A Touch of E Flat

The narrator, a roly‑poly scientist‑professor named Albert Jamieson Cooling, records how routine cold‑materials research yielded an unexpected Cooling Effect and an accidental near‑fatal activation of a prototype that produced what he terms a Cooling gun. Writing from police surveillance and a hospital recuperation ward, he traces his transition from wartime laboratory work to a small college, explains the physical phenomenon observed with near‑absolute‑zero materials, recounts the mishaps that revealed its disastrous potential, and reflects on the moral and practical implications of weaponizing such discoveries.