Holes

                Professor Charles Best was attempting to create a liquid polymer capable of dissolving chemical bonds. The application was, he assumed, primarily for removing old adhesives. As the grant was funded by the adhesive division of 3M he figured out why they wanted it… but he was not prepared for what he eventually found. They had even supplied him with a sample of the glue to see if that helped him devise the anti-agent. He had asked for the chemical formula as that would speed things up enormously, but was told the project was top secret and he had to come at this blind.

The trick, obviously,  was creating a substance that would dissolve an existing chemical bond without completely destroying the two bonded items. Any idiot could devise an acid that ate through glue, but imagine the effect the acid would have on the stuck surfaces. He was aware of stories of people who, after using the latest “Super-glue” found their fingers stuck together or found that they had accidentally spilled the glue in the garage and now the hardened material formed a flat liquid permanent puddle on the floor that would not be removed. They must have developed, or be developing a new glue and wanted to offer an “antidote” to stupid people. But he could see the use of a glue that was removable. He pictured a house that was held together with a glue stronger than any nail or cement mix. If the people wanted to add a section to the house, they simply removed a portion of the wall cleanly by dissolving the glue around the portion that needed to be altered. Or shipping companies that used a drop of glue to secure large shipments and simply poured some of his anti-agent on at the delivery end to release the load. Maybe even a type of lock that was geared to a persons genetic structure. The lock would not open unless someone with a specific DNA code applied the agent. His mind swan with possibilities but they all rested on his ability to devise the substance that would release the bond.

He tried all the standard remedies people had when they stuck something to something else than wished they hadn’t. Nail polish remover, alcohol, even lowering the temperature of the stuck items. It had all been done before but he needed to start from scratch if he was to find the compound they wanted.

He was getting no where. Everything he tried either destroyed the stuck objects or was ineffective on the glue sample.

 

It hit him one day as he was watching TV. A character in a show was using some type of magnet to move a large object. His eyes widened as he realized that he may have hit on an avenue that no-one else had tried before.

Energy.

What if, rather than some liquid that simply melted the bond, you applied an energy field to disrupt the bond at the atomic level? In theory, if you had two bricks stuck together with glue, you should be able to un-stick them by applying an energy field that disrupted the physical bond created by the glue. The bricks would remain untouched because they had a different energy signature, but the glue would simply disappear in a waft of smoke!

He began work immediately.

 

The device he eventually created looked like a large round magnet with a donut hole in the middle. But it worked. He encoded the glue with a specific isotope in the mix. Then he devised a field generator that isolated that isotope and discharged it. The result was more of a liquid than the “puff of smoke” he envisioned. He stuck together two pieces of PVC piping with the 3M glue and passed it through the donut hole. Almost immediately the volume of glue he used turned into a slightly viscous puddle of black liquid under the magnet and the pipes separated with no indication as to where they had been stuck originally. The only odd thing he could not rectify was the amount of goop versus the amount of glue. If he used 5 ml of glue, he found that he had 5.3 ml of goop at the end. Every chemist knows that you can’t have more products than reactants and he was at a loss to explain where this extra volume was coming from. It was not from the test items. He verified the weights of these before and after the glue was used and removed and they were always constant. So where was the extra mass coming from?

He chalked it up to fatigue and mis-calculation and decided to look into it later. After all… there was no way to violate one of Newton’s laws was there?

After each experiment he had a small amount of goop that he had to dispose of. He was usually a stickler for environmental issues but he knew that the goop would be relatively harmless. No worse off than the millions of galons of motor oil that home mechanics poured down their sinks every year. He was tired, and rather than seal the goop in the biowaste containers he carried the catch tray over to the sink and intended to wash it down the sink as he washed his hands. He tipped up the end of the pan and the goop flowed out through the indented spout hole that prevented spillage.

 

A drop of the goop landed on the side of the sink near the drain hole. He tried to wash it down the sink but realized that water flowed into the hole! He had created some kind of acid after all and had burned a hole through the base of his sink that the water was now rushing out of and into the cupboard below. He opened the door to the lower area to view the damage the water had done to the various items he had stored under the sink.

The area was bone dry.

There was actually a build up of fine dust from the months of neglect over each of the bottles of rarely used chemicals.

He looked up towards the metallic curve of the sink itself. He strained to look with his eyes but could not see the hole. He would not use his hands to seek out the hole he had created. If it was some type of acid he created he did not want to find out how long its residual properties were by how quickly it dissolved the skin off his fingers if there was any remaining near the hole it created. He could not see a hole. He stood up again and glanced at the sink again as he reached for the flashlight he always kept in the lab for the many blown fuses he had had over the years. The hole was still there. An imperfect circle, as the acid had made a hole in the random shape the liquid was in as it hit the surface of the sink  He turned on the water to a slight trickle and watched as it ran down the small hole and disappeared. He left this trickle running as he crouched and shone the beam of the flashlight on the area where he knew the hole should be. He had his bearings now and knew the hole should be at the front left of the sink, near the rounded corner and just where the bottom curved up to make the sides.

Again, there was no hole.

He could hear the water as it ran into the mini-drain he had created. It sounded like any other drain would sound with a small sucking noise as gravity pulled the water into the hole along with air.

A nervous anticipation began to dawn on him as his mind wrapped itself around what he believed to be going on.

He could not understand what the problem was. He was a chemist for gods sake and he was convinced that this small hole existed only on one side of the sink, and that was impossible. Two mistakes now. He was not able to reconcile the mass of the products with those of the reactants, and now he had burned a hole in his sink and could not see where the water was going. Perhaps it only ate through the surface of the sink and there was some kind of inner layer that was now pooling the water. He turned off the tap and pulled the pencil out of his top coat pocket. Still unwilling to risk his flesh by touching  the hole he was convinced was caused by some corrosive byproduct he was unaware of, he stuck the pencil into the hole.

It was a new pencil and he pushed it almost the full 5 inches or so of its length into the hole with no resistance. No way is there a double wall on this sink thicker than 5 inched he thought. The other end of this pencil is waggling on the underside of this sink right now and I look like a complete fool. He knelt down again in front of the cupboard, still holding the pencil by the eraser, and shone the flashlight  where he knew the pencil would be sticking out.

There was no pencil.

Forgetting about the possibility of it being an acid, he smacked his hand flat against the rounded outside corner of the sink. The human body being what it is, he knew that, although it was a bit of a stretch, that his hands were in a type of praying position and that they were directly opposite each other on each side of this sink that could have been no thicker than 1/16 of an inch. He should be poking his left hand with the pencil but he could feel nothing.

Nothing.

He shimmied the pencil back and forth a few times and jumped when he realized that he could not only hear the tick-ticking as the wood tapped on the metal edges of the sink, but he could feel the vibration made by each click with his left hand. The vibration was centered almost directly on his palm but there was no pencil to be found.

He had lost his mind plain and simple. The hours he had put into this project had taken their toll and his mind had simply taken a leave of absence for a few hours. The human mind is an incredible organ. Children more so than adults, but it retains a remarkable ability to submit in cases where it should actually go insane. A human confronted by a huge glowing cow suddenly appearing over the breakfast table one morning would either go insane, or after a few minutes of pinching themselves to make sure they were not asleep, would simply accept that it happened and get on with it.

Charles Best’s mind found a middle road in a form his mind always found helpful and familiar. Analysis. He was dog-tired, he was overworked, he was stressed, he had inhaled the puff of smoke from the results of his molecular de-bonding experiments and all these factors had combined to produce a hallucinogenic state where he was unsure of his own reality.

He was seeing things.

His mind, secure in the obvious conclusion, ordered his had to put down the pencil and go to bed, to which he gladly complied.

 

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

He did not remember going to bed, but he awoke still wearing his lab clothes in the cot provided by the university. He felt refreshed, relaxed and confident his mind was back to full batteries.

He walked over to the sink and glanced in.

The small hole from last night was gone. He rapped the side of the sink as a final confirmation and was rewarded  with the hollow bong of the steel sink

 

Repeats experiment, creates goop and pours it in the sink again. Big hole. Same effect.