“Why?” the younger Fastbinder asked.

  His father held up a hand. “He put in oilcloth to line the grave, then used a strong metal bar to lever the mechanical man down into it He covered it with oilcloth and only just had it buried again when German reinforcements arrived. My father threw himself to the ground, pretending to be unconscious until he was found and revived and hailed as the only surviving hero of the Americans’ savage attack.”

  His father chuckled. Jacob Fastbinder III frowned. “What happened then?” he demanded.

  “The handler of the mechanical man came in search of him. It was one night later, and my father had expected it. He had done enough of a quick study of the mechanical man’s batteries to know that a rescue attempt must come very soon, and it did. As he stood watch on the burial site, he saw it move. A hand came up from the soil. The mechanical man was being ordered to disinter itself.”

  The elder Fastbinder was amused, imitating the gesture with one bent arm clutching at the empty air above his head.

  “It was another dirigible he saw in the night sky, only a mile away. My father alerted the German army and they went gunning for the aircraft. The dirigible descended and my father buried again the hand of the mechanical man, then left France. After the war, in secret, with just a few hired Frenchmen whose labor and silence could be bought, he came again to the battlefield and unearthed the mechanical man. They loaded the rusted thing into a hired truck and then my father shot the Frenchmen in the back for their trouble, burying them in the hole.

  “The mechanical man had not corroded too badly, due to the oilcloth Jacob Fastbinder wrapped him in, but repairing it was a long and tedious process. My father learned more about advanced engineering in the next thirty months than in all his years of school and internship and military field work. The mechanical man was more advanced than anything he had ever seen or heard of, and my father saw his future. He began to patent and produce the new technology, and that is how Fastbinder Machine Werks was founded. Do you believe me, Jacob?”

  The younger man was stunned, but he nodded. “I suppose I do. You’re not much of a practical joker. Father.”

  “True enough. Soon, my father learned the identity of the mechanical man.” With that, his father went to his office desk and took out a small, faded book, putting it on top of the Fastbinder history book.

  It was a ratty old paperback novel from America, with a prominent “100” displayed in the upper right corner. The ridiculous illustration showed a flamboyant robot standing head and shoulders above cowering German soldiers in the uniforms of World War I.

  “Ironhand Smites the Kaiser?” Fastbinder III read. His father nodded. ‘“Ironhand joins the heroic American troops in the Great War, fighting for freedom against the vicious, cowardly Germans.’”

  Again his father nodded and said, “And now, my son, you must think I am truly mad.”

  “This is just cheap paperback trash.”

  “Fiction was a clever disguise for a genuine phenomena. Ironhand was exposed to the world by its creator, even promoted, before it was taken under the control of the U.S. government. The dime novels and a few public appearances by a shoddy imitation Ironhand convinced the world there had never been a genuine article. This secrecy made it easy for Jacob Fastbinder to patent the secrets of Ironhand and, indeed, found the Fastbinder Machine Werks.”

  The younger man looked his father square in the eyes. “I guess I don’t believe you, after all.”

  “Why would I make it up?”

  “I do not know. But this?” The younger man tapped the face of the robot on the paperback. “This is preposterous.”

  “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.”

  The young Fastbinder saw the whole picture now. His father was ill, forced to reveal this bizarre family secret as a way of kicking his son in the pants, force him to become someone truly deserving—by the old man’s standards—of the leadership of the family company.

  “How much time do I have?” he asked. “To prove myself?”

  “Before I die, you mean? Two years, maybe five. Yes, Jacob, there is plenty of time for you. Do you have what it takes to make use of the time?”

  For an answer, Jacob looked at the mechanical man. “Let me work here, in grandfather’s workshop. Let me see what I can learn from him.”

  Jacob could tell that his father thought this was a curious request, and Jacob realized then just how dull a man his father was. Why, he had never had the desire to work in this workshop!

  At that moment he understood that he, Jacob Fastbinder III, was made in a different image—not the successful businessman his father was. He was like his grandfather, the first Jacob Fastbinder, the man who claimed Ironhand.

  The seed of shame that his father planted in his being was only as monumental as his excitement over the discovery of his past. It was just two months later that these opposing forces collided again.

  “What is this?” his father demanded hotly. This time, Jacob had not been kept waiting outside his father’s office for even a minute.

  “A patent application,” Jacob said. “I have learned much from Ironhand.”

  His father’s anger was commingled with shock. “From Ironhand? The thing still has secrets to tell?”

  “Perhaps if you had spent a few hours poking around in Grandfather’s workshop you would have discovered this yourself,” Jacob said. “Have you ever earned a single patent for this company, Father?”

  “No, and neither shall you,” Fastbinder stated flatly. “You’ll risk everything! Don’t you understand? Somebody in America already invented this—this nested relay switching matrix.”

  “Ninety years ago,” Fastbinder reminded him. “That does not matter if there is someone in America who is still wondering what became of Ironhand. It is a miracle we were never shut down, but at least now those patents are far in our past, too. We cannot afford to dredge up this secret again.”

  Jacob noticed his old man was pale. How long would it take him to die? Hopefully not five years. The young man said, “Ironhand walks.”

  “What?”

  “What Grandfather could not understand, I do understand. I have mapped his programming system, repaired the corroded relays, and now he walks. Soon I’ll have his frequencies and command codes mapped out and I’ll be able to operate him perfectly, just as his makers did.”

  His father looked stark. “No. No more work there. It is reckless and I should never have allowed it.”

  “Father, this is my way. It was your father’s way. I can be a success, but not like you, not by being a financial executive. I must be an engineer.”

  “Then do it elsewhere.”

  In silence, the young Jacob stood and reached for the paper.

  “This stays with me.” The elder Fastbinder slapped his hand on the patent application.

  So this was what it was reduced to, finally, the old power struggle. Jacob Fastbinder III was not going to allow himself to lose at that, not again, not even one more battle.

  “But the knowledge goes with me,” the young man said. He extracted a small flat thing from his briefcase. His father looked confused. “It is a floppy disk. All my notes from Ironhand are stored on one five-inch piece of plastic.”

  “Give that to me!”

  “Of course, Father,” Jacob said, flipping the thing onto his father’s oak desk. ‘It is only a copy.”

  “Give me all of them.”

  “Not possible. I made a dozen copies. Some are hidden around the country, some are in safe-deposit boxes in the U.K. and Switzerland.”

  Now the old man understood. “You would blackmail your own father?”

  The younger man sneered. “What were you trying to do to me, Father?”

  “Make you into a useful businessman!”

  “Manipulate me. Force me to become hideously mundane, like you.”

  “Son, please, do not reveal what you have learned.”

  “I will. To the highest bidder. And let it be known that you refused to make use of my patent. It is substantial. People will want to know why you turned away your own son with his profitable new technology.”

  “Every word you speak is another knife thrust into my heart,” the old man said, full of bitterness.

  “Better the heart than the back,” his son retorted, exposing his own anger now. “Decide, old man. You have ten seconds.”

  Jacob Fastbinder stayed with the family business and was promoted to director of technology, eventually even buying out his father’s share in the firm. A year later the value of that share had tripled with the introduction of the new nested relay switch product line, giving unprecedented computerlike control to component makers, without investing in bulky, expensive computers. It had applications in luxury cars, armored vehicles, aircraft, cruise ships, you name it.

  Jacob Fastbinder in was a great success, but not the success his father had envisioned. It didn’t matter. His father’s time was over, even if it did take the old man a long four years, three months and six days to finally die.

  The advent of cheap computerized controls made the famous nested relay switch system obsolete not long after the elder Fastbinder died and Jacob Fastbinder III became executive director of the company. Without a hugely profitable invention to shine his star, he was judged solely on his management skills, which were less impressive. Before long he was ousted from the director’s chair.

  Only the family link to the company, and the need to save corporate face, motivated the board of directors to give Jacob Fastbinder in control of a new start-up firm in the United States. A grand new opportunity, the press releases promised, but Fastbinder knew he was being set up. A large-scale failure in the United States, and the board would have the public justification it needed to eject the last descendant of the company founder.

  All went as planned. Fastbinder American Controls Corp. generated big losses. Fastbinder was ousted, but the board agreed to allow him to receive, as severance, a share on sales from his personal patents, which were licensed to the U.S. division. This was an easy concession for the board to make, as there were, in fact, no profits at all coming from the U.S. division.

  Fastbinder III sold his shares in the parent firm and kept only his German homes. Still a wealthy man, Jacob went into seclusion on his desert estate in New Mexico, near Tucumcari, and held a press conference that appeared entirely superfluous and self-aggrandizing before the fact. None of the big media outlets sent reporters to listen to a bitter ex-CEO spout vitriol about the company that fired him.

  The only tidbit of interest came when Fastbinder explained he “…removed himself from the company in an effort to escape the long history of associations between his company and its sympathy for the Nazi cause during the war.”

  In truth, there was no longer any public perception of a link between Fastbinder Machine Werks and the Nazis—until the press conference rekindled it Fastbinder’s bad PR sent Fastbinder Machine Werks into financial stutters. His timing helped—-the world was finally getting around to taking legal action against firms known to have helped the Nazi cause.

  He received calls from various legal organizations asking if the family ever possessed artworks and treasures looted by the Nazis. “Oh, the family never owned such valuables. The corporation, however… I seem to recall a few interesting paintings and boxes of jewels in a basement vault.”

  Fastbinder allowed his U.S. and German properties to be searched, and they came up clean except for a lot of antique machine parts of no value.

  Fastbinder Machine Werks came up clean, as well.

  “Tell those nincompoops to look in zee basement vault!” Fastbinder said to the head of the UN agency charged with the investigation.

  “Well, the thing is, Mr. Fastbinder, we can’t find the basement vault, and nobody on the board seems to know where one is.”

  “They told you this?” Fastbinder asked incredulously. Had he forgotten to tell the board about his father’s secret vault in the headquarters subbasement? Oh, shiest, now the company was going to look like it was trying to cover up. Too bad for the company.

  “I know it exists. Zee executive director of zee board of directors described it to me personally,” Fastbinder said. “He never saw fit to allow me to view it myself, however.” Fastbinder told the UN exactly where in the basement they might search for fresh wall repairs.

  The vault was found. MORE THAN THREE STOLEN PAINTINGS FOUND IN FASTBINDER WERKS VAULT! thundered the headlines in the London newspaper. Fastbinder had a copy overnighted to New Mexico. The German papers were too uptight to do the story justice. FASTBINDER VAULT REVEALS ONLY FOUR PAINTINGS. Hmm, Fastbinder thought, maybe he should have left more of the family art.