Unpopular Science

“I am glad you are skeptical. It is a strange story. But I can convince you easily enough.”

“You have evidence?”

“Of course.” The older main also tapped the steel face on the book cover. “I have him.”

In silence the father and son left the offices of Fastbinder Machine Werks and drove to the family’s old house on several hundred acres of fallow land outside Cologne. The father of the first Jacob had tilled this soil, but now it was leased to other farmers or simply allowed to grow wild.

The old house was still maintained just as it had been when Jacob Fastbinder died in the 1950s. Jacob Fastbinder III now understood why it was kept: it was a place to house the family secrets, if what his father said was true.

What would Jacob Fastbinder III do if he discovered his father had become a lunatic?

But his father was about to prove he was not a lunatic.

Into the cellar they went, and into the workshop adjoining the cellar and hidden behind a fake wall. It was a sprawling shop packed with old, broken electronics and mechanical devices and endless rows of workbenches.

"I never even knew this workshop existed,” the son said.

“I am the only one who knew until I showed you,” explained his father.

There was dust everywhere, and corrosion and rust, and beneath the veil of time the young man glimpsed promises and mysteries. He imagined great engineering feats, invented and abandoned, waiting to be rediscovered. By him.

One worktable was empty, in a back corner.

“Help me with this.” The old man grasped a corner of the tabletop, face clenched as if it was a great exertion to move the tabletop, which was really quite light in weight.

When the wood-plank tabletop hit the floor, the young Jacob looked into a box like a coffin. Ironhand was there.

His father began to talk again as he puttered with devices on the next table, explaining that Jacob Fastbinder was a sort of bumbling mechanical genius, the kind of man who could not have a coherent conversation about screwing a bolt into a nut. He did have a talent for reverse engineering, it turned out, and managed to parlay the innovations inside Ironhand into numerous works of mechanical sophistication.

“Of course, he nearly destroyed himself and the company by choosing to put his developments into the hands of the Nazis. Despite the promises of the man in charge, a German thousand-year reign failed to happen. The corporation was broken up, which is why Fastbinder Machine Werks is these days just a fraction of what it was—with just three factories making parts for automobiles and other machinery.”

“Yes,” the young son said in a daze.

“But that is sufficient. We machine very good engine blocks and transmissions,” the older man added. “The romance of the business may be lost, but we are profitable for the last twenty years and the Fastbinder family is still wealthy. You’re not listening, Jacob.”

The old man got no response. He sighed and opened up the belly cavity on the old mechanical man, inserted the battery pack and twirled the wing nuts to secure the leads.

Ironhand sat up at the waist.

“It’s true,” the young man gasped.

“See this gyroscopic control next to the battery?” his father asked. “Look familiar?”

“Grandfather’s first patent?”

“Exactly. And this is a mechanized compass, allowing switch actuation with a featherweight magnetized needle. The family fortunes were made on all these things, and it all originated with these very components.”

“Let’s see it in action,” the younger Fastbinder exclaimed. “Have him stand up and walk around.”

“That is not possible.”

“Why?”

“This is why,” the father said. “This series of tiny relays. They’re a work of genius that even Jacob Fastbinder could never fully understand or repair.”

“There are hundreds! Like spiderwebs!”

“Thousands. They controlled the mechanical man through its hundreds of functions, in series, sometimes automatically, based on various inputs.”

“It’s like BASIC programming.”

The elder Fastbinder shrugged. He had little patience with the technology of computers. He saw them as tools of the accounting department, and yet these days there were Apple IIs being requested by every department in the company. He knew they were powerful, but he was an old-timer who couldn’t comprehend the programming and the logic behind it. It was too late to start learning it now.

Ironhand sat there, a hunk of old steel, internal mechanisms working softly. Just a machine, without consciousness.

To his son, the elder Fastbinder said, “I am dying.” The young man looked up at him.

“And I have a son unworthy of replacing me.” Fastbinder III opened his mouth to speak. Years later he remembered all the emotions he was trying to come to terms with at that moment.

“Why,” he uttered finally, “do you find me unworthy?”

“Jacob, you’re an impulsive man. You have not demonstrated you can be a valuable man.”

“I have ambition.”

“But no will. I have yet to see you make a difference in the Werks.”

“I’m director of engineering!”

“And you are adequate in that role.”

“What more can I do?”

“Be a leader.”