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.