The whole Iron Man debacle began when Dr. Anthony Deevers was watching the latest comic-book-turned-movie. It was the Engineering Department’s regular Thursday night outing. Fridays would’ve been more convenient because some of them had early Friday classes, but by unspoken mutual consent they’d chosen a night that would allow them the pretense of a social life outside of the University.

     The six of them, plus Dr. Singh’s wife Miriam, had taken a whole row in the theater, and Dr. Deevers found it quite companionable. When the hero, falling from a tall building, saved himself by lassoing a gargoyle and jolting to a stop, there were spontaneous, simultaneous groans from the engineering contingent at the flagrant violation of the laws of physics. “That arm just got torn off,” Dr. Webberly muttered. It gave Dr. Deevers a warm feeling to be seated among the only people in the theater who appreciated that point.

Afterwards, they migrated to Mario’s for beer and pizza and a discussion of the film.  “Would it do them such harm,” Dr. Singh complained, “to touch base with reality once in a while? I think it would be better if the heroes had to deal with the real facts of how things work. When the flying platform goes from zero to a hundred in one second flat, you do not go with it just because you’re standing on top!”

     “What really bugs me,” said Miriam, a nurse at the University Hospital, “is the fact that they get all these terrific wallops and don’t have even a bruise to show for it. The other day we had someone in the ER who thought they could punch through a pane of glass and not get hurt. Or like tonight, someone gets shot and it’s, ‘Oh, I’m okay, it’s just my arm.’ It’s really irresponsible to show this stuff. I’d like to shoot that director in the arm and let him see if it’s ‘okay.’ ”

     “I agree with you on the medical stuff, Miriam.”  Opal Johnson, Dr. Webberly’s T.A., was the only other non-PhD at the table. “But I’m not sure they could make an action movie people would want to see and stick strictly to the laws of physics. I mean, the flying platform is just cool. Who wants to watch the hero hop aboard and fasten his seat belt?”

     “It doesn’t need a seat belt,” Dr. Singh argued. “It just has to tilt forward when it takes off so the rider doesn’t get left behind.”

     The rest of the evening passed pleasantly as they revised the movie they’d just seen, finding ways to stage all the action sequences to make them more plausible and substituting possible gadgets for the impossible ones. This is the sort of thing engineers do for fun.

     Dr. Deevers didn’t walk home that night planning to build his Iron Man suit. Not exactly, not right away. But he was thoughtful. When he got back to his apartment, he took down his collection of Iron Man comics from the top of the closet. He carried the box into the kitchenette and plopped it down on the counter. The whole collection was probably worth a good bit on eBay – not that he’d ever sell it, of course – a nearly complete run starting from the first issue (published before he started reading and collected later) through the years when he was buying them as they came out, up to the point where he’d lost interest, when the hero started seriously hitting the bottle. If he’d wanted soap operas he could watch them free on TV.

     Iron Man had always appealed to him. He’d been a shy, asthmatic kid with an interest in mechanical things from a young age. Alone among the crowd of costumed crusaders, Iron Man was just a regular techie guy with no special powers – actually an invalid. Like young Anthony Deevers, all Tony Stark had going for him was his excellent brain. They even had the same first name.

     Dr. Deevers flipped through the old issues at random, noticing the many gadgets, most of them flat-out impossible even by today’s standards. But some of the gadgets were no longer confined to the realm of imagination – they’d either been invented or could be achieved with just a little bit of compromise with reality; some could even be improved upon. After a while, he pulled out the little notebook and mechanical pencil he always kept in his shirt pocket and started taking notes and making diagrams.

     It’s hard to say just when this graduated from a fun exercise to a full-fledged plan. Over the next few weeks, he filled up that notebook and two others, spent many late nights researching high-strength materials and electronics, and chatted with other engineers at the University without letting on exactly what he had in mind. Eventually, he had a prototype in mind.

     An iron suit, of course, was impractical. One of the new composites would be lighter and stronger – he could manufacture the shell himself at night, using the machines in the materials lab. Add hydraulics for superhuman strength. Radar – we can do that, and the original Iron Man never even thought of GPS. Rocket boots – well, that would need a lot of fuel, and the suit wasn’t aerodynamically stable. Better save that for Model II, but let’s see how high we can get this one to jump; and retractable power roller skates should not be a problem. Laser weapons need way too much power, but something non-lethal would be safer anyway. And borrow the experimental mini fuel cell from the Physics department for power…

     Designing everything in detail was more work than one person could do in a reasonable amount of time, so for several months, Dr. Deevers assigned his electrical engineering grad students little bits of control circuitry to create – supplying the specifications without explaining what they would be used for. He also suggested student assignments to the professors in other engineering disciplines. He’d read about the way the Department of Defense farmed out its top-secret projects, giving each team of engineers a little piece to do without telling them what the final product was. This way he could protect his secret identity.

     He continued to attend the Thursday night department outings also, though his secret gave them a different flavor. Lovely Opal Johnson would complain about having to walk through the creepy wood to get to campus, and he would fantasize about saving her from a mugger, and her subsequent gratitude.

     By the end of the term he had nearly all the parts he needed – begged, borrowed, bought or stolen. Late at night, he’d modeled his body in three dimensions using the large laser scanner in the advanced computer research lab, hurrying lest someone come in to wonder at him standing on the platform in just his briefs. He added the scan into his CAD model to see what the outside of the suit would look like and resolved to lose fifteen pounds over the summer to give the outside of the suit a trimmer appearance. And every day during the summer, often late into the night, he assembled and tested the components and debugged the control software, until, finally, a couple of weeks into Fall term, looking at it lying there on the kitchenette counter, he had to admit to himself that it was basically complete. He hadn’t quite achieved his weight loss goal – actually not even close – so the fit might be a little tight, but the only way to improve it further was to actually put it on and give it a trial run. Leaving it plugged in to charge, he set his alarm for 2 AM.

****

     The armor locked on with satisfying clicks. A little tight around the waist, as expected, but he would work on that.  He walked around the room – smooth enough, after a little practice, but a better feedback system would eliminate that lurch. Dr. Deevers tapped the the voice-activated recorder control on his forearm – to record the bad guys’ confessions, ultimately, but for the moment it would serve as a note-taking device for his trial run. “Smooth out motion …,” he started to say, his electronically disguised voice booming out into the room. Wrong button – he hastily made another stab at the keypad, his hydraulically-enhanced forefinger cracking the plastic cover of the PA button. “Damn,” he muttered.  More carefully this time, he pressed the record button and dictated his comment about the hydraulics, adding, “And try to make them quieter. Find stronger buttons. Label them.”

     Next, the display functions. Hydraulics whining, he walked over to the wall switch and carefully reached up to turn the lights off. Sensing darkness, the radar came on automatically, painting the room in three dimensions with ghostly green outlines. “Heh,” he said. “Time to take this show on the road.” He trundled over to the door, but had some difficulty gripping the knob. “Need friction pads on fingertips,” he muttered into the recorder. Squeezing with three fingers, he dented the edges of the knob enough to give himself purchase to turn it.

     The steps down to the street presented a challenge. The angle was too steep for him to see his footing –the helmet wouldn’t tip far enough forward. The suit was top-heavy, what with the fuel cell backpack, cameras, padding, kevlar, and a small computer to control the suit functions, so he was afraid to lean too far forward and maybe lose his balance. He ended up gripping the rail with both hands, edging down sideways.

     Once on level ground, he made much better progress, and was soon zipping along the abandoned sidewalks, toward a wooded park area at one end of the campus. Not a bad showing for a first trial. The boots were starting to chafe a bit at the heels and should be adjusted, but the hydraulics gave a nice bounce to his step.

     Reaching the concealment of the trees, Dr. Deevers switched the display from radar to infrared mode, the better to detect miscreants lurking in the bushes. He made a note to add lights to the control panel since he couldn’t make out the individual buttons, but it occurred to him that for maximum stealth, the suit really shouldn’t have any parts that glowed in the dark. Churning along the leaf-strewn walking path, Dr. Deevers considered the problem. It would be better, he thought, if he could come up with a way of getting rid of the control panel. Maybe the gauntlet electronics could recognize different hand signals, in addition to the special finger position that fired the weapons mounted on his wrists.

     Speaking of which… he pointed at a tree with his right hand, cocked his thumb back, then forward. Thip! A tranquilizer dart thudded into the trunk. The tree didn’t seem to notice. Switching hands, he fired again. The business end of the electric stun gun whirred out on its wire cable, but fell short of the tree by a couple of feet. He walked toward the tree to retrieve the tranquilizer dart, letting the stun gun wire wind up automatically. It was a handy tree, actually, with a branch just about nine feet above the path, and not too many other nearby branches. A good place to set an ambush for criminals passing on the path below. Switching back to radar mode to get the three-D picture, he stood below the branch, squatted, and jumped.

     With the hydraulic assist, he managed to get his arms over the branch, but didn’t have enough sideways flexibility to get a leg on top. He swung left and right a couple of times, then tried to walk up the trunk. Maybe he could hang by his hands and rotate forward and over, the way a trapeze artist got on top of the swing. He dropped down and got a grip on the branch, but the trapeze maneuver was not a success. It all happened so fast – he was in mid-swing, and somehow lost track of the branch. He ended up in free-fall, and landed flat on his back on the paved path with a loud “crunch.”

     The breath whooshed out of him, and for a long moment he thought he would pass out. His vision went black. Fighting to breathe again, he had a moment of panic when the darkness didn’t lift.  He thought perhaps he’d blinded himself.  Then he realized he must have landed on the computer and broken it, so the radar display wasn’t working. Now that his eyes were starting to adapt, he could see stars through the gaps in the tree branches.

     Lying there in the darkness, he wondered whether he’d broken his spine and how he’d explain the crushed computer to Dr. Feldman. He wasn’t quite ready to try to move. But then he heard a woman’s voice saying, “I think the noise came from here.”

     Dr. Deevers lay absolutely still, holding his breath. Suddenly there was a light in his eyes, and a man’s voice said, “What is that?”  Dr. Deevers reached up instinctively to cover his face, forgetting that it wasn’t visible in any case, but his arms didn’t move easily. The hydraulics must be out, too.

     “There’s someone in there!” the woman said. A familiar voice. Opal Johnson’s voice. He now remembered; this was the self-same creepy wood that Opal had complained about – which perhaps was what had given him the idea to come here to find lurking evildoers.

     “Are you okay?” the man asked.

     This was terrible. If he answered, Opal would recognize his voice – the electronic voice disguise system was probably offline too. And if he didn’t answer they would try to help him take off his helmet. He would have to act fast to preserve his secret identity. The tranquilizer gun! Pointing past the flashlight, he worked his thumb, but nothing happened. Damn! Computer controlled, like everything else.

     “I know what this is!” Opal said. “It’s Dr. Deever’s battle armor. Doc, are you in there?”

     “Go away,” he said, panicked. He started to struggle to his feet but discovered that the retractable skate wheels had deployed.  He ended up sitting down again; a dull throb told him he had turned his ankle. “Leave me alone, I’m fine! This is a secret project.”

     “Don’t be silly; don’t you think grad students talk to each other? We’ve all known about it for months. Here, Kevin, grab his other arm and let’s get him up.”

     His humiliation could only be more complete if they helped him out of the suit and discovered that underneath he wore only Spiderman underwear. He held his arms to his sides to prevent being picked up. “I don’t need help.”

     “Well… all right. Do you want the flashlight?”

     “No.”

     The two of them went off together, leaving him alone in the dark. He twisted off the gauntlets, reached down and manually retracted the skate wheels. Limping back to his apartment, he reflected that there was at least one bright spot in the whole experience – given that his identity was no secret, it was just as well the tranquilizer gun hadn’t worked after his fall. It would’ve been difficult to explain.