“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.