Unpopular Science

Mark moved to a small table of contents and brought up a page of the same website, this one dedicated to the Ironhand exposition at the 1904 World’s Fair. There was a photograph of the robot standing under a banner proclaiming him to be The Amazing Electro-Mechanical Man. A somber man stood next to him in a suit and vest, smoking a pipe. The caption read, “Ironhand wowed visitors to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, MO, where his inventor, Archibald Slate, offered a hundred-dollar reward to any man who could prove Ironhand was a fake. The hundred-dollar prize was never claimed.”

Under the caption was an extended description of the fair and the Ironhand bag of tricks, which included walking, talking and shooting a rifle. Remo read all the way down to the bottom and noticed a link called “The Ironhand Rumor Mill.”

Mark Howard was on a trip to the washroom, so Remo carefully moved his finger across the flat place on the computer that moved the little blinking doohickey on the screen, then tapped the clicking thingamajig.

The computer, to his surprise, did not disintegrate, detonate or go black. It showed him, of all things, a page called “The Ironhand Rumor Mill.”

“I’m on to something,” he told Mark, who looked alarmed when he saw Remo had touched the computer. “Don’t worry, it’s fine. Look. Ironhand’s participation in a U.S. geological survey of Alaska and the Arctic. Ironhand’s career in the U.S. Army. Ironhand fights in Mexico and in World War One. These are reprints from newspaper articles from the nineteen-zeros and the nineteen-teens.”

“They sound like they’re taken right from the books,” Mark noted.

“Look at how many,” Remo said. “This guy who collects them says Ironhand sightings were a phenomenon, like UFO sightings.”

“And just as believable,” Mark insisted.

“Well, for years the common folks saw the B-l bomber and called it a UFO. Finally we fessed up and said yeah okay we’ve got this really-bizarre looking jet bomber.”

“The UFO sightings didn’t stop,” Mark pointed out.

“But those who saw it were right all along, weren’t they?” Remo insisted.

“They said they saw an unidentified flying object. They said they saw something amazing and new in the sky. They were right. Maybe the Ironhand sightings were like that.”

Mark considered it then shook his head. “I do not seriously believe there was any sort of a mechanical man walking around a hundred years ago that could do more than walk and wave his hand,” he insisted.

“Why?”

“We can barely do that with today’s robotics.”

“Every generation assumes it possesses the epitome of mankind’s learning, huh. Little Father?”

Chiun turned his head away from the wing, smiling broadly. “That is so, Remo. You have been listening!”

“Yeah, kinda. Repetition is everything. I still know the words to ‘You Light Up My Life,’ too, even though I don’t want to. Chiun, what’s the name of the stone dog-faced boy in the attic of the Master’s House. Is it the Oracle of Anubis?”

Chiun’s smile was enormous. “Yes! I have not even thought of it in years and yet you have found the perfect example. I am proud of you, Remo!”

“You’re gonna hurt your face if you keep doing that, Little Father,” Remo warned. “So the Oracle of Anubis is really old. It’s a statue of a guy, life-size, made of rock, and he has a face like a greyhound or some other skinny dog. The oracle was made for the public library in Alexandria, Virginia.”

“Alexandria, Egypt. The library of Alexander the Great,” Chiun corrected.

“Yeah. Anyway, it’s old.”

Mark Howard was speechless.

“And when the library was torn down or fell down or whatever, the oracle was removed.”

“And it survives to this day?” Mark asked. “You’ve seen it?”

Remo blinked. “Well, yeah. Actually, I own it. It’s in a box in the attic, in Sinanju. But what is important is this. Junior—it’s an effing robot. What’s more, it’s an effing vending machine! You put in a coin and it answers your question by pointing its finger at the answers on the stone tablet in front of it. I know it’s a cheap carnival trick by today’s standards, but think what it must have been like hundreds of years ago.”

“Thousands,” Chiun corrected.

“Thousands of years go,” Remo continued, on a roll. “And I don’t mean what it was like to use it, I mean what it was like to invent it. He had to be some kind of a genius to think of that stuff considering he never saw anything like it before.”

Mark nodded. “No frame of reference. I see your point.”

“So why couldn’t somebody one hundred years ago have come up with a robot that could do genuinely amazing things? If he was brilliant enough?”

Remo tapped the screen, on the picture from the World’s Fair, on the face of Archibald Slate, creator of Ironhand.

“Why not this guy?” Remo asked.

Chapter 19