The Heart Attack Machine

From time to time, the ebb and flow of the news tides wash up a certain kind of detrius which we pick up and file away because they remind us of Richard Farnsworth (not his real name), a kid from our freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, yo these thirty long years ago. Tidbits like the death which tragically cut short the Papacy of John Paul I, and now, 26 years later, the “merciful” heart attack which spared the most recent Pope a prolonged and undignified period of incapacitation before expiring.

Young Farnsworth was full of vim and bizarre ideas.  His field was electromagnitism, and was always ranted on about phased projection of electromagnetic fields and whatnot. Quite frankly, the young Dowbrigade understood nary a word, which was not suprising, seeing as our field at the point was psychology, which we dropped as soon as we figured out that everyone in the Psych department was clinically psycho and mostly just trying to figure out why. The next year we changed to Anthro, which we found much more sane and outward looking.

But we digress. By November, it had become appearant what Farnsworth’s true obsession was.  He was fascinated by the idea of a Heart Attack Machine. Appearantly, seeing as the heart is a bio-mechanic pump regulated by electical impulses, a powerful enough electromagnetic field can interfere with the impulses and basically stop it like pulling a plug.

According to Farnsworth, this had already been proven (he didn’t get into what kind of experiments had “proven” it), but the only “problem” was that the machinery required to project an electromagnetic field of sufficient intensity filled half a room, and require a power connection many times what was available from a normal household socket. Plus, the effective range of the thing was only about 2 or 3 meters. You would have to get the victim to walk directly in front of a huge, immobile maching to actually kill anybody.

However, again according to Farnsworth, he had devised a way to phase the electromagnetic field, in such a way that it required much less power to generate, and could be projected at least twice as far.  Combined with recent advances in miniaturization, he said, it was at that time feasible to create a version of the HAM that would fit into a large suitcase. If someone would only give him an adequately equiped lab and an unlimited budget, he could do it. We thought him utterly mad, although undoubtedly a genius.

And that was 30 years ago, by now, the damn thing probably fits into a breifcase, or even a laptop. So whenever a farflung foreign leader, or a significant role player in any of the arenas of human endeavor we track, convieniently dies of a heart attack, we remember old Farnsworth.

Whatever happened to old Farnsworth?  We never found out. In early December of that same year, he just disappeared from campus. One day, his suitemates came back from class, and all his stuff was gone. They, and some of us who had gotten to know him (he had no real “friends”) went to talk to officials up to Dean of Students Archie Epps, but they refused to tell us anything. It was as if he had never existed. But we suspected we was in a well-funded laboratory somewhere, working on his obsession.

Whoever came up with the Polish Pope idea pulled off the most brilliant stroke of geo-political manipulation in history.  The intense Catholicism of Eastern Europe in general, and Poland in specific was the Archilles heel of the mighty Marxist empire. It was the sore, which once inflamed, errupted into the cancer that killed the beast of Communism. Of course, they had to get rid of that short-shelf-life “mistake” Pope to get their man in, but it was worth it. Now, the greatest Pope of many lifetimes has been shuffled ceremoniously but expeditiously off the stage by another heart attack.  Ane we are reminded yet again of Richard Farnsworth (not his real name) and his Heart Attack Machine.