the new ones. A brand new Bentley Continental GT convertible looks pretty nice to me," said Ernie, as he tapped the eight-digit code into a security keypad. A whir and a clank, and the inner portal to Ernie's lab swung open.

Chuck wasn't moving, just yet. "You gotta be shittin'! Toni never left on like you had any real money, doin’ yer scien-terrific horse puckey, what's that go for, hundred and eighty K?"

"I never told her. Two-fifty. Before options."

Chuck's dimwitted attention finally focused, to a degree, on the interior of the room before him. Gleaming quartz glass and stainless steel vessels, gas cylinders, coils of tubing, power supplies, test instruments, and tools everywhere. "Holy crap!" For a moment, he was actually speechless. "I wondered why you guys parked your two cars outside when you got a four-car garage! What is all this stuff?"

"This is my work," Ernie answered. "You knew I had a lab. This is what I do."

Chuck had never seen the inside of any research facility, other than in movies. He'd gone straight from pumping gas and washing cars to selling cars on commission. If you talk incessantly and don't know anything, that seems to work. At least, it had for Chuck.

"So, what does all this stuff do?"

"I have several things going on at any one time," Ernie declared, proudly. "The benches over there are taken up with one project, a tuned wavelength resonance sensor. It's something the DOD is very interested in acquiring. The prototype is almost complete. And over here," he continued, "is the very first of a new generation of advanced weaponry."

"Really? No kiddin'! You make weapons? Not bad, for a dumb poe-lock!"

Ernie stopped, stepped back, folded his arms and glowered.

"Hey, hey! Don't take it personal...you can't help it. It wasn't like I said, 'fat, dumb Polock.'"

"Aw, hell, it's alright," Ernie said, resignedly. "You probably can't help it. You are making this easier."

"Easier?"

"Sure. Let me show you. See this vessel? It's a reactor. It's where it all started, with this project. Whenever I've had time while waiting for my next inquiry, I worked on controlled fusion."

"That's like, nuke-ular, right? A really big deal, huh?"

"Yes. A really big deal, and a big problem. Whoever solves it will change the world. Energy independence, forever."

"So, did you solve it yet?"

"Um, not exactly. Instead, I did this." Ernie turned the large stainless steel chamber around on its heavy casters, so Chuck could see the charred, gaping hole in its side. Chuck looked at him, blankly.

"So what?"

"Well, the problem with controlling fusion has been containment. Temperatures generated by the reaction are such that no physical container could hold it. So, most efforts have been to keep the reaction away from the container walls by surrounding it with a plasma barrier, kept in place with controlled magnetic fields."

"Okay, so that didn't work, and it blew a hole in the thing?"

"Hey, great observation, Chuck. It blew a hole in the thing. I was experimenting with a spherical configuration of the tokamak, that's what the containment is called. I made the mistake of making a change in field configuration without shutting down. I was just impatient. So it did this, and it made a hell of a bang. Then I got to thinking, maybe the escape from containment can be controlled, and directed, maybe even enhanced...after all, if you can contain it, you can also shape it."

"So, did that work?"

"That’s a great question, Chuck. Not at first, it didn't work. I didn't have a lot of trouble designing a field with a collapsible aperture, not that it was easy, either. I put one inside the other, and dropped the inner...never mind. But I needed something to order the waveforms generated by the output. That was the breakthrough.” Ernie paused, thoughts swirling. Chuck could never comprehend. Keep it simple.

“This thing is damned near a generator of a miniature 'photon torpedo'.”

“Now that I understand. I loved Star Trek. Blast anything with it yet?”

“Why yes. Yes I have. You should feel very privileged, Chuck. Allow me to demonstrate. You see, with all controlled fusion reactors to date, the energy requirements of the containment have been far too great to produce a net gain. We can sustain a small fusion reaction within containment, but if we try to grow it to produce usable energy, what we get is no greater than the energy then needed to contain it. If you can follow that. So based on the hole in my vacuum chamber, I tried releasing the contained energy all at once. It didn't provide quite enough to make a real weapon out of it, though. You have to time it, build up the plasma in a certain shape, kind of like the ejection plume of an RPG.”

“A RPG?”

"Never mind. It isn't important. Anyway, it's much more involved than that. But for me, it was stage one, stage two, stage three. Stage one was modified, shaped containment that grows and flexes with the charging of the reactor. Stage two was the functioning of the aperture. Stage three – well, it's something else. Waveform congruence is what makes a beam of light, a laser. This unit does it, too. And much more...anyway. Check this out."

Ernie busied himself flipping switches to start cooling pumps, opening valves to draw a vacuum in the reactor, and he hit a button to start a big generator. Soon, the reactor was glowing with rippling shades of vibrant green and purple. Ernie stepped up to a control panel and flipped another series of switches. A long, silver-metallic, triangular envelope next to the reactor began to hum. Ernie stalked over to a small lab refrigerator and removed a fresh dressed chicken.

As he carried it over to a spot directly in line with the long metallic envelope, he gestured toward a furniture dolly that was topped with a square steel plate. "Better stand on that plate," he advised, "You'll be safest right there." Chuck stepped up onto the plate. Ernie smiled and hung the chicken on a hook at the end of a length of steel chain. Then he walked over to the control panel and checked gauges and readouts. "Watch the birdie," he said, and flipped two switches at the same moment. Immediately, the lights dipped.

"Phzat!!"

Nothing visible emanated from the machine, but the chicken vaporized immediately and completely. Not a shred of anything remained. Both men felt the rebounding wave of reflected energy from the far wall, perhaps twelve feet beyond the point where the chicken had hung. Several of the lower links of the chain were missing as well, as was the hook. "Holy crap!" Chuck couldn't believe his eyes. "Ernie, somethin's wrong! Somethin's really wrong! I can't move!"

Ernie stepped over to the control panel and cranked a knob. "It's okay now." He glanced over at Chuck, who was now completely quiet as well as motionless, there on the furniture dolly. He began readjusting settings on the control panel, and Chuck could hear the thrum of the generator increase in frequency. Then he turned to Chuck, whose visage bore a horrified, wide-eyed look.

Ernie grinned. "I know you can't change that awful look on your face, Chuck, because I know you're completely immobilized. That was the third project I had going on. It's really pretty neat. I could hold you in position there until your muscles failed. Of course, that won't be necessary. You'll be vaporized yourself, very shortly. You might as well relax in there, to the extent possible.” Ernie grabbed Chuck's shoulders and shoved, helping the dolly along with the toe of his tennis shoe. “Soon, all your obnoxious tendencies will vanish with you." As he aligned neighbor Chuck with the output of his latest invention, he added, "You know, Chuck, this really is an amazing development. I'd been puzzling over the possibilities presented by bi-axial waveform congruence. That's a "three-d wave" to you, Chuck. Imagine! Theoreticians obsess over the possible existence of four, five or six dimensions, and yet, most people think of the continuum in terms of only two! Leaves ‘em flat.” Ernie laughed aloud, a chortling, amused guffaw.

“Anyway, this thing really shouldn't be fired indoors, and who knows, maybe I'll never do it again. My employers don't even know it exists. But think what they could do! With enough spread and power, you could immobilize every living thing on a battlefield, like, stop an oncoming charge, cold. Then, you could vaporize the enemy, equipment and all! I'm not sure I want 'em to have power like that.”

“What this does do for me," he continued, "is to guarantee I won't have to split the forty-two million or so I've made from my patents and invention sales. That chicken? It was the second chicken I vaporized. You? You're about to be the second person." Ernie sidled up against Chuck, turned his head so they were nearly nose-to-nose and smiled, right into his victim's face. "My dear wife Antonia was the first." He walked back to the humming envelope and adjusted its beam spread. Then he turned and looked back at Chuck. "You are really, really an asshole, you know that, Chuck? And I might have tolerated that, in fact, I'd always kind of felt sorry for you. Because you are such a moron. It just doesn't seem fair. What I couldn't overlook was you messing with my wife! I mean, I know it was just as much her! You might be a couple of years younger than I am, but you sure aren't a handsome guy! You're just an average fucking moron! So, what the fuck?"

Ernie stepped back over to the control panel, lowered a pair of goggles over his eyes and flipped one switch. Chuck was sure it was all over. Instead, a heavy fan in the ceiling overhead started winding up. "Ventilation," Ernie explained. Everything was ready.

Suddenly, above the din of the big vent fan, the generator and the humming apparatus, they heard a pounding at the inner door of Ernie's sanctum. Alarmed, Ernie remembered that he hadn't closed the outer door. He hurried over and squinted at the peephole. A cop! Hmm. There was no way in hell a cop would have any idea what was going on. The guy had his thumbs stuck into his belt. Ernie hurried back and threw a sheet over his immobilized victim. Then, he opened the door, just twenty or so centimeters wide.

"Yes, officer?"

"That your open fire out there?"

Ernie smiled amiably. "Why yes, is that a problem?"

"Well, hell, not to me. Don't see a thing wrong with it. But you've got a neighbor across the street, she saw flames shooting up from it, ten or fifteen minutes ago. Worse, it's unattended. You know, gas grills are fine. Like that big stainless steel one your next-door neighbor has, over there."

"Okay, officer, I'll come out and put it out. I was just letting the charcoal get going, but I won't..."

"Hells bells." The officer interrupted. "Use it. Enjoy it. This time. Don't dump any more charcoal lighter on it though, okay? Can't figure out why you started it, anyway." The cop sniffed the air. "Smells like you already got fried chicken." He turned and walked away.

Ernie gently closed the door, walked back to his control panel and re-checked all the gauges and readouts. Lastly, he stepped over and removed the sheet. Maybe he should turn down the immobilizer and ask Chuck if he had any last words. "Screw it," he mumbled to himself, and he turned around and hit the ‘fire’ switches. The machine’s response was a bit louder this time.

"Phhhzzaatt!!"

"Ohhh! Aww, shhit!!"

Ernie suddenly felt a little faint. It was time to open a window.

***************

Another fifteen minutes had passed, and Ernie was getting a shower. What a rip. Obviously he wasn't so smart. How could he have overlooked a detail like that? It was so...incredibly obvious! He finished up, toweled off and got dressed. Well, it was over now. Time to relax and to finally get some food. Luckily, charcoal lasts longer than this thing had taken.

As he rolled a few bratwursts onto the grill, Ernie noticed that the still air in the vicinity of the lab smelled a bit like chicken-fried steak. Might as well bring Chuck’s gas grill on over, Chuck wouldn’t be needing it. That business between the neighbor and his Antonia, that was pure crap and nonsense. Taking care of it was just the purest of practicality. No big fuss, and people would think the guy had taken off with Ernie's wife. After discovering she had opened a new savings account in her name only, Ernie had broken her password and had emptied the few thousand in their joint account into hers, via the internet. Then he had withdrawn it with his face masked at an ATM, using her card. Convenient. Luckily, there were no children involved. Chuck had been single.

Ernie cracked open a beer and thought about that shiny new Bentley. Probably better wait a few months to buy it.

Why hadn't he considered that Chuck was a full head taller than Antonia? The burst from the reactor, straightened and aligned and then beam-spread to a height of just about five feet four inches, had vaporized everything below Chuck's chin. The immobilizer hadn't done a damned thing to suspend the head in mid-air, and it dropped like a pumpkin and rolled off on its own across the concrete floor. Ernie'd had no choice but to sit the head back up on his oak lab stool and vaporize that too. That had been his only stool! But the last hook had already been vaporized, and he wasn't about to make a run to the hardware store, leaving Chuck's head there on the lab floor.

You just don't leave loose ends like that lying around.

‘Planar polarized muon field,’ Ernie mused. To replace the metal plate Chuck stood upon. Finally, he considered whether or not the issue had been a typical problem of scale. Not really, of course; but the thought of scale reminded him of the battlefield scenario, and equations danced through his head, snowflakes in his mental breeze. Ernie couldn't have helped himself. He didn't realize it because it didn’t matter to him. He was mentally laying groundwork for the next great war.

Pushing the food around on the grill, Ernie smiled in anticipation and reached for a plate. The brats sizzled and popped in a most satisfying way.

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