“I’m not concerned with your literary resourcefulness,” I said, attempting to contain my anger and conceal my trepidation.
“You posted the essay from this house?” Mrs. Watson asked, following my line of reasoning.
He nodded. “Yesterday morning I saw a classified ad in the Times calling for essays regarding ‘unusual experiences in the field of Spiritualism.’ The pay is quite generous. So I got the essay right out to them. Naturally, I haven’t heard back yet. But I thought it better to strike while the iron is hot.”
“Turn off the lamp,” I instructed Conan Doyle.
He looked at me oddly but did as I asked.
In the near darkness, I stood and went to the window, pulling back the drawn curtains just enough to peer out. “Well, you’re right about the iron being hot,” I said, turning back.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“There are two large men standing in the shadows across the street. They’re watching this house.” Mrs. Watson and I had not noticed them upon our arrival, but I didn’t doubt they’d been there. Nor that they’d noticed us.
“But how . . .” Conan Doyle stopped. He realized now the implications of his literary enthusiasm. “So the ad in the Times was a trap.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And I stepped into it,” he continued.
“That’s exactly the phrase that came to my mind, Sir Arthur,” Mrs. Watson answered, somewhat earthily but not inaccurately.
“They must have witnessed our arrival, Mrs. Watson,” I indicated.
“Yes, and we were undisguised. So they probably recognized you, Sherlock.”
Very likely.
“Who are they?” Conan Doyle asked.
I turned to him. “I don’t know.”
“What will they do now?” he pressed.
“Judging from their previous actions,” I said, “they’ll wait a little longer to see if anyone else arrives and then burst into this house.”
“And then?” he asked.
“You’re the one with the bullet wound,” I said to him. “Need I spell it out?”
“But who are they?” Conan Doyle repeated.
“I already said I didn’t know,” I snapped. “But perhaps if you walk outside, my dear Sir Arthur, you can share hearty handshakes all around while you politely ask for their calling cards.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Holmes,” he puffed.
Mrs. Watson stood up from the couch and made her way to the back of the house, peeking through a drawn blind. When she returned, her face was pale. “There are two more in the back as well.”
“Turn the light back on,” I instructed Conan Doyle. “We may delay them slightly by making them believe we’re waiting for more associates to arrive.”
“Are there more associates?”
“No.”
“Are we armed?” Conan Doyle asked.
“No.”
“Then let’s call the police,” Conan Doyle suggested.
I doubted the police would come to our aid, considering the scope of the conspiracy represented by the agents outside. But that was not the only problem. “Pick up the telephone receiver.”
Conan Doyle did as I asked. He held it to his ear. “The line’s dead.”
“So what do we do now?” Mrs. Watson muttered.
I sat in a chair and removed my pipe from my jacket, calmly lighting it.
“What are you doing, Holmes?” Conan Doyle demanded. “We can’t just be sitting ducks when they burst in!”
“What do you suggest, my dear sir? That we take defensive positions behind the sofa?”
“This is no time for sarcasm, Holmes,” Conan Doyle objected.
I took a puff of my pipe.
“How dare you just sit there smoking?” Conan Doyle continued. “I am a man of action, and I insist upon the same manly, British attitude from you.”
“Then why don’t you demonstrate for me?” I suggested. “Why don’t put up your fists, like Jack Dempsey, and walk outside. That would certainly qualify as ‘action.’”
Mrs. Watson took a seat at my desk, watching. Her self-possession would have made John proud.
“How can you just sit there and smoke?” Conan Doyle repeated.
I answered. “As you may know from the celebrated writings of Mrs. Watson’s dearly missed husband, I spent a few years away from the madding crowd, disappearing to foreign lands. One stop was in Japan. While at the Shunkōin Temple in Kyoto, I heard a story that might be instructive to you now.”
“You’re going to tell me a story?” he asked.
I didn’t let his skepticism deter me. Or rush me. “One day, a young man was walking from one village to another when he was spotted at a distance by a hungry tiger who gave chase. The young man ran as fast as he could, but, naturally, the tiger gained ground, coming closer and closer. Just before the tiger made a meal of him, the young man arrived at a cliff with a sheer drop of more than a thousand feet. Industriously, he took hold of a vine and swung himself over the side just as the tiger arrived at the precipice. The tiger looked over the edge, slavering hungrily. Now dangling precariously, the young man noticed that a mouse had emerged from a hole in the cliff, near the top, and had begun gnawing at the vine, which thereby would break any moment, sending the young man down, down, down. Meanwhile, the tiger continued pacing patiently at the cliff ’s edge. That’s when the young man noticed a wild strawberry growing on the cliff side just within his reach. He plucked it and ate. It was delicious.”
Conan Doyle waited a moment before saying: “And? What happened next?”
“That’s the end of the story.”
He looked at me, quizzically.
I puffed on the pipe. “Delicious,” I said.
“Ah,” Conan Doyle murmured, comprehending. “So you’re telling us we’re goners?”
“Eventually, yes. Goners. It is the one certainty. But not tonight.”
He brightened. “Then what’s the plan?” he pressed. “That’s what I’ve been asking for, not stories!”
Mrs. Watson smiled, as if she’d trusted I had a plan.
I pointed to the coat closet. “Hidden inside is a false floor and a passage that leads down to the city’s vast sewer system.” I removed the small electric lantern I’d carried since our journey the day before to Le Rossignol. “I know the sewers quite well. And I have a second safe house on Campbell Road in Islington, which we can reach without ever rising to the street. However, it will be a long and strenuous night. And, I must warn you, the neighborhood to which we’ll arrive lacks the high-minded gentility of Bloomsbury. Indeed, it’s the most crime ridden in London, which may serve our purposes by making it seem to others the last place we’d go for refuge.”
“Then let’s get out of here,” he insisted.
I nodded and stood.
“What of our bags?” Mrs. Watson asked.
“I’m sorry Mrs. Watson, but we have to leave them behind, as we’ll be pressing through some tight spaces in the sewers. My apologies also for any unpleasantness that will characterize our upcoming journey. For now, just take a moment to insure that your name appears nowhere on either your suitcase or any of its contents. The men outside may not have recognized you, as they likely recognized me.”
“So, how will you show your face out of doors tomorrow?” she asked.
“As in this house, I keep in my Islington residence a closetful of clothing, wigs, prosthetics, stage make-up, and the like, for both men and women. So, don’t worry. Tomorrow, we’ll emerge with new faces as different, anonymous Londoners.”
“Are we going to just stand here, enjoying strawberries until the vine breaks and we all fall to our deaths?” Conan Doyle asked.
I appreciated his apt and timely allusion. “No, it’s time we went.”
“Good,” he said, starting for the hall closet.
Now, if I were Victor Hugo I’d provide numerous pages of description of our trek through the sewers. But I am not Hugo, so suffice to
say that over the next few hours we coursed the unpleasant web of underground passages and made it to my second safe house just before sunrise.
Thus delivered, we wearily settled ourselves.
I don’t know how much of the morning passed before I noticed an oversized envelope sitting atop a long-neglected pile of commercial fliers at the foot of the mail slot. Picking up the missive, I noted that its postmark indicated delivery just the day before. It was addressed to my fictional persona, Professor von Schimmel, recently of Cambridge University; the return address, Cambridge University physics department, indicated it was from Paul Dirac, the twenty-six-year-old physicist under whose office door I had slipped my Islington address before taking my recent, late-night leave of academia. I assumed the correspondence consisted of Dirac’s latest paper on quantum mechanics, which I imagined I’d get to after I settled the urgent matters at hand. I looked forward to the casual distraction. I slit open the envelope, which, indeed, contained Dirac’s latest paper. However, I did not set the pages aside, as planned. Rather, after I glimpsed the title, I immediately sat down to read the young physicist’s work.
Many-Worlds:
A New Interpretation of the Wave Function Collapse in Quantum Mechanics
Don’t worry. I too was initially confused by the title.
But that “many worlds” business caught my attention.
Within hours, Mrs. Watson and I had departed for Dirac’s rooms in Cambridge.
We left Conan Doyle behind. I felt confident the scribbler would do nothing so foolish as to again post correspondence in our absence. The Islington residence, a ground-floor, cold-water flat, possessed no telephone, only intermittent electricity, and an ancient wood stove for heat. It was no Ritz suite. Naturally, Conan Doyle presented himself to me as a disgruntled prisoner when I told him he could not join us on the trip to Cambridge. I explained that traveling in pairs always draws less attention than as a trio; this would be particularly the case now, as the henchmen in Bloomsbury, who likely had burst into my house, discovered the secret passage, and, ultimately, lost our trail in the warren of sewers beneath the capital, would be looking above ground for a fleeing party of three. We could all three disguise ourselves, as Mrs. Watson and I did, but every trio moving through every train station would be subject to intense scrutiny from the conspirators. Or we could hire a car to take us all to Cambridge, but drivers sometimes worked as informers. Conan Doyle could not deny my logic and shook our hands with all good wishes when Mrs. Watson and I departed, late in the morning.
Leaving the safe house, Mrs. Watson and I looked little like ourselves.
She wore a long wig with a tiny hat pinned at an angle on her head, and make-up to create a sickly complexion, suggestive perhaps of a consumptive, or, at least, one with whom you might share your handkerchief but from whom you would never ask for it back. Serious illness is a great tool for keeping others at a distance.
Meantime, I returned to my disguise as professor of classical physics, Heinrich von Schimmel. This was, after all, how I’d been known to Dirac in Cambridge. In those hallowed halls, and elsewhere, my young colleague was considered a peer of the distinguished quantum theorists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, continentals who sought nothing less than a revolution in science equal to that of Einstein’s a generation before. As Von Schimmel, I had enjoyed Dirac’s vanguard explanations of the counterintuitive nature of the new science. In his latest paper, which I’d read at a pace in my grimy Islington safe house, he had given that counterintuitive quality its most dramatic twist to date.
Consequently, he was our man now.
But he did not answer his telephone when I rang him. Nonetheless, I considered it likely he would be available for consultation in his rooms that afternoon. He had no lectures that day and did not maintain a social schedule. So, absent appointment, Mrs. Watson and I made our way from Campbell Road to King’s Cross Station, where I bought tickets on the 12:04 to Cambridge.
We settled into a compartment, which we had to ourselves, in the first-class carriage.
We’d be in Cambridge before tea time.
I recall the ride through the sunlit, green countryside as being quite refreshing after our dark and noxious journey through the sewers the night before and our morning’s trek out of the squalid, coal-enshrouded environs of Campbell Road.
For a time, we rode in silence.
Mrs. Watson gazed out the window.
We were still someplace near Potter’s Bar when she turned to me. “So, how does this Dirac fellow’s work relate to the events of the past weeks? I mean, I’ve never seen you shuffling through typed pages with such breathless enthusiasm.”
Characteristically, I’d offered only minimal explanation for our hurried departure. “Professor Dirac is a distinguished scientist,” I said to her now, as if that were explanation enough.
It wasn’t.
“What does his being a scientist have to do with Conan Doyle being shot and our being chased through the London sewers?” she asked.
I respected that she would not be put off. Also that she had developed a more pointed and, frankly, effective manner of questioning than our John had ever managed to put to me. “It’s as I suggested in Paris,” I answered. “If there were any scientific basis for the manifestation that Conan Doyle and my fraudulent mystic Siddhartha Singh publicly described, then such substantiation could explain why formidable, modern forces otherwise disinterested in the ‘supernatural’ have taken notice. Indeed, violent notice.”
“And Dirac has proposed such a basis in his paper?”
I nodded.
“But how can that be?” she asked. “Science makes sense. This goes against all common sense.”
“It does, and going against common sense is what this new science of quantum mechanics seems to be about. At least as I understand it. I am no expert. Hence, our journey to Cambridge.”
“Well, I know nothing about ‘quantum mechanics.’ I never heard the term before.”
“Then you’ll have plenty to take in.”
“I don’t want to seem the imbecile, Sherlock.”
“You could never seem less than highly intelligent, my dear.”
“Can you at least tell me what ‘quantum mechanics’ is?”
A simple enough question. However, no quantum theorist has yet managed to fully answer it even in the latest scientific journals. I put it to Mrs. Watson as clearly as possible. “Quantum mechanics is the study of the way elementary particles, of which everything in the universe is made, including you, me, and the distant stars, behave.”
“Behave? You make these particles sound like naughty schoolchildren.”
“Actually, that image captures their character quite well.”
“What do you mean?”
“Any change to a subatomic particle is perceptible only as a non-deterministic, physically discontinuous transition between discrete states . . .”
She stopped me. “What language are you speaking, Sherlock? I’m not following a word of it.”
“Ah, forgive me for the overreliance on jargon.” I reconsidered my approach to the explanation. “What I mean to say, Mrs. Watson, is that a subatomic particle . . .”
“Subatomic?” she interrupted.
“Smaller than an atom.”
“That’s small indeed,” she said.
“A subatomic particle does not travel or evolve from one state to another, as we do,” I continued, increasingly aware that quantum physics was not one of the disciplines in which I had achieved expertise in the years I’d masqueraded in various academic persona. But I was determined to be as clear as possible. “Rather, Mrs. Watson, such a particle simply ‘becomes’ something else, instantaneously. Accordingly, no particle can be observed in such a way as to identify both its current position and its angle of movement. We can only ever know where it is but not where it’s going, or what direction it’s been traveling but not where it is. The German scientist Werner Heisenberg calls this the ‘uncerta
inty principle.’ Or at least that’s how I understand it.” With this simple explanation, I had elevated Mrs. Watson’s knowledge beyond that of most university physics professors, as Heisenberg’s theory had been published just the year before in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik and had not yet been translated. Recommended to me by Dirac, I’d found it fascinating reading.
“So we can never know the whole story?” she said.
I thought her interpretation cut straight to the point. “That’s right. What we’re left with are mere statistical likelihoods that any particular particle will behave in a certain fashion, which, when applied to billions of particles as a whole, allows for very precise predictions indeed.”
“But any one particle . . . unpredictable,” she followed.
“Yes.”
“Interesting,” she observed. “But what does it have to do with our case, Sherlock?”
Good question. “This brings us to the apparent dualism of the ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ functions and how the Copenhagen Interpretation attempts to reconcile such a strange phenomenon.”
She looked at me again as if I were speaking a foreign language.
I had to do better.
“In short,” I continued, “when a particle is not observed it is actually more like a vast aggregation of possibilities than it is like a single entity, distinct and objective in place and time. Think of it as being like a hazy cloud of likelihoods that only congeals into a single, ‘real’ object when it is observed.”
“Observed?” she queried.
“Measured.”
“As by an instrument?”
“Yes, or . . . simply looked at.”
“So looking at a subatomic particle makes it ‘real’?” she muttered, not bothering to conceal her incredulity.
“I told you it would seem illogical, but it’s all verifiable experimentally. This process of collapsing the wave function through the act of observation . . .”
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