Found It!

 

"Excuse me, step back behind the rope, sir."

"Nay."

"'Nay?' Sir, I'm not going to ask you again, please."

The figure slumped. His broad shoulders drooped. "Young man," he said through a thick but cultured accent, "I am here to retrieve what is mine."

What the man was claiming as his was a peculiar little doodad, it might resemble a teapot on an axle, if the teapot also had a spout on its underside.

"Sir, that device has been in the museum's custody," and the guard was careful not to say 'belonged to the museum' because of the many stories in the news in recent years debating how assorted peoples' artifacts wound up in museums, Adele Bloch-Bauer being an especially vivid example, "for close to one hundred years and is, itself, much, much older than that. I'm pretty certain it isn't yours unless you are exceptionally well preserved."

The figure turned, fixing contemplative eyes on the younger man. His face was lined but not withered, and held a thoughtful expression. "I am so much better preserved than you can imagine." He held out a square, battered hand - the kind of hand that was well used to holding tools. "My name is Hero."

 

The museum director waved the guard away. Whoever this "Hero" person was, he didn't seem to be violent and as his only transgression thus far had been to move a stanchion, nothing major seemed to be in the offing. He appeared, so far, to be a harmless kook, if a rather more inventive one than usual.

You get all kinds in the museums. Usually it's just goth kids having sex in the darkest corners of the mummy halls, usually unaware of the surveillance camera right above them. Except for that one couple, hoo boy. They knew where the camera was, sure enough.

"So, Mr. Hero..."

"Alexander, please."

"Sir?"

"Mr. Alexander. Hero Alexander."

As in, Hero of Alexandria. Not an obscure figure from history to be sure.

"Mr. Alexander, then. Can you provide any sort of provenance upon which to found your claim to the device?"

"Not easily. For starters, the guard stopped me." Hero casually sat in the guest chair opposite the director's desk, and threw one leg over the other. "Can you?"

"Stop you? I guess I'd just call the guard back."

"No, no," Hero chuckled. "I meant, can you provide provenance? Such an excellent word, the Gauls did nice things with the language. Prrraah-vey-nahnnss. Wonderful," he chuckled again, having lovingly rolled the 'R' with a glottal flourish.

The director wasn't much swayed. "Of course, we have very clear paperwork describing how the device was acquired from its previous custodians. It's all on file."

"And from whom did they get it?"

"Seeing as the year was..." and he tapped rapidly into his computer "...late 1930 and the Great Depression was having worldwide effects, I wouldn't be too surprised if..." and he read a few entries on his screen "...well, good. It says here it came to us from a small private collection in Giza, Egypt."

"And where did that individual acquire it?"

"That isn't here. We paid handsomely for it. Handsomely for the time, that is."

"Does your record indicate what the price was, precisely?"

"Yes, it states: 'Purchased for the sum of one thousand, twenty-eight US dollars, paid in cash.' Around fifteen thousand today."

Hero frowned. "The equivalent of fifteen thousand? That is a fair amount of money."

The director smiled. "Indeed. So you see we wouldn't be willing to just allow someone to wander up to it and start handling it," and Hero noticed he hadn't defaulted to more derogatory terms like "meddling," "fiddling," or "monkeying." "Handling" was quite neutral. This director's situational awareness was not bad.

Hero fished in his inside pocket and drew out a slim book. "Fine. I'll call it a storage fee. Fifteen thousand? Even?"

"No, sir, please put your checkbook away."

"Fine." Hero shoved the checkbook back and drew out another packet. "We'll do this the old-fashioned way," and started leafing out hundred-dollar bills.

A stack of at least thirty bills was already on the desk blotter between them before the director realized that the book of notes Hero Alexander was counting from didn't appear to be getting any slimmer. He probably had over fifty thousand dollars in cash on him right now. "Sir! Please stop! I can't let you do this."

"Why not?"

"Sir, the artifact is not for sale."

"No, I agree with you. It never was, and I want the damned thing back!"

 

The director sighed. Another one of these.

 

Every large institution attracts its own share of cranks and depending on how public or secretive the agency is, the tenor of oddball it attracts changes. Uncommunicative government agencies like the CIA, for instance, tended to draw out the paranoiacs who suspected assorted levels of skullduggery, some of it quite fantastical. Other entities with less suspicious natures nevertheless could become the idée fixe of some uniquely unhinged folks.

 

You got the public ownership types, who declared that as taxpayers they were therefore owners of the museum's contents and maybe even the buildings themselves. Such people were usually steered around to understanding that, firstly, there were lots of taxpayers and if the individual was an owner then so, too was the rest of the taxpaying public and to take away the displays would constitute theft from them. That sometimes worked. But if it didn't, it was a straightforward walk down the paperwork to point out that while the Museum did take some government assistance from time to time, it was in fact "owned," if you could call such an entity as the Museum an owned thing, by an independent foundation that took its independence seriously.

 

So this looked like an ownership conceit. Probably a fairly uninteresting one, they didn't vary widely.  It might not merit entry in his personal log of Nutjobs to Remember.

 

"I never intended to sell this thing, you see. I never sold it at all."

 

Okay, as ownership conceits went, this one was new. "That would make sense, since the device is centuries old, sir."

 

"Yes, well, I did build it well. We already knew about solder even then, you see, so making good joints is just a matter of good surface preparation."

 

The director began to interrupt but Hero went on. "Let me fill you in. I'm older than you can possibly imagine. Some people would assume I'd have to be a vampire, or under some kind of curse, or something similarly fantastical. No magic is involved because there's no such thing as magic. I can tell you, quite certainly, that I am every bit as biological as you," he said, methodically drawing out a small penknife from his pocket, making a nick in his little finger as he spoke and folding the knife to put it away again. He looked around somewhat absently and, anticipating the request, the director proffered the box of tissues from his desk, which Hero accepted with a nod. He dabbed carefully at the fingertip, then showed the tissue to the director. "Red. Iron-based like yours. Okay?

 

 

The director had dredged up a bit of information on Hero, however. He was well regarded but not revered like some certain historical figures, mostly treated as an especially apt teacher. "Some sources say it was Tesibius of Alexandria who invented that thing, not you. If I accept that you are who you imply you are."

 

Hero blew a short raspberry, which started the director. "Do those sources tell you what ultimately happened to Ktesibios? And please pronounce it correctly, it's a Greek name."

 

"Uh, no. Records that far back are sometimes spotty."

 

"Rumors of his death were greatly exaggerated, to borrow a phrase from Sam. No, Ktesibios was getting a bit long in the tooth while still looking a little too hale, so he had to 'die' and I had to lie low for a while, while people forgot about me. Then I could resurface and resume teaching and I got the whirligig back and after a while Hero got a little too old, too. This isn't my first rodeo, young man."

 

"Hero" looked a solid, healthy fifty years old and the director knew he himself looked every bit of the sixty-five he felt, so the 'young man' landed oddly.

 

"Are you..." Hmm. Let's not say that out loud. "What are you going to do with the artifact?"

 

"Do? Nothing, it's just a toy. A doodad. I want what's inside it."

 

"What's inside it?"

 

"The solution to a puzzle I've been working on for generations. Ari gave it to me..."

 

"Ari?"

 

"You know him as Plato. Very smart fellow, I assure you. He gave it to me and it has been vexing me longer than the United States has been a country. And I only just recently sorted it out, remembered what happened."

 

The director shook his head. "Inside...how would you get it out?"

 

Hero smiled. "Tell you what. Accompany me down to the artifact and I'll show you."

 

A few minutes later, standing in front of the ancient device, Hero looked silently to the director who solemnly removed the rope barring him. "Is there an alarm on the pedestal?"

 

"No, it's monitored by three cameras, only one of which you can see. But they can see me here too so let's just get on with it."

Hero approached the device and, with two quick movements, wrenched the entire top half completely off. The director goggled but Hero chuckled. "Precious few people knew it comes apart like that. And of all of them, all have died of old age except me, and now you." He reached inside and, not looking into the reservoir, felt around. "After I had already started going by the name Pappus, I finally set up to figure out what Ari had left me. Where...ah." There was a faint click. "Got it." He withdrew his hand and held up...

 

"A puzzle piece?" It was too angular to be a modern, mass produced puzzle piece, but it was clearly a puzzle piece. There were different patterns of engravings on either side.

 

"Yes indeed."

 

"But what was it doing in," the director waved at the old artifact, "that?"

 

"Well, it's not like your modern puzzles, is it? Nay. This is bronze," and he tinked it on the pedestal to make a metallic sound, "and it has been serving as a check valve. It just so happens that the last crucial piece of information I've needed is on this piece, and now I finally have it."

 

"Um, I still can't let you take..."

 

"Oh, for the love of Mary. She was a wonderful young lady by the way. Very sweet. Here, just hold it for a moment..." Hero fished a smartphone out of his breast pocket and with two quick snaps of his wrist activated its camera. He took several quick snapshots of the puzzle piece, then flipped it over in the director's hand and took several more. "Now. Do you want the pictures and I keep the piece, or do you want the piece and I keep the pictures?"

 

This was quite rational, having the option of keeping all the pieces of this ancient artifact when Hero had been presenting nearly irrefutable foreknowledge of its internal construction. It lent his claim of being the device's original designer or builder some credence.

 

Best to not wander too far down that road.  He’d been suspending disbelief up until now; now disbelief was finding little solid ground to stand on when the suspension would be taken away.  It was a bit much to take in.  How old did this Hero have to be, to have been the device’s originator? Two thousand years or so…and would that be as old as he really was?

 

He might be older yet.

 

"It would be best if I could have the original because Ari might have done something esoteric to this one such that its unique properties are necessary to solve the problem, but I don't know that for sure. But with the pictures you could make a new piece exactly like this one and install it and no one would ever know the difference."

 

No, the director thought. They likely wouldn't. I didn't know that was in there. As if from a distance, or over an old, scratchy telephone connection the director heard himself say, "Take it."

Hero nodded. "My thanks. For your troubles, I'll make a new one and be back to install it. Will that be all right?"

The director nodded mutely and waved as Hero pocketed the odd little piece and left the building. He stood there for a few silent minutes before he realized the artifact was still standing in two pieces. THAT would take some explaining, but...

 

It hadn't taken Hero hardly any time whatsoever to get the thing apart. Looking it over carefully he saw...ah. Lugs here and tabs there. Drop, rotate, drop again, rotate back. Extremely fine work, and more sophisticated than he had anticipated. Turned for disassembly, this design would let pressure escape while retaining the halves if opened with pressure still on it. Brilliant…good grief, it was just like a car’s radiator cap. He dropped the top on and manipulated it carefully. It went together and snugged down with a satisfying resistance.

 

If the removed piece were never replaced, so what? The museum never lit a fire under the Aeolipile, after all.

 

He made his way back to his office, fell into his chair at the desk and noticed a white bit of material in the visitor's chair.

 

The tissue. The tissue where the visitor calling himself Hero Alexander - Heron of Alexandria - had dabbed at the spot of blood he had dramatically drawn from himself to prove he wasn't fake.

He pressed his intercom. "Sheila, please have someone from Biology call me immediately."

Hero's puzzle wasn't the only one that had lain for generations, unsolved. He might figure something out if he was lucky.

Winging It: The Adventures of Human Gina

 "Okay, humans. Type 2 standard tool users, bilateral symmetry, very good. Terrestrial, very good - no tanks for you guys. And let's see..."

Tentacles tapped at the side of the monitor as more tentacles manipulated the entry orbs. Gina had seen this in action many times but still hadn't puzzled out precisely how inputs were made into the computers. It appeared to be combinations of motions, rather than distinct positions or individual motions. Worse, every input required simultaneous motions on at least four different orbs, so watching the Llobban "typing" could be compared to observing a complex belly dance performed by a basket of snakes.

"It doesn't say here who your sponsoring species are?"

"Sponsoring species?"

"You know, the first contact species that helped guide your species' ascent to sentience?"

"Uh...we never had one?"

The Llobban turned white. Literally white, like a stick of chalk. Gina had seen that before; among these jovian secondaries turning white was a universal expression of shock. "None?"

"No. Certainly none that I've ever heard of."

The Llobban stirred the inputs rapidly, all four of its major eyes scanning the screens. "That's not..." It kept scanning until finally it released the inputs. "Oh!"

"What's wrong?"

"It says here that your world was deemed dangerous and marked off for sequestration."

"Really? Who decides that?"

The Llobban waved tentacles - all of them, a Medusa-like cluster of at least fifty - at the ceiling. "Upstairs. They don't tell us why, just what and when. Your world has been visited and remotely evaluated a few times and the last time was during a war..." it squinted at the screens, "...between yourselves? Really? With nukes?!" If anything, the poor creature turned a little whiter yet.

"Oh, yeah. That."

"Yes, that!"

"Yeah, we got over that. Mostly."

"How the hell did you get here?"

"Oh, well. You know. Lunar base, Mars base, Jovian moon and then some of you guys came wandering by and I hopped a ride." Gina shrugged expansively. "Here I am."

Abruptly the Llobban changed back to almost its normal coloration. "That does sound like a familiar story." It shrugged too, a sinuous serpentine wave. "But you are the very first, the very first of your kind I have encountered. We've heard of you of course, and the stories of your prize fights are...they can't be real, can they?"

"They're real."

"A rigid beat a Blob? That doesn't happen."

"Record time, too, they tell me."

"Anyway. We knew you were out there but I never thought I'd have you in front of my desk."

"Yeah. Listen, though, I just wanted to look into securing official statuses for my planet and species. Can I do that or not?"

"Um, well. Yes. You'd have to sign on for a contract as the representative for your species for a period of not less than..." it squinted at the screen again. "...hmm, since you're brand new and no sponsoring species, really? I don't think we've ever had a representative apply for recognition on their own merits before. You're supposed to have someone speak on your behalf..."

"We speak on our behalfs. Behalves? Whatever. We stand on our own feet."

"Right, that's what's weird..." Gina's translator was having no difficulty whatsoever with this creature; its command of human-analogous idioms was comfortably familiar. He was easier to talk to than Booj and his booming formal phrasing. "Usually the ascension process takes a couple of centuries, which is enough for us to get to know about you a bit better."

"Well, we've been evolving into sentience for about the last half-million years or so. And we've been developing modern cultures for, I dunno, I guess about twenty thousand years? We've only been as technologically advanced as we are for maybe the last fifty, though."

"You mean...you evolved into sentience?"

"Yeah? So?"

"That doesn't happen!"

Gina raised her hands in a plain here I am anyway gesture. "It had to happen to somebody besides us."

"No!"

"Come on. Who lifted up you guys?"

"We were sponsored by the Arannda."

"And who sponsored them?"

"They were raised up about fifteen thousand years ago by the undecipherable," the translator punted the last word.

"And who sponsored those guys?"

"Umm...I don't know."

"And before them?"

"Okay, maybe I get your point."

"We evolved, buddy. It's one thing to be raised up and that's great, but we humans, if we didn't have anybody to raise us then we just did it ourselves."

The Llobban was looking at its screen. "It says here you have driven yourselves to the brink of extinction multiple times."

"Yup. Guilty as charged. But we figure out what we're doing wrong, sort it out, and keep going."

"If you want to be your species' representative, you will have to commit to a period on the panel of not less than five of your years."

Gina thought about it. "I've got other things I want to do. And I might not be the best choice for a representative anyway. I'm not that kind of person."

"What will you do, then? There are enormous advantages to be had with formal representation among the species."

"Sort it out and keep going, I guess."

Makeshift: The Adventures of Human Gina

 "How is this noteworthy? A weapon is anything used to inflict damage on a being. That is the definition of a weapon. It could be anything you pick up, anything you use."

"Yes, but don't forget that with their nimble hands and tough fingers, humans can pick up almost anything they are strong enough to lift."

Algo skimmed the first several pages, then chaptered ahead in his reader. "Hm. It says here that humans don't actually need weapons as such. What is this?"

"Ah, I see you have skipped ahead to 'hand to hand combat.'"

"Yes. What does that mean? Assuming the combatant even has hands."

"Humans - indeed, most of the lifeforms on their whole backwards planet - can engage in violence against others with no weapons whatsoever. It's a side effect of their rigid skeletal frameworks. Even though the musculature is relatively forgiving in any kind of impact, the rigid structure makes it possible to concentrate the impact forces in a small area. Other rigid creatures are easily damaged by such forces."

Algo puffed up, turning colors slightly. "Well, that's useless against us." He flattened himself out, then pulled himself back into a sphere. "Being amorphous, I can't see how a human could damage us. This is going to be an easy win."

"Algo, just read the book. Quickly. Your bout is tomorrow and it's a no-holds barred free for all. The betting spread is closing and the human's deficit is almost gone. The crowd is starting to swing their way."

"Pfeh." Algo waved dismissively at his handler, who surged orange and sailed angrily out the portal.

The next morning, Algo squared up - literally, assuming various geometric shapes and colors to amuse and thrill the crowd - against his unimpressive opponent.

The creature wasn't especially large. It was maybe only a half-portion of his own mass, not changing shape at all and the shape it had was singularly unappealing, limbs and bumps and the odd cloud of extra-fine cilia around one protuberance at the upper end.

The referee warbled the usual warnings. Algo ignored them; a free for all was just that: do what works, however it works. No killing, either combatant could tap out at any time. Incapacitate, force a yield, win.

The combat was to take place in a Type 3 Simulated Environment, representing a typical spacecraft interior with the usual appointments: bulkheads, enclosures, the equipment a vessel would need to navigate between secondaries in a jovian system. It was a pretty big system with several major jovians, each of which swarmed with secondaries. The spacecraft type wasn't specified but required by the rules to have details representative of vessels from all the major species including Algo's own and even humans, to ensure neither combatant had an unfair advantage.

The bout began. Algo surged ahead to engulf the human, which kicked off the ground to sail above him in the low gravity. That was to be expected, but he hadn't anticipated that the human would be so comfortable. According to what little research he had done, humans had evolved in a relatively high-gravity environment and were heavily specialized for that.

Oops. The human, with its rigid framework, had the magical advantage of leverage and had been able to push with great speed and force, and now here he was dawdling through the central volume of the space and unable to change his main mass's vector significantly, except...

He launched an extension at the human to grab hold of it, but when he did make contact and began to wrap around the human's appendage, the human made a funny motion with its limb and wound the extension up and up until it had been wrapped up faster than he could extend more of his mass into it. The extension pulled loose.

Not a big deal - extensions popped loose all the time. It wriggled and squealed and appeared to be trying to engulf the human's limb but had entirely too little mass to make any progress. Separated from his intellect, it might rely on instinctive actions, however being completely incompatible biochemically, it didn't dare try to digest the creature.

But it did. Separated from his main body mass as it was, Algo's separated extension was now pretty dumb and acting on very primitive instincts indeed. He saw it change colors slightly as it concentrated digestive juices close to the human's skin surface, then change again, violently, as the reaction took place.

"Frikkin' OW!" The human made the first sound Algo had heard from it. "Ya little shit!" The human leapt off the wall it had sailed toward while battling the extension, and flew through the open portal.

In an enclosure resembling a ship's galley, the human jerked open an insulated box and thrust the arm with the extension inside. Suddenly subjected to the freezing cold, the extension instinctively contracted to a minimum surface area shape - a sphere - and turned nearly black. The human slammed the door on the shape.

Algo came surging through the portal behind the human, just as the human whipped a cooking vessel off a rack and scooped it through Algo's body mass. He felt a tremendous portion of his mass come away and as it did, another portion of his intellect went blank. The human slapped a lid onto the cooking vessel before the portion could escape, and stuffed the pot into another insulated box and slammed that door too.

Algo felt he had lost nearly half his mind and his entire mass advantage, now approximately equal to the human and the wretched combat had only been going on for two standard minutes! The human was examining him carefully.

"Everything is a weapon," the book had stated. While the human was unarmed, it nevertheless had adapted found objects to violent needs. This room appeared to be mostly representative of human technology, and it was using human gadgets to disable him in pieces. He needed to move the battle to a space where the human might be less familiar with its surroundings.

Algo surged out the portal and down the passageway. He had an idea and needed to act on it before even more bits of his intelligence were wrestled away from him.

"Oh no you don't," the human called after him. It came out the portal as well.

Perfect. Come and get me, he thought.

But it didn't.

Gina watched the blob recede into the distance. She hadn't been sure she had understood the briefing materials clearly - they had been translated through two different languages before winding up in Terran Standard - but apparently she'd picked up some of it well enough. The creature wasn't grievously injured by having bits of itself torn off, and the tearing itself wasn't a big deal. They really were a kind of nonspecialized cellular colony. The bigger they got, the smarter they got.

Native to the warmer depths of the system's second major jovian planet indecipherable they do not fare well in lower temperatures; the instinctive response to sudden chills is to assume as small and dense a form as possible, to fall back to where life sustaining heat might be found. When fighting an infection, a indecipherable will also assume this same shape, to better conserve its heat and raise its internal temperature to kill off the pathogen.

The book, "Weapons are Useless Against the Unkillable," had been some of the strangest briefing materials she had ever clapped eyes on, but the gist of it boiled down to: the indecipherable were essentially invulnerable to anything short of fire. Striking them made a ripple in their body mass, cutting simply separated this part over here from that part over there...and then the two parts flowed back together again. But they definitely had a preferred temperature range, several degrees warmer than that of humans and precious little tolerance for cold. Whoever had written the book had been quite impressed by the creatures' durability.

But they hadn't known any humans.

And when she had stuck her arm with the blob of indecipherable into the freezer, sure enough the critter had condensed and balled up. It was easy enough to contain it then. But her skin still itched - had it tried to absorb her? Did that constitute a violation of the rules?

"It says 'no biting,' but this thing doesn't have a mouth."

"Human Gina," said the voice in her ear, "I can lodge a complaint if you like, but if the fight is stopped, we waive all wagers. You will have to pay a forfeiture fee."

"Dammit Booj, I was just thinking aloud."

"I do not understand." Her local handler, an immense but low-density native of one of the medium-sized moons, had a voice like a bass guitar. "Are you experiencing a cognitive failure? Do we need to cancel the contest?"

"NO! I'm fine. No cancelling, no failures! I'm not talking to you."

"But you were talking."

"Unless you hear me say your name, I'm not talking to you! Leave me be."

Damn Booj was like a mother hen and the worst kind of boxing promoter in one oddly contradictory role. He wanted to back a winning fighter, but he was willing to throw the fight at any moment. How did that figure?

That would have to wait.

The indecipherable - dammit, that was too clunky. "Booj, what do these people call themselves again?"

A teeth-grating screech sounded in her earpiece. "Holy smokes, is that the word?"

"Yes, Human Gina. Do you need to hear it again? Do you need assistance with the pronunciation?"

"How the hell do you even say that? I didn't know you could hit such a high pitch."

"I cannot. That was a recording."

"Well for Pete's sake. Booj, what do you call them?"

"In my language they are," and a luscious twanging with resonant overtones came through the earpiece, which tickled.

"I can't say that either. What did that mean in my language?"

"I am looking it up. Ah. It means Blobs."

Well, hell. "Okay. Thanks, Booj."

The Blob had skedaddled toward the aft end of the simulated ship, notably away from the simulated galley which clearly was too like human spaces with human-friendly stuff in it. So if he had gone toward somewhere else, he was looking to find something that skewed the environment in his favor.

She had determined by the Blob's resting coloration that it was considered a male, though how an amorphous creature that reproduced by some mechanism that emphatically was not intercourse considered itself male, she didn't really understand.

Unimportant. Ask him afterward. Whatever.

She couldn't wait for him here while he waited for her there. After a certain amount of time, passivity forfeitures would start to tick off against their winnings. No camping allowed, both combatants had to be actively engaged in pursuit, escape or combat, with a nominal amount of latitude permitted for conferring with handlers, resting and emergency self-care.

Her skin still itched. She leapt after the Blob.

Algo raced around the enclosure. It was a cargo space tailored to his own kind, racks of receptacles to secure bulk cargo spheres against acceleration in any direction. A fair amount of rigid structure, no hindrance to him moving in any direction - he could flow right around anything that got in the way - and plenty of hard things to clunk the human against if he could just get hold of her.

True to any cargo space, there was almost nothing loose here. Cargo spaces were designed with "loose" as a description to be avoided. Probably for the best, the human had made entirely too much use of things it was able to rapidly manipulate.

Here was a restraining strap. Against a creature of such constrained form as a human with a skeleton, it could be useful...except Algo himself couldn't really use it well. If he tried to pull too hard on it, it would simply pull through him. Straps were used in conjunction with winches. Except...

After his handler had stormed out, Algo had read a bit of the book despite his protestations. Not much, it wasn't very interesting despite the title. "Anything Is a Weapon," yes, that made sense if you thought about it. But context mattered. In his many contests-for-hire, he had used all manner of attacks against all manner of creatures, including once taking a very large and succulent vegetable and slowly, inexorably digesting it before the terrified eyes of a creature whose religion deified it. He had actually regretted that particular attack; the food had been very disagreeable, though the payoff had salved his rattled biochemistry. But in the section describing constrained-form lifeforms, he had become interested at the limits such constraints put on the lifeforms' mobility. Where the human had the advantage of sheer strength and no need to brace against anything to bring it to bear, its internal bracing meant that it couldn't flow. How far it could bend was limited, too. Whereas bits of himself could be scooped away from his mass and contained and he still be functional, the human could be constrained just by having a single limb trapped.

The human bashed through the hatch and was immediately entangled in the dangling mass of restraint strap that Algo had strewn through the air in front of the opening. A low whine emanated from across the cargo bay as a winch began reeling in the slack, and some of the lazily floating loops began to close around her.

Gina whirled to disentangle herself, but not before a loop closed around her leg, hauling her toward the cargo racks. She recognized the threat immediately.

Look at the racks themselves. No luck there: no sharp edges, and of course not. You wouldn't want sharp edges that might fray the straps. She pulled hard and listened as the winch groaned to a halt.

Huh. They don't pull them very tight. I wonder...she bit at the strap and was able to make a nick in it. Her leg wasn't going numb against the tension, but she certainly wasn't going anywhere until she got the entangling strap off...

The Blob came surging up from the floor - she guessed it might be the floor, in this nearly-zero-gee environment it hardly mattered - and she kicked a foot at its approach, missing but fortuitously throwing a loop of strap around the approaching pseudopod. She jerked the loop shut and the pseudopod was severed from the body mass. The smaller mass emitted a shrill screech and surged away.

Oh ho! The bigger they get, the smarter they get. But that also means that little bits are not smart. In fact if they're very small, that is, very not smart, they just try to escape. The little blob of Blob was still going, trying to put more distance between itself and her.

...wait...

...where the hell was the rest of the Blob?

Algo surged down the rack until he had engulfed the human's head. He wasn't proud of this attack but lacking other, more direct methods he would be satisfied to smother the creature with his own mass until it either tapped out or lost consciousness. It was proving far too fast for him to construct any kind of useful trap, constraints notwithstanding. It was strong and clever - just like he had thought himself, before part of his intelligence had been stuffed into a pot, another part shoved into a freezer and now part of it just running away. He had to end this quickly. And another of the constraints pointed out in the book had been that in such differentiated creatures, respiratory gas intake was consigned to a shockingly small part of the body, one that he could engulf despite his reduced volume. Gotcha, he thought to himself, trying not to feel too smug.

Gina felt the mass touch at the back of her neck like warm water, and then flow completely around her head. She spasmed for a moment, trying vainly to scoop it off and throw it, but her hands only thrust through the mass like viscous syrup, and it stayed put.

Sonuvabitch, she thought. He actually thought of a way to choke me out. The Blob couldn't squeeze, couldn't put pressure on any blood vessels and force her to lose consciousness quickly, but this would work unless she thought of something quickly. She couldn't hold her breath for much longer, not after all this exertion.

Giving up on using just her hands, Gina grabbed the hem of her snugsuit tunic and rapidly whipped it up and over her head, scooping the Blob away in a mass and, conveniently, completely clearing her mouth and nose.

Gotcha. There was precious little of the mass that wasn't captured inside the shirt, and she twisted it shut at the waist, pinching the neck closed and walking her fingers rapidly to reel in the sleeves as well.

Still tied to the cargo racks by the strap, she had nearly all of what was left of Algo inside her shirt.

Now what? Whacking him against anything would have no effect whatsoever. She couldn't let go of any part of the shirt to get loose from the strap.

The little bit of him she'd cut loose was nowhere to be seen. Chances were that the Blob would have had to chase it down himself, once the fight was over.

Oh, wait. No. Could that work?

She stretched the bundled shirt out, and twisted. Twisted, reset her grip, and twisted some more.

A garbled screech emanated from inside the shirt, but too late. She reset her grip and twisted even more, and the Blob squeezed in streamers through the fine fabric, droplets that tore loose and, all of them screeching in thin, tiny screams of alarm, swam away through the thick air of the cargo bay.

Gina observed the droplets all streaming away in panic, as if she had somehow frightened away a thick fog. She still held a sizable blob of Blob in her shirt, and reset her grip again.

The last bit of Blob she hadn't contained or torn asunder, the bit that had squeezed out of the neck hole as she peeled her shirt off, swam in front of her.

"Tap?" It said, in plain Terran Standard. It swam over to the cargo rack and tried, weakly, to knock against the rigid surface. "Tap?"

Gina held off wringing more Blob out of her shirt. "What are you saying, little guy?"

"Tap?" It tapped on the cargo rack again. "Tap?"

"Do you yield?"

"Tap!"

"Are you tapping out?"

"Tap!" It knocked on the cargo rack again.

Gina spoke into her earpiece. "You hear that, Booj?"

"We hear it," his basso voice rumbled. "That was remarkable. No rigid has ever beaten a Blob before." The lighting in the cargo hold brightened, and the winch reversed itself so the tension on her leg let off.

"Cool." Gina opened the shirt and carefully turned it right side out, releasing the trapped mass of Blob as she did. It immediately surged over to absorb the little delegate that had offered to end the contest.

"Help?" said the Blob.

"Sure." Before trying to mop up the Bloblets that were too small and unintelligent to do more than avoid them, she took the Blob back to the galley, where she reunited him with the larger chunks she'd stuffed into the freezer and refrigerator. He immediately became much smarter and more eloquent.

Gina watched as the Blob went through something like a convulsive shudder, if a free-floating blob of goo could shudder.

"That is very unpleasant. No portion of me has ever been that cold before."

"Sorry about that. No holds barred."

"Yes. I thought I had you at the end."

"You almost did. It was close."

"I thought humans were constrained? How did you take yourself apart?"

"What?"

The Blob extended a pseudopod to indicate the shirt, now tucked into the waistband of her snugsuit pants. "You took this part of yourself loose and constrained me within it. I had nowhere to grab, nothing to engulf. You engulfed me...and then did something strange and I could feel bits of myself tearing away..."

Gina chuckled, and took a moment to pull the shirt back on. Among such blatantly non-humanoid creatures - creature? There was just the one of him after all - she hadn't felt naked until they had started talking about her clothes, which was weird. "Sorry, friend. This isn't part of me. This is clothing. I can take it off whenever I want, put it back on, it's just clothing."

"It's a weapon."

"Well, no. But yeah. Anything is a weapon, depending on how you use it."

"I am learning that."

"Come on, let's go find the rest of you."

"My name is Algo."

"Call me Gina. I'll go where you go, Algo."

"This was an educational experience. I will treat rigids with more respect hereafter."

Together they sailed back toward the cargo bay, to chase down the terrified and hiding bits of Algo's escaped ego.