Unpopular Science

Chapter 23

Chiun lay in the darkness and felt the past all around him—the memories of the house and the memories of a long-lived Master of Sinanju.

These Americans, he was convinced, allowed their old homes to acquire the patina of age because they possessed so litde that was truly old, so little with the reverent nature of real history. But why did age have to be a dreary thing to these befuddled Americans?

This house was filled with ghosts and regret. He, Chiun, was not that kind of aged creature. Of course he had regrets, but he did not allow the sorrows to fester. This house seemed to breathe and creak and moan every moment of the dark night, as if in eternal mourning.

Chiun slept on his mat on the hardwood floor. Remo’s breathing across the room was boisterous and annoying, but Chiun had learned to live with it.

Then he awoke. Little time had gone by.

“Chiun? You awake?” Remo asked.

“A specter tapped me on the shoulder, Remo.”

“I felt it, too. But it wasn’t a spirit.”

“It was what then?”

“Wait.”

Then it came, a flutter. Remo was on his feet. “It’s the same thing we felt in Barcelona,” Remo declared.

“Yes. But this time it moves toward us. It has tracked us down.”

“Don’t think so. It’s coming to find the same thing we’re looking for.”

Remo raced down the hall and pounded on the bedroom door of Sarah Slate, then floated to the main floor and into the cellar, where he knew Mark Howard would still be awake and at work. He found Mark standing in a sea of paper, row after row of it. He was in the midst of some large-scale organizational effort.

“Heads up, Junior, company’s on the way.”

“What? Who?”

“Who knows? Call Smitty and tell him to have reinforcements waiting.”

“Reinforcements?”

“Hey, do you remember what happened in Spain? We got the shit kicked out of us. Whatever is coming closer to this house has got the same sort of energysucking beams pointed at us.”

Sarah was waiting for him at the top of the stairs. “Get in the car and get out of here,” Remo ordered.

“No, thank you. I want to see it.”

“I can’t keep you safe.”

“I wouldn’t assume you could.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence. It’s your funeral.”

Sarah sighed, “That would be a fitting end.”

“Oh, jeez, lady, get over it!”

They stood in the darkness of the large side yard, waiting for something to happen, while Sarah and Mark Howard played cribbage on a table in the large living room, the interior lights blazing in the night.

The feel of the bizarre, energy-robbing phenomena had ebbed and flowed menacingly but distantly, never quite growing to a painful level. Then it had stopped, and there was nothing for a while except the sounds of Providence.

Then Remo felt the shaking of the ground beneath his feet, and the shaking intensified and whatever made it came closer.

Something black came through the night, avoiding the lighted places, and stepped through the line of bushes that served as the property’s back fence. It moved slowly, with extreme deliberation, but every step seemed to disturb the earth. Remo found his eyes trying to slide off the thing, and yet there was nothing translucent or invisible here. It was simply very, very black.

He heard and felt the well-oiled actuation of gears and chains and mechanical drives, reminding him of his fascination with the mechanics of a greasy old carousel from a charity carnival that once came to the orphanage that was his home as a boy. He also saw the glimmering electronics inside the black pits of its skull, and he felt the electronic eyes as they swept constantly in all directions, alert to threats.

But Ironhand didn’t see the Masters of Sinanju in the darkness. It read their body heat, but the thermal signature was far outside any of the parameters it classified as human. It couldn’t hear their breathing because they did not breathe.

When it stepped from the lawn to the patio stones, there was a click of metal on rock, enough to awaken the exterior lighting. The twin porch lights blazed to life, a single steel arm smashed them out.

But the stealth paint must not have worked too well in full illumination, and in the second when the light was on they all saw Ironhand, clear as day.

It was a metal monster eight feet tall. Its heavy, chunky torso and limbs were of forged steel, constructed a century ago in a blacksmith’s shop. Its head might have started out as a heavy-duty stovepipe, then augmented with welded accouterments such as a hard- forged mouth and heavy-steel eye reinforcements. Ironhand walked on massive steel feet that were center hinged. At every exposed joint Remo glimpsed black-painted copper coils and clusters of electronics that were definitely not original equipment in 1904.

Mark and Sarah jumped to their feet and Sarah came to the twin French doors onto the patio. She opened them, stood in front of the thing.

“Ironhand.”

Remo really hoped the thing didn’t answer, “Hello is all right”.

Instead it said, “Yes, Slate.”

“Who is running you, Ironhand?”

“Archibald Slate III.”

“Liar!”

Ironhand turned away from Sarah Slate, casting its eye-mounted visual sensors over the lawn. It scanned left to right, clicked something in its skull and scanned right to left, then completed its 360-degree turn to face Sarah.

“Archibald Slate III requires documentation from Archibald Slate I.” He spoke in a synthetic, clipped voice, but with a German accent.

“You lie.”

“Ironhand is incapable of lying.”

“You’re just a computer, aren’t you, Ironhand? I know computers aren’t supposed to be able to tell an untruth and I know that is bullshit. A computer does what it is programmed to do. You’re programmed to say lies.”

“Give me documents of Archibald Slate.”

Remo moved fast as Ironhand raised its arm. He wondered if Ironhand was outfitted with the same sort of firepower as Mr. U. Not that it mattered, since any sort of gunfire from such close range was going to be a killer.

He floated over the lawn and brought his fist down hard on the arm, finding its weak spot and breaking it open in one flash of movement.

Ironhand sensed the attack in a microsecond and turned on Remo, intending to crush with a savage blow of the arm it now understood to be damaged.

Chiun floated out of the night and caught Ironhand off guard again, befuddling its sensors, and the old Korean probed the gaping eye socket, yanking out components.

Ironhand swung at Chiun, found nothing, searched until it found any anomalous heat signature, and triggered.

Remo saw the barbed fork come at him in a halo of crackling blue electricity and stepped aside effortlessly.

Sarah Slate screamed and Ironhand spun to face her. Remo didn’t know what was in those electric barbecue forks exactly, but it couldn’t be good. He couldn’t let Sarah get fried.

“Hey, Robby! This way!” He waved his arms, and Ironhand spun back at him, fired again, and Remo stepped aside. The projectile was like three wicked barbed daggers welded together at the base and electrified until they trailed static lightning. The air burned from their passage.

Before he could strike again, Ironhand began the rapid recharge of its electrical system. There was a tiny whir of the generator.

Remo crashed to the earth as if he’d been hit with a big truck.

It wasn’t electricity. It was just the opposite for Remo Williams. Instead of being jolted with current, the life energy was suddenly sucked out of him, so hard and fast he didn’t have time to think. He just went limp.

Ironhand thrust one arm directly at Remo Williams and triggered another forkful of voltage.

But just as rapidly as he was drained of power, Remo felt it surge back—partially. He twisted and heard the thunk of the trident imbedding in dirt just inches from his shoulder. Remo was already launching himself off the ground and lashing out with one far-reaching leg.

The mechanical man shifted to ward off Remo, wisely using its nonfunctional hand to absorb the damage, and Remo’s foot slammed through it hard enough to tear the steel plates around the rivets. The arm slammed across Ironhand’s chest, then dangled from its shoulder socket by a few steel tendons.

Remo stepped up close, detached the arm with a yank, then melted away as another trident sizzled the air above him.

Where the hell was Chiun?

Remo collapsed again, hard, as Ironhand recharged its systems. The paralyzing weakness passed in a heartbeat, and Remo found himself staring at another bolt, aiming at his head. He tossed the separated arm, which deflected the trident with a shower of sparks. When the arm thumped to the earth, it was stained with black scoring.

“Aaiee, trash can!” Chiun danced in front of Ironhand, making a garish spectacle that even a robot would be distracted by, and Remo took advantage of it. He floated in.

Ironhand was unbelievably fast, but no discarded pile of factory equipment was faster than a Master of Sinanju. Remo cracked the good arm at its shoulder joint before it could fire. Ironhand spun with the attack, but its reaction time was a fraction too slow to save the arm. Remo hung on, Ironhand gyrated with a wild singing of servomotors, and the arm came off in an uncontrolled flash of blue lightning.

Ironhand’s systems would never need to discharge the power burst again, not without a firing mechanism, but the systems automatically began the generator anyway. Remo slammed to the ground and saw Chiun wilt and collapse.

It was like being dead, just for a moment, and each of those moments felt endless. But the moment faded and Remo pushed himself to his feet, vaulted to the robot, forced himself to clamber up the steel monster despite the lethargy in his limbs. Remo stood on its steel shoulders, easily keeping his balance regardless how Ironhand spun in both directions.

“You’ll never shake me, hunk of junk,” Remo said. Then he kicked Ironhand in the face, blow after blow, listening to the parts inside snap and crunch. Ironhand plodded across the yard, slammed through the shrubbery and careened into the street.

“Your rock-’em-sock-’em days are over,” Remo panted, his legs like lead. His nerves felt singed. Ironhand was gaining speed on the street, every step like the crunch of a dropped wrecking ball.

“Hey, Nick Chopper, give it up,” Remo said, and his next kick nodded the massive head back. Remo found himself staring down into the cold, electric eyes of the robot. Ironhand never slowed as its rampage carried it into a parked car. Remo jumped lightly just before the impact, which collapsed the door of a Ford sedan all the way through the driver’s half of the interior.

The armless robot lurched into the street and tried to make its head work, but the motors hummed in vain..

Remo, dangling from a nearby tree, stepped back on the thing’s shoulders and stared down into its cold face.

“Not a scratch on you. I bet you get good crash-test safety ratings. But now it’s recycling time.”

Remo slipped his fingers under the rim of the steel neck, felt for the weakness in the metal and pulled, but Ironhand put on a burst of speed, veered off the road and crashed through a wooden fence. There was nothing underneath it for almost seventy feet.

Remo stepped back onto solid ground as easily as if he were stepping off an escalator, while Ironhand did what would normally be expected of a ton of steel that had just gone off a cliff edge.

Remo blinked, squinted, trying to make his eyes see in the blackness. His breathing was still labored and his faculties remained diminished. The crash, though, should have been louder.

It wasn’t so much a cliff he was standing on as a steep hillside, and below was a mass of vegetation. The path of ruin showed where Ironhand went through it.

Remo didn’t take his eyes off the overgrowth, even when he heard Chiun approach behind him. “My son, are you injured?”

“Just catching my breath. Little Father. You okay?”

“Yes,” Chiun answered shortly, and Remo knew well enough that it wasn’t the truth. He could hear Chiun’s heart beating too quickly and he could sense Chiun willing himself to control it.

“Personally, I feel like hell,” Remo said. “Whatever this shit is, it’s bad shit.”

“I know whatever this shit is,” Chiun said.

‘You do?” Remo wanted to ask more, but at that moment a squad car careened into view, roared in their direction and screeched to a halt.

“Let us go,” Chiun said.

“I have to go down there.”

“You are too weak,” Chiun insisted. “As am I.”

Remo wouldn’t drag his eyes away from the place below him, even when the pair of Providence cops ambled up.

“Hey, buddy, you the driver?”

“No,” Remo said.

“Hey, buddy, you want to look at me when I’m talking to you?”

“It wasn’t a car.”

“Motorcycle?”

“Not a motorcycle,”, said the second cop. ‘You saw what happened to that Ford up the street.”

“Big Harley maybe,” said the first cop. “What was it, buddy?”

“Robot.”

“Hoo-kay, buddy, you want to step away from the edge there? We’ll have a little chat.”

Remo knew precisely where they were, so when he reached behind him with both hands he grabbed them exactly where he wanted to grab, not an inch too low.

The police officers found themselves hanging by the belt buckle over the edge of the big hillside along North High Street.

“Shut up or I drop you,” Remo informed them. “Now watch.” Remo tossed both of them into a 180-degree spin and grabbed them again, this time by the belt in back. They were now facedown.

“Look,” Remo said. “Tell me what you see.”

The cops craned their necks and went rigid when they saw the thing that walked out of the weeds. It was armless, head skewed as if its spine was broken, but it was huge, glimmering with sparks of electricity, and the metallic clomp of its footsteps was like barbells crashing in a noisy gym.

“See that?” Remo demanded.

“We see it!”

Remo replaced them on solid ground, never taking his eyes off the robot.

“Was it the Terminator?” one of them asked in a quaver.

“More or less,” Remo replied.

“Will he be back?”

Remo stopped and met Chiun’s eyes. The cops had never even seen the old man standing in the darkness. Chiun looked, what—sapped?

“Yeah,” Remo said, feeling tired, too. “He’ll be back.”

Then Remo saw Ironhand’s friend pushing through the undergrowth but didn’t quite believe what his eyes were telling him. “You gotta be effing kidding me.”

“What is it?”

Remo turned as if noticing the cops for the first time. “Hey, when you were kids did you guys get the Space Monkey Cartoon Roundup show out of Jersey?”

The first cop was suspicious about where this was headed, and being hung by the crotch was insulting to his dignity. “Yeah. So what?”

“I loved that show when I was a boy,” enthused the second cop.

“You remember the robot on that show?”

“Yeah,” said the second cop. “So?”

“I remember!” the other cop said. “He was big and round, right? With a round head?”

“And sorta faggy for a robot,” the first cop added.

“Would you know him again if you saw him? Because there he is.”

“Really? Let me see!” The enthusiastic cop squinted downhill. “Oh, Stan, it’s him! It’s Clockwork the Robot!”

“You’re nuts, Charlie.” Stan looked hard. “It c-can’t be!”

Remo said, “Sure looks like Clockwork to me.”

“But that was years and years ago,” Cop Stan said.

“Somebody just kept him around, Stan, and now he’s alive again!” Charlie answered excitedly.

Clockwork was indeed a big round ball of patina-aged copper, more than a yard in diameter. Its tubular metallic arms were set in ball joints at the shoulder and elbow. On a tubular neck perched another round ball, the size of a soccer ball but also made of copper, green with age, with bright spots where the patina was scratched. On its head was Clockwork’s signature tin bowler.

“His hat! His hat! He still has his hat!” Charlie exclaimed.

“But I never knew he had treads for feet,” Stan said. “On the Space Monkey Cartoon Roundup they never showed Clockwork below the waist.”

As the armless, limping form of Ironhand emerged from the weeds Clockwork rolled on steel treads to flank it, escorting it across the street.

“Is that other guy the robot from Destination: Earth?” Stan asked.

“Are you thinking of The Day the Earth Stood Still?” Charlie asked.

“Nah, that one was all smooth and shiny. This is kinda like a life-size battle bot.”

“Without the arms,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, well, whoever he is, he’s a lot less fruity than Clockwork. Remember Clockwork used to always get knocked over by that mean orange monkey and then he couldn’t get back up?”

That was when the headlights appeared. Ironhand continued across the street as Clockwork paused on its treads and rotated on the pedestal that attached them. Its arms raised defensively.

“He’s gonna get turtled by a Corolla!” Stan taunted. Remo didn’t think so. He thought he should get down there and help the occupants of the honking Corolla, but his knees were rubber.

The Corolla driver never really stopped. He slowed to a mile-per-hour roll and kept honking. Whatever he thought he was seeing, he didn’t believe it was really a big dopey spherical robot on treads.

When he came within five feet of Clockwork, the arms lowered just enough, then the fat-fingered hands dropped off the wrists on hinges and dangled. Each wrist expelled a flash of light and the sound followed a fraction of a second later.

“Guess Clockwork’s grown a thicker skin over the years,” Remo commented.

“Jesus, that sounded like shotgun rounds!” Stan blurted as the Corolla’s front tires went flat. The driver’s door opened and a man tumbled out, scrambled to his feet and fled back the way he had come. Clockwork raised an arm and triggered at the runner’s back, but the Corolla absorbed most of the buckshot. The fleeing man grabbed the back of his head where he’d caught a few rounds of buckshot “Yeow!” he yelped as he ran out of sight.

“Call it in!” Stan shouted, and emptied two rounds; from his revolver in the direction of Clockwork.

“How could you miss?” Remo asked.

“What are you doing?” Charlie cried. “You’ll hurt him!”

“He just tried to kill somebody!” Stan replied.

Remo grabbed them both and pushed them to the earth just in time. Clockwork emptied both barrels up the hill at them. The buckshot that would have imbedded in their flesh sliced into the trees above them and tore at the leaves.

“Oh, Clockwork,” moaned Charlie miserably as bits of green confetti adhered to his teary cheeks.

Remo watched Clockwork roll into the vegetation beyond the road, following Ironhand.

“I think you guys can take it from here.”

Stan watched Remo for a moment, observed that he didn’t get a face full of buckshot, then slowly raised his head from the ground. He looked down the hillside, got to his knees slowly, then cautiously stood.

“He’s gone. Call it in, Charlie.”

“Who would do such a thing, Stan? They took out his heart and made him a monster!”

“There’s bad men in this world, Charlie,” Stan said gently, patting his partner’s thinning comb-over. “I’ll call it in myself.”

He reached dispatch and reported a shooting and an escaped gunman. He wisely reported it as a “costumed” gunner. Let the Corolla driver make the eyewitness identification on the shooter. Only after he over-and-outed did Stan realized the man who had just saved their faces from being bloodied was gone.

Did he have anything to do with these goings on? For that matter, what in Hades was going on?