You See But You Do Not Observe

by Robert J. Sawyer

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  Fictionwise

  www.Fictionwise.com

  Copyright ©1995 by Robert J. Sawyer

  First published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, February 1995

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  * * *

  I had been pulled into the future first, ahead of my companion. There was no sensation associated with the chronotransference, except for a popping of my ears which I was later told had to do with a change in air pressure. Once in the 21st century, my brain was scanned in order to produce from my memories a perfect reconstruction of our rooms at 221B Baker Street. Details that I could not consciously remember or articulate were nonetheless reproduced exactly: the flock-papered walls, the bearskin hearthrug, the basket chair and the armchair, the coal-scuttle, even the view through the window—all were correct to the smallest detail.

  I was met in the future by a man who called himself Mycroft Holmes. He claimed, however, to be no relation to my companion, and protested that his name was mere coincidence, although he allowed that the fact of it was likely what had made a study of my partner's methods his chief avocation. I asked him if he had a brother called Sherlock, but his reply made little sense to me: “My parents weren't that cruel.”

  In any event, this Mycroft Holmes—who was a small man with reddish hair, quite unlike the stout and dark ale of a fellow with the same name I had known two hundred years before—wanted all details to be correct before he whisked Holmes here from the past. Genius, he said, was but a step from madness, and although I had taken to the future well, my companion might be quite rocked by the experience.

  When Mycroft did bring Holmes forth, he did so with great stealth, transferring him precisely as he stepped through the front exterior door of the real 221 Baker Street and into the simulation that had been created here. I heard my good friend's voice down the stairs, giving his usual glad tidings to a simulation of Mrs. Hudson. His long legs, as they always did, brought him up to our humble quarters at a rapid pace.

  I had expected a hearty greeting, consisting perhaps of an ebullient cry of “My Dear Watson,” and possibly even a firm clasping of hands or some other display of bonhomie. But there was none of that, of course. This was not like the time Holmes had returned after an absence of three years during which I had believed him to be dead. No, my companion, whose exploits it has been my honor to chronicle over the years, was unaware of just how long we had been separated, and so my reward for my vigil was nothing more than a distracted nodding of his drawn-out face. He took a seat and settled in with the evening paper, but after a few moments, he slapped the newsprint sheets down. “Confound it, Watson! I have already read this edition. Have we not today's paper?”

  And, at that turn, there was nothing for it but for me to adopt the unfamiliar role that queer fate had dictated I must now take: our traditional positions were now reversed, and I would have to explain the truth to Holmes.

  “Holmes, my good fellow, I am afraid they do not publish newspapers anymore.”

  He pinched his long face into a scowl, and his clear, gray eyes glimmered. “I would have thought that any man who had spent as much time in Afghanistan as you had, Watson, would be immune to the ravages of the sun. I grant that today was unbearably hot, but surely your brain should not have addled so easily.”

  “Not a bit of it, Holmes, I assure you,” said I. “What I say is true, although I confess my reaction was the same as yours when I was first told. There have not been any newspapers for seventy-five years now.”

  “Seventy-five years? Watson, this copy of The Times is dated August the fourteenth, 1899—yesterday.”

  “I am afraid that is not true, Holmes. Today is June the fifth, anno Domini two thousand and ninety-six.”

  “Two thou—”

  “It sounds preposterous, I know—”

  “It is preposterous, Watson. I call you ‘old man’ now and again out of affection, but you are in fact nowhere near two hundred and fifty years of age.”

  “Perhaps I am not the best man to explain all this,” I said.

  “No,” said a voice from the doorway. “Allow me.”

  Holmes surged to his feet. “And who are you?”

  “My name is Mycroft Holmes.”

  “Impostor!” declared my companion.

  “I assure you that that is not the case,” said Mycroft. “I grant I'm not your brother, nor a habitué of the Diogenes Club, but I do share his name. I am a scientist—and I have used certain scientific principles to pluck you from your past and bring you into my present.”

  For the first time in all the years I had known him, I saw befuddlement on my companion's face. “It is quite true,” I said to him.

  “But why?” said Holmes, spreading his long arms. “Assuming this mad fantasy is true—and I do not grant for an instant that it is—why would you thus kidnap myself and my good friend, Dr. Watson?”

  “Because, Holmes, the game, as you used to be so fond of saying, is afoot.”

  “Murder, is it?” asked I, grateful at last to get to the reason for which we had been brought forward.

  “More than simple murder,” said Mycroft. “Much more. Indeed, the biggest puzzle to have ever faced the human race. Not just one body is missing. Trillions are. Trillions.”

  “Watson,” said Holmes, “surely you recognize the signs of madness in the man? Have you nothing in your bag that can help him? The whole population of the Earth is less than two thousand millions.”

  “In your time, yes,” said Mycroft. “Today, it's about eight thousand million. But I say again, there are trillions more who are missing.”

  “Ah, I perceive at last,” said Holmes, a twinkle in his eye as he came to believe that reason was once again holding sway. “I have read in The Illustrated London News of these dinosauria, as Professor Owen called them—great creatures from the past, all now deceased. It is their demise you wish me to unravel.”

  Mycroft shook his head. “You should have read Professor Moriarty's monograph called The Dynamics of an Asteroid,” he said.

  “I keep my mind clear of useless knowledge,” replied Holmes curtly.

  Mycroft shrugged. “Well, in that paper Moriarty quite cleverly guessed the cause of the demise of the dinosaurs: an asteroid crashing into earth kicked up enough dust to block the sun for months on end. Close to a century after he had reasoned out this hypothesis, solid evidence for its truth was found in a layer of clay. No, that mystery is long since solved. This one is much greater.”

  “And what, pray, is it?” said Holmes, irritation in his voice.

  Mycroft motioned for Holmes to have a seat, and, after a moment's defiance, my friend did just that. “It is called the Fermi paradox,” said Mycroft, “after Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who lived in the twentieth century. You see, we know now that this universe of ours should have given rise to countless planets, and that many of those planets should have produced intelligent civilizations. We can demonstrate the likelihood of this mathematically, using something called the Drake equation. For a century and a half now, we have been using radio—wireless, that is—to look for signs of these other intelligences. And we have found nothing—nothing! Hence the paradox Fermi posed: if the universe is supposed to be full of life, then where are the aliens?”

  “Aliens?” said I. “Sure
ly they are mostly still in their respective foreign countries.”

  Mycroft smiled. “The word has gathered additional uses since your day, good doctor. By aliens, I mean extraterrestrials—creatures who live on other worlds.”

  “Like in the stories of Verne and Wells?” asked I, quite sure that my expression was agog.

  “And even in worlds beyond the family of our sun,” said Mycroft.

  Holmes rose to his feet. “I know nothing of universes and other worlds,” he said angrily. “Such knowledge could be of no practical use in my profession.”

  I nodded. “When I first met Holmes, he had no idea that the Earth revolved around the sun.” I treated myself to a slight chuckle. “He thought the reverse to be true.”

  Mycroft smiled. “I know of your current limitations, Sherlock.” My friend cringed slightly at the overly familiar address. “But these are mere gaps in knowledge; we can rectify that easily enough.”

  “I will not crowd my brain with useless irrelevancies,” said Holmes. “I carry only information that can be of help in my work. For instance, I can identify one hundred and forty different varieties of tobacco ash—”

  “Ah, well, you can let that information go, Holmes,” said Mycroft. “No one smokes anymore. It's been proven ruinous to one's health.” I shot a look at Holmes, whom I had always warned of being a self-poisoner. “Besides, we've also learned much about the structure of the brain in the intervening years. Your fear that memorizing information related to fields such as literature, astronomy, and philosophy would force out other, more relevant data, is unfounded. The capacity for the human brain to store and retrieve information is almost infinite.”

  “It is?” said Holmes, clearly shocked.

  “It is.”

  “And so you wish me to immerse myself in physics and astronomy and such all?”

  “Yes,” said Mycroft.

  “To solve this paradox of Fermi?”

  “Precisely!”

  “But why me?”

  “Because it is a puzzle, and you, my good fellow, are the greatest solver of puzzles this world has ever seen. It is now two hundred years after your time, and no one with a facility to rival yours has yet appeared.”

  Mycroft probably could not see it, but the tiny hint of pride on my longtime companion's face was plain to me. But then Holmes frowned. “It would take years to amass the knowledge I would need to address this problem.”

  “No, it will not.” Mycroft waved his hand, and amidst the homely untidiness of Holmes's desk appeared a small sheet of glass standing vertically. Next to it lay a strange metal bowl. “We have made great strides in the technology of learning since your day. We can directly program new information into your brain.” Mycroft walked over to the desk. “This glass panel is what we call a monitor. It is activated by the sound of your voice. Simply ask it questions, and it will display information on any topic you wish. If you find a topic that you think will be useful in your studies, simply place this helmet on your head” (he indicated the metal bowl), “say the words ‘load topic,’ and the information will be seamlessly integrated into the neural nets of your very own brain. It will at once seem as if you know, and have always known, all the details of that field of endeavor.”

  “Incredible!” said Holmes. “And from there?”

  “From there, my dear Holmes, I hope that your powers of deduction will lead you to resolve the paradox—and reveal at last what has happened to the aliens!”

  * * * *

  “Watson! Watson!”

  I awoke with a start. Holmes had found this new ability to effortlessly absorb information irresistible and he had pressed on long into the night, but I had evidently fallen asleep in a chair. I perceived that Holmes had at last found a substitute for the sleeping fiend of his cocaine mania: with all of creation at his fingertips, he would never again feel that emptiness that so destroyed him between assignments.

  “Eh?” I said. My throat was dry. I had evidently been sleeping with my mouth open. “What is it?”

  “Watson, this physics is more fascinating than I had ever imagined. Listen to this, and see if you do not find it as compelling as any of the cases we have faced to date.”

  I rose from my chair and poured myself a little sherry—it was, after all, still night and not yet morning. “I am listening.”

  “Remember the locked and sealed room that figured so significantly in that terrible case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra?”

  “How could I forget?” said I, a shiver traversing my spine. “If not for your keen shooting, my left leg would have ended up as gamy as my right.”

  “Quite,” said Holmes. “Well, consider a different type of locked-room mystery, this one devised by an Austrian physicist named Erwin Schrödinger. Imagine a cat sealed in a box. The box is of such opaque material, and its walls are so well insulated, and the seal is so profound, that there is no way anyone can observe the cat once the box is closed.”

  “Hardly seems cricket,” I said, “locking a poor cat in a box.”

  “Watson, your delicate sensibilities are laudable, but please, man, attend to my point. Imagine further that inside this box is a triggering device that has exactly a fifty-fifty chance of being set off, and that this aforementioned trigger is rigged up to a cylinder of poison gas. If the trigger is tripped, the gas is released, and the cat dies.”

  “Goodness!” said I. “How nefarious.”

  “Now, Watson, tell me this: without opening the box, can you say whether the cat is alive or dead?”

  “Well, if I understand you correctly, it depends on whether the trigger was tripped.”

  “Precisely!”

  “And so the cat is perhaps alive, and, yet again, perhaps it is dead.”

  “Ah, my friend, I knew you would not fail me: the blindingly obvious interpretation. But it is wrong, dear Watson, totally wrong.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean the cat is neither alive nor is it dead. It is a potential cat, an unresolved cat, a cat whose existence is nothing but a question of possibilities. It is neither alive nor dead, Watson—neither! Until some intelligent person opens the box and looks, the cat is unresolved. Only the act of looking forces a resolution of the possibilities. Once you crack the seal and peer within, the potential cat collapses into an actual cat. Its reality is a result of having been observed.”

  “That is worse gibberish than anything this namesake of your brother has spouted.”

  “No, it is not,” said Holmes. “It is the way the world works. They have learned so much since our time, Watson—so very much! But as Alphonse Karr has observed, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Even in this esoteric field of advanced physics, it is the power of the qualified observer that is most important of all!”

  * * * *

  I awoke again hearing Holmes crying out, “Mycroft! Mycroft!”

  I had occasionally heard such shouts from him in the past, either when his iron constitution had failed him and he was feverish, or when under the influence of his accursed needle. But after a moment I realized he was not calling for his real brother but rather was shouting into the air to summon the Mycroft Holmes who was the 21st-century savant. Moments later, he was rewarded: the door to our rooms opened and in came the red-haired fellow.

  “Hello, Sherlock,” said Mycroft. “You wanted me?”

  “Indeed I do,” said Holmes. “I have absorbed much now on not just physics but also the technology by which you have recreated these rooms for me and the good Dr. Watson.”

  Mycroft nodded. “I've been keeping track of what you've been accessing. Surprising choices, I must say.”

  “So they might seem,” said Holmes, “but my method is based on the pursuit of trifles. Tell me if I understand correctly that you reconstructed these rooms by scanning Watson's memories, then using, if I understand the terms, holography and micro-manipulated force fields to simulate the appearance and form of what he had seen.”

  “That's right.”


  “So your ability to reconstruct is not just limited to rebuilding these rooms of ours, but, rather, you could simulate anything either of us had ever seen.”

  “That's correct. In fact, I could even put you into a simulation of someone else's memories. Indeed, I thought perhaps you might like to see the Very Large Array of radio telescopes, where most of our listening for alien messages—”

  “Yes, yes, I'm sure that's fascinating,” said Holmes, dismissively. “But can you reconstruct the venue of what Watson so appropriately dubbed ‘The Final Problem'?”

  “You mean the Falls of Reichenbach?” Mycroft looked shocked. “My God, yes, but I should think that's the last thing you'd want to relive.”

  “Aptly said!” declared Holmes. “Can you do it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then do so!”

  * * * *

  And so Holmes and my brains were scanned and in short order we found ourselves inside a superlative recreation of the Switzerland of May 1891, to which we had originally fled to escape Professor Moriarty's assassins. Our re-enactment of events began at the charming Englischer Hof in the village of Meiringen. Just as the original innkeeper had done all those years ago, the reconstruction of him exacted a promise from us that we would not miss the spectacle of the falls of Reichenbach. Holmes and I set out for the Falls, him walking with the aid of an alpenstock. Mycroft, I was given to understand, was somehow observing all this from afar.

  “I do not like this,” I said to my companion. “'Twas bad enough to live through this horrible day once, but I had hoped I would never have to relive it again except in nightmares.”

  “Watson, recall that I have fonder memories of all this. Vanquishing Moriarty was the high point of my career. I said to you then, and say again now, that putting an end to the very Napoleon of crime would easily be worth the price of my own life.”

  There was a little dirt path cut out of the vegetation running halfway round the falls so as to afford a complete view of the spectacle. The icy green water, fed by the melting snows, flowed with phenomenal rapidity and violence, then plunged into a great, bottomless chasm of rock black as the darkest night. Spray shot up in vast gouts, and the shriek made by the plunging water was almost like a human cry.