Unpopular Science

Chapter 22

After dinner they met around the fire in the circular great room whose cornerless walls were covered with old framed photos, daguerreotypes and tintypes of dead Slates. It was the four of them. The housekeeper, Mrs. Sanderson, had departed with tears in her eyes when Remo and Chiun refused to eat her roast.

“It’s the first big meal she’s had the opportunity to prepare in months,” Sarah Slate chastised Remo. “Would it have killed you to at least try it?”

“Sorry,” Remo said “We don’t swing that way.”

“So, where do I start?” Sarah asked when they were all seated in the vast but somehow cozy great room— all except Chiun, who popped up from the floor time and again to examine one of the ancient pictures. ‘What do you know about Archibald Slate already?”

“All we know is the public record.” Mark Howard took out a steno pad and flipped it open. “Born in 1849 in Rhode Island in this house. Earned a reputation as an eccentric engineering genius while attending Brown University, right here in Providence. His reputation was enhanced when he left the university and was granted a multitude of mechanical patents, but he became a celebrity in 1899. That’s when Ironhand was unveiled for the first time.” Mark looked up and smiled warmly. Sarah smiled warmly in return. “How am I doing so far?”

“Wonderfully.”

“Fickle,” Remo said.

“Huh?” Howard asked.

“Go on,” Remo added impatiently.

“Uh, let’s see. Archibald Slate stages a series of Ironhand exhibitions. He writes engineering papers but they’re turned down by the more prestigious journals of the time. Archibald becomes a laughingstock in some circles and promises a dramatic series of exhibitions to prove Ironhand’s capabilities.

“That’s the same year he and Ironhand trek two thousand miles across the Canadian-Alaskan tundra, including making a dangerous passage through the Canadian Rockies. In 1903, Slate and Ironhand spend several months in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, rounding up a slew of wanted men. They head next into South America and explore many hundreds of miles of the Amazon during the dry season.

“All these events were highly publicized, but they never achieved the goal of legitimizing Ironhand. Every eyewitness account, every photo, was derided as fakery. To his detractors, Slate went from being a pitiful source of amusement to being a symbol of every profit-mongerer eager to make a buck off the public fascination with the new world of technological marvels.”

Mark looked up suddenly. ‘Tm sorry to be so blunt, Ms. Slate. This is what my research shows. I don’t mean to insult your ancestor.”

Sarah smiled openly. “Not at all. I’ve heard much worse, Mr. Howard.”

“I’m Mark, please.”

“I’m Sarah.”

“I’m impatient,” Remo added.

“You’re also rude. And illiterate,” Chiun piped up. “And disrespectful. And careless and lazy and impertinent and a poor dresser and physically repulsive and scandalously uncultured.”

“I’m not a poor dresser.”

“You wear undergarments in public.”

“T-shirts are practical. Keep reading, Mr. Howard.”

Sarah Slate watched the pair of Masters with ill-concealed amazement before turning her attention back to Mark.

“In 1904, Archibald Slate was said to be despondent over his inability to convince the world that Ironhand was the singular representation of several mechanical and electrical breakthroughs, so he paid handsomely to sponsor his own exhibition at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. This, he promised, would be a scientific exhibition in which Ironhand’s secrets would be revealed. The exhibition was a flop with the scientific community, but it was a big hit with the public, and within a few months the first Ironhand novel came out. Ironhand and the Cherokee Marauders. Supposedly based on Ironhand’s true adventures in the West in 1903. This was followed up by The Machine Man on the Dark Continent. The series was published for years, culminating with Ironhand #136, The Amazing Electro-Mechanical Man Conquers the Orient and#137, The Robot Probes under the Earth.

“Who in their right mind would want to read a hundred and thirty-seven books about the same guy?” Remo demanded.

“Archibald Slate was credited as the author, but in reality he seems to have retired to a life of idle inventing and occasional consulting work with the U.S. Army’s transportation research. Helped design the early armored vehicles. But by 1918 he was beginning to show signs of anxiety, and became senile. He wandered away from his convalescent home, here in Providence, and was never seen again.”

Mark looked at Sarah Slate, who seemed lost in memory. “Did I leave anything out?”

She laughed, briefly, an unhappy sound. “Yes.” Mark smiled encouragingly. Remo waited. Chiun’s eyes tightened, ever so slightly.

“In 1904,” she continued, “my great-grandfather began planning his World’s Fair exhibition, in which he would demonstrate the technology in Ironhand and display the diagrams of his technology on posters. He would give the technology away free to anyone who would make use of it. Surely, he thought, someone would see that what he had created was truly wonderful and ahead of its time. Somebody would surely take a chance on his inventions and see how successful they were.

“Three weeks before the Fair was to begin, the United States government illegally appropriated Ironhand from Archibald Slate. They gave him the choice of joining the government research project based on Ironhand automation technology, or being entirely excluded from the development. He had to join the government. He had no choice. The Ironhand exhibited at the Fair was a cheap tin copy—even that fake Ironhand was extremely advanced for its time. The books were a ploy by the government. They wanted the public to have no doubt that Ironhand was and had always been a cheap sideshow attraction. Victorian-era robots were a dime a dozen, all fakes, and Ironhand was cast as just one of the crowd.”

“You’re saying the government saw the advanced nature of Archibald’s engineering and appropriated it?” Mark Howard asked.

Sarah nodded. “With the Army, Archibald created a series of new robots but none had the capability to operate autonomously like Ironhand. When war broke out Archibald and Ironhand were sent to the front. This field testing proved disastrous. Ironhand disappeared in October 1918, after destroying a German gun that was causing massive destruction in France.

“Archibald came back from France a broken man. His efforts to recreate Ironhand failed as his mental faculties waned. The Army sacked him. Being in the family home seemed to aggravate his paranoia and agitation, so we bought a local nursing home to care for him. Then as you say, Mark, he walked out of his nursing home and vanished.”

Remo was grinding his gears. “Back up. What do you mean by autonomous?”

“Ironhand wasn’t computerized, but he did have what was probably the world’s first remote-control system. My great-grandfather, you see, was an acquaintance of an engineer named Jameson Davis. Over brandy in a British club in 1897, Davis began describing the extraordinary achievements of his cousin in the field of radio telegraphy.”

“Marconi?” Remo asked.

“Yes.” Sarah nodded.

Chiun stared at his protégé. “How could you know such a thing?”

“I have the test answers written on my arm.”

“Archibald Slate licensed the rights to radio telegraphy directly from Guglielmo Marconi. Slate and Marconi agreed to keep the license a secret to protect their mutual patents, and the Slate payments were made through Davis. As Ironhand was being built, between 1897 and 1899, Marconi’s radio telegraph was having its first field successes.”

“So Slate could send simple commands to Ironhand using electrical pulses?” Mark asked.

“A series of relays inside Ironhand received the radio telegraph signals. At first, my great-grandfather started with relays in series. Sending one pulse would snap the relay to switch position one, for example, which controls the right lower leg, sending two pulses activated the right upper leg, and so on. When he had activated the correct system, a longer pulse closed the relay in that position. The next set of pulses would move the selected system incrementally. One pulse would bend the lower leg five degrees, two would bend it ten degrees.”

“Sounds like it would work, but it would take an hour just to take a few steps,” Remo said.

“It did—at first. Then Archibald began designing some of the first logical, practical-use switch systems ever created. In other words, he programmed Ironhand.”

“Not with a computer?” Remo asked.

“With series of relays” Sarah said. “Electromechanical switches, using electrical coils, but no one had ever configured them like Archibald did. The switches turned certain functions on and off, one after another, in such a way that Ironhand could perform a complicated task, like take a step forward, with one simple command. Archibald even constructed interconnected relay strings, which made use of nested routines, looped the commands, even perform if/then operations.”

“Cripes,” Mark said. “He was doing analog programming—in 1899.”

“Yes. By the time Archibald took Ironhand to Canada in 1902 he had added directional control using a compass and a gyroscopic self-balancing system. After being blackmailed into serving the U.S. government, he was forced to steal technologies developed by others. In 1917 he was one of the first to use Ernst Alexanderson’s selective tuner for radio receivers. In the field, Archibald himself operated Ironhand. Nobody else was capable of learning the immensely sophisticated control patterns needed to make Ironhand actually work. In France, Archibald perched in a low-altitude balloon and monitored Ironhand through binoculars. He directed Ironhand across a field of small-arms fire that killed seven men. There was a premature explosion, killing Ironhand’s guard detail. Ironhand vanished and was called a loss.

“That night, Archibald returned to the battlefield alone, and against orders. Archibald desperately tried to get a radio signal to Ironhand, hoping it was laying out of sight in a ditch or some weeds. He ordered Ironhand to stand up.”

Sarah Slate swallowed and sipped her lemonade, as if remembering an event from her own experience.

“He saw nothing. For minutes he saw nothing. Then the earth moved. At first he was terrified that it was one of the battlefield victims who had been declared dead and hastily buried. But what he saw was a hand of steel that shot up from the ground.

“Someone else saw it, too. A German officer was hiding under cover nearby, and when he saw the metal hand emerging from the earth he ran onto the field of battle, scanning the night with his own telescope. He got a fix on Archibald Slate and began firing his rifle. Archibald was forced to retreat.”

“Just so I’m clear on this,” Remo said, “when the German guy runs out, he’s not shooting at the robot hand that suddenly popped out of the ground?”

“Correct, Remo,” Sarah said in her formal manner. “That German probably was the one who buried Ironhand, then stood watch over the area in case the Americans dared come back and try to take it. And that was the end of Ironhand, for Archibald Slate.”

“But it wasn’t the end at all,” Remo said. “That German got him. And put him in the basement for ninety years and brought him out again.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “But who?”