I remember a story with a Professor who gets invited by an inventor to his house. The inventor shows him a device, (actually two, one on each side) that will disassemble all matter in between to its constituent particles. The device can then reassemble the particles back to the original.
He demonstrates on the Professor while the Professor's assistant watches, then undoes the process. Meanwhile, he's talking about how he's going to sell this device to governments, and the Professor gets worried about the consequences of something like that in the hands of anyone, really. The Professor pretends there's a leak of electricity coming from the chair that the device is positioned about, and gets the inventor to sit on the chair. He then vaporizes the inventor and leaves. I think the author also wrote other stories about this Professor character, if it helps.
