Unpopular Science

Chapter 28

Jacob Fastbinder III stepped out of the front door carefully, taking the first big step as if his leg was not trustworthy. When he was on solid ground he turned and locked the door behind him. The house was a low concrete structure that was actually half submerged in the desert soil. The concrete walls were three feet thick, the roof almost as thick, designed to keep the structure cool when it had served as a produce distribution plant in the late 1960s. A chiller, which once kept the warehouse refrigerated, was just so much collapsed, corroded wreckage alongside it.

“That’s Fastbinder?” asked the attorney.

“That’s him,” said museum manager Margo.

“That guy looks old. I thought Fastbinder was in his fifties.”

Margo shrugged and chewed her gum. The attorney watched the bent man for another few minutes, then asked, “They have an air-conditioner in that place?”

“Don’t think so. Know what it would take to keep that place cool? It’s big as a mansion!”

The attorney gave her a doubtful look. “I’ll bet it smells like a sewer.”

Margo lost her friendliness. “You’re being unpleasant.”

“Well, I am an attorney.”

“Yuck.” Margo left, no longer feeling obliged to be sociable. Attorneys, after all, weren’t people.

The attorney had no use for these back-road weirdos. He, for one, got no kicks from Route 66, and had not enjoyed his drive on it. Even the Town Car he rented in Tucumcari couldn’t seem to pump out enough air-conditioning to combat the searing heat of New Mexico. The doddering old Fastbinder wasn’t even halfway to the museum yet.

“Holy shit, how long is this gonna take?” he said. There was a gasp of horror and an eight-year-old girl in braces and pigtails pointed a stiff finger in his direction. “Mommy, did you hear what this man said? He said the S-word. Mommy!”

A sweat-drenched pantsuit with a rotund, middle-aged woman inside it came at him fast. He thought she might tackle him. “What kind of a man are you, saying words like that in front of a little girl? Where is your decency? Where is your respect for human beings? It’s sick and disgusting.”

“Mommy, he said a bad word! He said it. I heard him. He said it!” The girl was sobbing and dancing. “I heard it, Mommy!”

‘What happened?” Margo said, arriving to investigate the mayhem. She skewed the suited man with a look. “What did you do to this little girl?”

“He said the S-word!” the girl wailed.

“You did what?”

“Right here in the gift shop!” the girl’s mother whined. “What kind a man does that?”

“He’s no man,” Margo sneered. “He’s an attorney.”

The eight-year-old girl screeched and panicked, thrashing her limbs mindlessly, knocking over a rack of New Mexico State Bird postcards, which in turn toppled a wire stand holding hundreds of New Mexico shot glasses. The girl curled up behind a display of vinyl Indian moccasins wailing, “He’s gonna sue me! Please don’t let him sue me!”

The next thing he knew, the attorney was being manhandled out the front of the museum and gift shop. He didn’t fight it. It was too hot and Margo was too powerful. But he had never been so humiliated in his entire life. He waited in front of his Town Car.

Damn, he hated this son of a bitch Fastbinder. Couldn’t the son of a bitch walk any damn faster?

“Goot evening,” said Jacob Fastbinder III in his pronounced German accent, putting on a crooked, wrinkled smile. “You are zee attorney, ya?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Fastbinder. I’m here on business from the board of directors.”

“Oh, ya.” Fastbinder laughed. “The board is certainly having these days some troubles!”

“Yes,” the attorney answered dryly.

“Maybe they will go into bankruptcy soon, ya?” Fastbinder laughed more heartily.

“We’re talking to our creditors,” the attorney said defensively. “Some are willing to negotiate.”

‘I know you jab at me. I will never negotiate. But maybe I will buy back zee company, when the price hits rock bottom!” More laughter.

The attorney smoldered as he removed the envelope and handed it to Fastbinder. “I doubt you could afford it, Mr. Fastbinder. Even in bankruptcy, the company has assets worth…”

Fastbinder opened the envelope and displayed the check to the attorney. The attorney swallowed.

“Not worth more than that.” Fastbinder chuckled. “And I get one like this every six months.”

“No wonder the firm’s going bankrupt,” the attorney said. “How’d you manage to get a severance like that?”

“I outlawyered the lawyers! It was easy, once I realized that lawyers are filthy pigs who are helpless away from the slop troughs. They thought I was insipid when I wanted half the profits from my U.S. controls group patents. They thought the group was a dinosaur that would fold up in no time.”

“And now it’s the only profitable business unit,” the attorney concluded, stunned. “How could those people have been so short-sighted?”

“Not people, lawyers,” Fastbinder said gleefully. Margo appeared, her Keds crunching on the pea gravel parking lot. She whispered to Fastbinder, shooting glares at the lawyer, then raised her chin high as she strode back into the museum and gift shop.

“I hear there has been troubles. You must pay for the damages, please.”

The attorney opened his mouth, closed it again, opened it again. “You have got to be kidding me.”

“I am not.” Fastbinder stopped smiling. “My manager says we suffered a loss of forty-two postcards of zee cartoon mosquitoes and thirteen shot glass. The postcards are seventy-nine cents each or three for two dollars, so that comes to fourteen dollars. The shot glasses are $3.25 each with no quantity discount. So the total owed is $56.25.”

“You have to be out of your mind.”

Fastbinder shrugged.

“First of all, I didn’t break the cheap tourist crap. The idiot kid broke it.”

“My Margo says it was you who caused it.”

“Your Margo is an obese idiot. Secondly, you probably buy that junk for pennies.”

Fastbinder shrugged. “True. The postcards cost me eight cents each in boxes of a thousand. The shot glasses are thirty-nine cents each wholesale in two-hundred-unit lots. However, if you will read zee disclaimers posted in zee store it says, ‘You Break It, You Bought It.’ It does not say, you ‘You Break It, You Will Be Charged Zee Wholesale Price For It.’”

The attorney was stunned. “You know what. Fastbinder, I wouldn’t pay you fifty-six dollars and twenty- five cents if it would save my life. I’ve had enough of you desert freaks.”

“Yes. I see. Good day.” Fastbinder strolled to his gift shop and the multimillion-dollar check fluttered out of his hands.

“Hey! Your check!” The attorney raced to grab it, then ran huffing after Fastbinder. “I need a receipt for this!”

Fastbinder stopped on the wooden front porch of the Museum of Mechanical Marvels and Gift Shop. “No, thank you.”

“You gotta take it!”

“I’ll take it after you pay what is owed.”

“It’s worth millions!”

Fastbinder made a haughty shrug.

“I told you I am not paying for the postcards!” the attorney sputtered.

“Come back when you have changed your mind.”

The attorney knew he couldn’t go back to the law firm without a signed receipt for the check. He’d be out of the firm. So he swallowed his pride—his last tiny morsel of pride, as it turned out—and went inside to pay the $56.25.

“You should also say ‘I’m sorry’ to Margo,” Fastbinder suggested.

The attorney apologized to Margo the museum manager, and then Fastbinder took the check.

By the time he returned to the law firm in New York, the attorney had convinced himself that he should return to prostitution, the career that got him through law school. Being sodomized by old men was unpleasant, sure, but it was less degrading. Plus, he had made some great contacts in business and government during six years of practicing law—he knew senators, CEOs, lobbyists, hundreds of well-to-do potential customers. He’d make a lot more than he ever did while attending Harvard.

A classy man-whore with his boyish good looks would have clientele up the yin-yang, and more self- respect to boot.

Self-respect was a subject near to the heart of Jacob Fastbinder III. These days he had a lot of it, but he was no stranger to self-loathing. Once, for a while, he’d seen himself as lower than dirt.

It was in Cologne, Germany, at the company headquarters. Fastbinder’s first clue that things were not right was when he was told to sit and wait. His father was in a meeting, but would get to him eventually.

In the few years he was with the family company, Fastbinder had never before waited for his father to finish a meeting.

“He requires that you make a study of this document,” said his father’s assistant as she handed him a leather-bound book. Fastbinder took the book, then glared at the assistant, who shrugged and poked at the bridge of her glasses. “This is what he said.” She went back to her desk.

Fastbinder began reading the book. The History of Fastbinder Machine Werks Through A.D. 1975, published by the company on its half-century anniversary. Fastbinder had read it before, when he was a teenager, and had done so under duress, and he knew most of this history anyway. His father talked about the company history at the dinner table, incessantly, as if he thought somebody besides him cared.

After an hour, Jacob Fastbinder III was allowed in to see his father, who was not in a meeting at all. “How was your reading?” asked Jacob Fastbinder II.

“Dry as stale bread,” his son complained. “The only amusement I received from it was finding important gaps in the history. For example, there was another World War. A second one, after the first one. It was in the forties, I believe, and my understanding is that Germany played a part.”

His father was not amused. “You are a smartmouthed punk.”

“I’m exaggerating, of course. There’s a whole quarter of a chapter devoted to the Second World War, but not one use of the word ‘Nazi’. Quite skillful of the author.”

“And necessary. But did you learn anything new, Jacob?”

For an answer, the younger Fastbinder sneered and dropped the book with a thump on the oak-and-glass table in front of his father’s overstuffed sofa, then dropped himself in the sofa. “What’s this about. Father.”

“History.”

“I mean, this meeting,” the younger Fastbinder said.

“So do I.” His father turned, clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace the office somberly. “We are here to discuss history, and your place in it.”

“I hope I never become one of the lifeless slugs who fill the pages of that piece of trash.”

The elder Fastbinder nodded as he walked. “Nor do I. But that is not the true and complete history of this company, as you observed, Jacob. There is more to the story.”

“Yes. Nazis, for example.”

“There is more than that. More than even you know. More than I knew until I was a grown man.” He stopped and glared from under his lowered brows at his one and only son. “The Fastbinder patriarchy has its secrets.”

The younger Fastbinder was interested now, but tried not to show it. “Such as?”

His father resumed pacing. “I have been weighing this decision, whether it is time to tell you about all this. You are not yet ready for this knowledge. You have an immature disposition, a recklessness, a disregard for propriety. But I am forced into this by certain unforeseen events.”

“What unforeseen events?” This, intrigued the younger man; the defamation of his character by his father was nothing new.

“I will get to that in due course. First I will tell you the true history of Jacob Fastbinder I, if you will hear it. Will you?”

The younger man forgot to be flippant. “Certainly.”

The older man nodded, then surprisingly, took a seat in the matching leather chair, looking fatigued. “My father invented nothing.”

The younger man cocked his head. “What do you mean? He has more than a hundred major patents.”

“All stolen. He was a good engineer, a skilled and talented technical analyst, but with no creativity. All the achievements he claimed for himself were the works of others.”

Before his son could utter the scoffing remarks that were on his lips, the elder Fastbinder held up a hand and continued. “It was in October of 1918. Jacob Fastbinder, my father, was in France as an equipment officer. He was helping to erect another of the fine big German cannons, with which to bombard Paris. As the gun was being erected under my father’s supervision, the Germans were attacked by a small scout team of American soldiers, who killed most my father’s soldiers and crew and destroyed the gun before it could fire a shot. This is recorded history.”

His son nodded. He knew all this.

“But the record is distorted. In truth, the Americans did attack, but Fastbinder was responsible for the death of all those Germans.”

The younger man frowned, but stayed silent.

“It was at night, when the gun was not yet reinforced. The barrel was in place, but the steel outer casing had been brought to the field in pieces. It was an experimental way of making these large weapons more portable, you see! The gun could not yet be fired, and it was still vulnerable, and that was the night the mechanical man came to tear it down.”

His father waited, silently daring the younger Fastbinder to make a joke. His son said, “Mechanical man?”

“Yes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there were all sorts of electric and steam-powered mechanical robots in the carnivals of Europe and North America, but they were frauds. Mostly they were cheap tin suits with a small dwarf or child inside, moving the arms. One or two truly functional mechanical men had actually been built, but they were failures. They would try to walk but fall onto their face. One of them crushed his own head when he saluted the American flag. But that night, in France, my father saw a mechanical man and knew at once that it was different, a genuine work of mechanical genius.”

“How did he know?” Fastbinder III demanded.

“Because it was in the battlefield, side by side with U.S. soldiers. No one would send such a thing on a secret military mission if it didn’t function. He watched it for minutes, as it crept with the Americans closer to the gun position. He saw the mechanical man traverse uneven terrain, and crawl on all fours with amazing speed, stand itself upright again, all extraordinary feats for an automaton.”

“It was a man in a suit,” the younger Fastbinder protested.

“This my father considered, but he saw the thing turn a full circle at the hip, then extend its head on telescopic neck supports, and he deemed it impossible for there to be any human being inside the metal skin. My father sounded the alert as the Americans closed in, and the battle was commenced. The mechanical man killed many Germans. He took the point, the bullets unable to penetrate his metal plating, and walked up to the Germans who would not leave their protective post around the precious cannon. The mechanical man crashed their skulls with his hands.

“My father decided then and there that must possess the mechanical man, which meant he must subdue it without destroying it. He thought of a way to accomplish this. He ordered the cannon to be fired.”

“What?” the younger Fastbinder asked, astonished.

“Your grandfather told one of his men to aim the cannon at a small dirigible hovering a mile from the battlefield. Whoever was controlling the mechanical man was in the cockpit of that aircraft. If the controller was knocked out of the sky, then the mechanical man would no longer be a danger and the Germans could gain the upper hand in the battle. The gunner protested, but my father assured him the gun was strong enough to fire a few rounds, even without its structural reinforcement. My father, however, threw himself into a deep gully at the moment his gunner obeyed the order and fired the cannon.”

The elder Fastbinder smiled sardonically.

“The gun burst apart,” his son stated.

“Yes, of course, but amazingly enough it managed to lob its shell with enough accuracy to punch a hole in the dirigible. Father saw it spiral to the ground when he emerged from the gully. He was surrounded by dead men, American and German. The mechanical man was flat on its back and not moving, but it was still functional! The creature knew it had toppled and was trying to right itself, even without remotely issued commands! But it was damaged, and it could not stand, and my father spent the rest of the night digging a hole for it.”

“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.

A week later, the London media exclaimed. EACH OF THE THREE-DOZEN FASTBINDER MASTERPIECES IDENTIFIED AS ART LOOTED FROM JEWS BY NAZIS!Even Fastbinder had to smirk when he read it. The “masterpieces” in question had, in actuality, been the least valuable works of art in the entire lot—which Fastbinder had liquidated for more than thirty million euro after his father finally kicked the bucket.

In the end, Fastbinder Machine Werks settled with the former owners of the paintings. The sum was nine times their value—Fastbinder knew this since he had the paintings expertly appraised before deciding to sacrifice them to the cause.

The sacrifice was worthwhile, he decided, when the financial toll on Fastbinder Machine Werks became apparent. The company leaned in the direction of bankruptcy. Amazingly, the U.S. division was suddenly profitable as Jacob Fastbinder III’s patents began selling hugely. It was the only thing keeping the firm alive and yet every dollar was a slap in the face. The company sent squadrons of lawyers to New Mexico to plead with Fastbinder to temporarily rescind his rights to half the patent profits. The U.S. division was now propping up the rest of the firm but was not quite enough to keep it from looming bankruptcy. Even the executive director of the board of directors appeared one afternoon on his doorstep. Fastbinder laughed in his face and shut the door, letting the man stand out there in the ninety-five-degree heat. The executive director lost his cool and started pounding on the door.

“We will make you director again!”

Fastbinder opened his front door on a security chain, laughing. “Did you get that, Mr. Hippolwythe?” he called.

The executive director was shocked to see a man come from around the corner, holding a miniature cassette tape recorder. He also had a camera and took a photo of the sweating, pitiful mess of a man.

“This man is a reporter for my favorite newspaper in zee United Kingdom,” Fastbinder explained to the executive director.

The story was perfect fodder for the U.K. tabloids. The paper the next morning had a narrow front-page photo, so tall it went from the top of the page to the bottom, showing the sweat-stained, rumpled executive director of Fastbinder Machine Werks with his mouth gaping open. It was an ugly image. The headline next to it screamed. PATHETIC HEAD OF MACHINE WERKS COMES CRAWLING BACK TO FASTBINDER HEIR BEGGING HIM TO RESUME CONTROL OF CRUMBLING COMPANY!

Oh, if only the executive director would have blown his brains out or jumped off a building. Instead he put on a fresh shirt and suit, tidied his hotel room in Albuquerque, and took 112 assorted prescription tablets. He was still sitting there, hand neatly on his lap, when the maid came in to clean up. She gave the tabloid a quote, but “He left the room so spotless, I didn’t even need to sanitize!” was not quite inflammatory enough for their tastes.

Oh well, the rest of it made fine reading. Fastbinder had the articles laminated and hung in his bathroom.