The Bronze Man
Talos had one vein, and a bronze nail in his ankle.
Malachi Fields is nine years old on the East Side of Cleveland when his mother buys him a book at a library sale for a dollar, and he finds Talos in it - the bronze giant Hephaestus built to walk the coast of Crete three times a day, killed by a single nail drawn from his ankle by somebody who spoke kindly to him while she did it.
He decides that afternoon to become an engineer.
Fourteen years later he is at the best robotics school in the country, working under a professor who is the finest teacher he has ever met - a man who asks him what he thinks and then waits through the silence for the answer.
Then he is invited home to dinner, and meets the professor's wife.
What follows costs him his work, his self-respect, and the last honest conversation he will ever have with his dying mother.
And when it is over he goes back to that house one final time, on a night he knows the professor is abroad - and finds out what the mentorship was for, what happened to the nine survivors of a dead world, and why a made thing has to be loosened before it can be overwritten.
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