"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.
