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My lady chaperons the mortal fuss of descent from a god-besotted family. They do not venerate a stalwart thunderer demanding hot blood as obeisance. They are Lutherans, tossing money at gaunt priests and feeling smug for consummating their panoply of worship. They are weekly promised less an eternity at their deity's right hand or an escape from the sulfurous pit than a pledge not to be bothered in the afterlife by gaunt priests. My honey wore a St. Jude medal swinging upon her blouse, leaving a short arc of discoloration upon silk that would be better admired for its contents than its torment. She endured the indignity of her religion taking her to the cleaners several times each week, and solicited my advice as a chemist. "We will give it a thin clear coat of polyurethane," I told her, "sealing the soft metal surface and allowing passersby to be seized by your bilateral smorgasbord instead of the medal's stigma." She smiled and dimpled. I pursued my own agenda.
Sympathetic magic is as old as mankind, cherished by heathens and animists and prelates elaborately packaged in watered silk raiment. An eagle feather, a carnivore's fang, a merrily bubbling reliquary or a bit of the True Cross is the ticket for rendering blind men deaf before a faithful congregation. As adrenaline runs hot the collection bucket is passed so that others, less deserving but of no lesser need and burdened by the weight of their purses, might hitch a ride. The clergy later toss the boons toward heaven. What the gods disdain is thereafter devoted to more worldly pursuits.
The hypocrisy of canonizing St. Jude - rendering an officially mandated Saint Jew and using the construct to extort alms from the meanest human dregs grasping in panic at the end of their ropes - was something I found distasteful. My line was descended from the money lenders in the Temple. Where was my finder's fee, my commission, my vigorish? My ancestors were kiting checks when Europeans were still swiniging frok trees.
I myself am a member of a priesthood privy to the secrets of the universe. We do not beg succor from a tenebrous idol. We spit nuclear hellfire, Prozac, and Levitra. Science! The power within me rose with a magnificent snarl. There was no telling what beatific mischief I could foment at a molecular level by summoning the universally permeating tendrils of quantum mechanics.
I was not about to dip that object of sanctimonious pecuniary adoration into some cheap urethane varnish on sale at Home Depot, nor would I acquire through shadowy channels a sample of an aerospace miracle resin. There was something better! A few microns of vacuum-deposited Parylene-C form an invisible film which stanches the chemical and electromagnetic infernos raging within the emission cavities of excimer lasers, for thousands of hours. Why stop there? The hardest material on the planet is inert to EVERYTHING below 400 degrees Celsius. I called a friend at Crystalume. He grew CVD diamond films.
Two hours spent within the eerie purple-pink glow of an argon microwave discharge seeded with a few percent of hydrogen and methane sealed St. Jude within the atomically densest, most intractable atomic sarcophagus in all creation. He would hereafter be nestled between those lush hummocks without conferring blemish, encased within a cognition more powerful than that of any burning bush. I returned the apparently unchanged trinket to my sweetie.
As days passed she noted that the St. Jude looked, ah, different. His eyes appeared to goggle, then his cheeks puffed and his tongue blackly protruded from his lips. A graven image of a man's head with hair curled in the Grecian manner and a nose at home anywhere in the Levant progressively transformed, or so it seemed, into the anguished face of a torture victim treated to a bit of South American whimsy requiring a plastic bag and perhaps three minutes' patience - the dry submarine. Diamond films are not only obdurate and inert, they are also absolutely impermeable to gases. The patron saint of lost causes was either going to do some fancy dancing or learn how to breathe through his rectum.
I stood before my woman admiring the improvement in what began as the usual stodgy religious art. As I turned there was a CRACK! as a ghostly whisper of diamond film debonded from the metal surface and flew across the room pursuing Mach One. It shattered into dust just after it beheaded a bronze statuette. St. Jude had returned to normal, perhaps with a slight upward curl added to the corner of his mouth.
Diamond is the stiffest material known. Care must be taken to match linear coefficients of thermal expansion of coating and substrate, or temperature cycling will uncouple them. In any case, the rear of the medallion held and has not streaked her blouse to this day.
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