“Wave function?”
“I mean, reducing the numerous possible states of a particle to a single ‘real one,’ via the act of observation. Quantum physicists call this ‘the Copenhagen Interpretation.’”
She looked up at the train compartment’s ceiling as she spoke, sorting it through. “So, the whole universe is made up of particles that only become ‘real’ when we look at them?”
“Something like that, Mrs. Watson.”
She turned to me and narrowed her eyes. “Yet these odd particles are the building blocks of you, me, this train, the trees outside, the moon and the sun?”
“Yes.”
“Ridiculous!” she said, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms. “It’s like some kind of music hall comedy routine. Absurd!”
I leaned toward her. “I don’t disagree with you about that,” I said. “Indeed, while standing in the queue back at Kings Cross, I conceived a thought experiment to illustrate that absurdity.”
“Thought experiment?”
“An instructive scenario.”
“I could use something like that.”
I wasn’t sure how useful she’d find my scenario. “Imagine that a dog is placed into a sealed metal box along with a radioactive particle, which, at a given moment, has a precisely 50 percent chance of decaying and releasing into the box a deadly gas. The moment comes and goes. However, since the box remains sealed, we, of course, cannot see inside to know the fate of the dog. It could be dead; it could be alive. All well and good so far, right?”
“No, it’s not all right,” Mrs. Watson pronounced. “It’s pure animal cruelty. No dog deserves that!”
“It’s just a thought experiment, my dear,” I answered.
“No matter,” she objected. “They’re such faithful and loving creatures.”
I thought of Toby, the good-natured dog who long ago had assisted Dr. Watson and me in one of our cases. And then I remembered Mrs. Watson’s beloved terrier from years before. “Okay, let’s make it a cat.”
She sighed, as that was hardly better.
“In any case,” I said, leaving animal cruelty for another discussion, “according to the currently accepted ‘Copenhagen Interpretation,’ until the box is actually opened, the animal inside remains literally both alive and dead. That is, only upon observation will it be either alive or dead.”
“You mean only by observing can we know whether it is dead or alive,” she surmised.
“That’s also true. But it’s not what I mean. Rather, only upon observation will the animal become either dead or alive. Until that moment, being unobserved, it is both alive and dead, simultaneously.”
She shook her head. “To me, if an animal can be both alive and dead at the same time and it all just depends on whether we’ve looked to determine which is the case . . . Well, I’m sorry, but this ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ is, as I said before, absurd.”
I could not fault her. “But what if existence is precisely that?”
“What?” she asked.
“Absurd.”
“Oh, now you’re sounding like one of those continental philosophers, Sherlock.”
That stung. But I’d been called worse. “Let me raise your ire even more with the alternative interpretation that forms the basis of Dirac’s recent paper,” I said.
“About this quantum business?”
I nodded. “Let’s stay with the image of the animal in the box,” I said. “What if the act of observation doesn’t merely make the multiple possibilities congeal into a single, ‘real world’ event, but, instead, breaks the world into two, creating a kind of junction as on a branch. So, in one world the animal struts out of the box, alive, and in the other he’s carried out, deceased. And both worlds are equally ‘real,’ each proceeding from that point forward ever independent of the other.”
She looked at me. “Univers parallèles.”
“Yes, though, in our day-to-day existence, we never know that such divisions are continually occurring.”
“And this new quantum interpretation from your friend Dirac proposes that such a thing is plausible in the modern world?”
I nodded.
She held the pad of her index finger to her lips and lowered her eyes, thinking. “Of course, you believe it’s balderdash, right?”
“As I said to you before, what I believe is neither here nor there. What matters is what others believe and what that belief means to them.”
“But even if it’s so . . .” She stopped once more.
I waited. “Does this make sense to you?” I asked at last.
She answered without hesitation. “Not really.”
“Then that means there’s a chance I explained it properly, Mrs. Watson, as quantum mechanics makes sense to no one, including its brilliant progenitors, even if experiments indicate it is so.”
“This is what we’re going to discuss with young Dirac? His new theory of . . . what’s he call it?”
“Many worlds.”
“And this is ‘science’?”
“It is a scientific proposition, grounded in advanced mathematics, experimental observation, and rational thought.”
“Which makes it formidable in our modern world.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not playing some kind of game?” she asked. She did not wait for an answer. “I mean, reading John’s accounts of your cases, one has a sense that you’re always two or three moves ahead, just collecting confirmation and evidence of what you already know.”
“It may be a game, but . . .” I shook my head. “In chess, one indeed plays three or four or more moves ahead. A good player may even know the outcome of a match as early as the opening exchange of pawns. But the chess board is limited to sixty-four squares. And, while the number of possibilities for any one move is vast, each choice is still bound by the board, whereas in the real world there are no such boundaries.”
“Especially if there’s more than one world,” she said. She straightened her skirt and checked the pin on the strange little hat she wore on the side her head, as if pulling herself together from a taxing excursion. “Thank you for the tutorial, Sherlock. I won’t feel like a complete fool when I meet this Professor Dirac. Even if this quantum business does leave one feeling rather like a woodland animal attempting to understand the design of an aeroplane.”
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” I said, quoting John quoting me.
“Yes, I know,” she answered. “I’ve read The Sign of Four.” She turned back to the window, observing the passing countryside. “Look at all the wondrous things your chaotic little particles make.”
I glanced outside.
I was never much for the beauty of nature for its own sake. But, in this instance, I nodded in agreement with Mrs. Watson’s observation. Then I leaned back in my seat, closing my eyes. I was tired, having endured another sleep-deprived night, and I drifted off. The exhalation of air brakes, the hiss of steam, the grinding of metal, and the clanging of a bell, awoke me as we pulled into the station. Mrs. Watson, who had also fallen asleep, had set her hand just beside mine, almost touching, on the upholstered rest between our seats.
“Cambridge!” called the conductor from the narrow hallway.
On the short cab ride from the station to the university, Mrs. Watson asked me, “Since you say Professor Dirac’s paper lays out his argument with clarity and precision, what, exactly, are we here to ask him?”
“We’re not here to ask him anything,” I answered.
She looked at me.
“We’re here to warn him,” I said.
But we were too late.
A black wreath had been hung upon the locked door of Dirac’s university rooms.
Mrs. Watson and I immediately made our way to the Department of Physics office, where the secretary, a young man with unruly hair and eyes of faintly different shades of green, recognized me.
“Professor
von Schimmel,” he said, standing up from behind his desk. “We didn’t think we’d see you again. It’s good to have you back. What a shame it’s under these circumstances.”
He assumed I’d returned to pay my respects.
“What happened to Dirac?” I asked, my German accent imperfect, betrayed by urgent concern.
“You don’t know, Professor?”
I shook my head.
“Motoring accident,” he said. “Poor man. So young. So brilliant.”
I sat in a chair beside his desk. For the first time in my life I felt old. Not merely weary, nor saddened, nor alarmed, though I felt all those things as well. “Tell me more, please.”
In brief, this is what he shared: Dirac had died in a single vehicle accident a few miles outside Cambridge two days before. There had been no other injuries and no witnesses. His automobile had struck an ancient oak. Dirac died from head trauma. Mrs. Watson put her hand on my arm, and I allowed her to keep it there. After a moment, I pressed the secretary for more, eventually regaining sufficient professional sangfroid to turn the conversation to the correspondence posted from this office and delivered just the day before to my Islington residence.
In this matter, the secretary’s postal log proved helpful.
I learned that Professor Heinrich von Schimmel was not alone on Dirac’s mailing list. The delivery to the Islington address was merely the most recent of three such postings that Dirac had instructed the department staff to complete. The other two dated from some weeks earlier, presumably upon Dirac’s immediate completion of his paper.
The first carbon copy.
Sir Richard Gregory, editor of the distinguished scientific journal Nature. Placing a telephone call to the journal’s editorial offices, I was not entirely surprised to learn that, like poor Dirac, Sir Richard had also died two days previous, he from a fall down a flight of stairs. Again, there had been no witnesses. Further, Dirac’s final paper was no longer to be found in the journal’s files, though there remained a carbon of an enthusiastic letter of acceptance written in Sir Richard’s hand and dated two weeks previous. It is fortunate that Dirac’s reputation was sufficient that his work had bypassed usual channels and gone straight to the top, thereby exposing no one else on the journal’s editorial staff to danger. The same good fortune was true for the university staff, as Dirac had kept his research a closely guarded secret here. Two murders were quite enough.
The other carbon copy . . .
Surely, Dr. Watson would manage this revelation with more literary aplomb than I can muster.
I will simply state the fact.
The final copy went to His Majesty’s government, in recognition of their financial support of Dirac’s research at Cambridge; specifically, the mailing was posted to the government’s most important senior operative: Mycroft Holmes, in care of the Diogenes Club, London.
Yes, my brother.
Unlike Dirac and Sir Richard, Mycroft was not dead. Rather, he was quite well. Nonetheless, I did not for a moment consider him uninvolved. Nor did I consider him to be in danger.
Most disconcerting.
In retrospect, I ought to have surmised it sooner.
Big brother.
Naturally, Mycroft and I shared personal history as well as genes. But that is not the same as sharing constitution, ethos, or destiny, and, while some qualities of our minds and solitary habits aligned, we were always quite different from one another. Suffice to say that as boys our differences were best expressed by the old saw that familiarity breeds contempt. Meantime, the equally clichéd adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder has proven less accurate for us, judging from the long durations between our meetings over the years.
“What does your brother do?” Mrs. Watson asked.
By then, she and I were seated in the back of a hired car, motoring down the country road for London. Once back in the capital, we would relocate Conan Doyle from the Islington house, whose address, owing to the mailing list in the Cambridge department of physics, was likely known by now to the conspirators.
She continued: “I know from John’s accounts that Mycroft works in the government. But doing what, these days?”
I glanced out my window. “At eighty, my brother maintains a uniquely powerful, if technically unspecified, position.” The countryside looked less bucolic now than it had on the train ride up. I turned back to Mrs. Watson. “He ‘fixes’ problems for the Home Office, the Ministry of Defense, or any other governmental entity or interest deemed sufficiently important to occupy his valuable attentions.”
“And what are the ‘important interests’ these days?” she asked.
I shook my head. “As I’ve been living a rather isolated, well-disguised life in academia these past few years, I’ve lost touch with the recent, secret workings of the government. Their concerns. I’ve lost touch with Mycroft, too. Our relations were never good.”
“Why not?”
How to put this briefly . . . “He always thought I judged harshly the uses to which he put his intellect,” I answered.
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s worked for King and country.”
“True. But who does King and country work for?”
She looked at me, waiting.
“The King’s government . . .” I paused, turning the phrase over in my head. It was a misnomer, suggesting that the government belonged to the King rather than the other way around. I glanced into the front seat of our car. Was the driver listening to our conversation? His attention seemed focused on the road ahead. Perhaps too focused. No matter. Whether or not he was an agent, I’d speak my mind. “The King’s government is little more than a well-greased financial concern, Mrs. Watson. The Empire is a multinational business. One might as well refer to the government, from the monarch down through the PM and Parliament, as the Bank of England. Or the England Company. It functions as little else.”
She adjusted her skirts in her lap but did not seem put off by my less than patriotic assertion. Rather, she cut to the most immediate and personal consequence of what I’d just said—the danger. “I want you to know, Sherlock, that whatever happens, I’m glad to be along on this adventure. I mean, we’re not working now to put an ordinary criminal behind bars or anything as mundane as that, true?”
“That’s true.”
She sat up straight and strong. “Well, I have no regrets, even if this is the last thing I do. Particularly if it’s the last.”
I didn’t tell her how many times I had come to the same resolution at dangerous moments in previous cases. Nor did I tell her how often I’d felt vaguely disappointed when such endeavors turned in my favor and I was spared of the danger. Time and again, denied dying in an interesting manner. It was odd that now, being old, I held more tightly to my life. “We’ll take no undue risks.”
She smiled. “With you, I know that the word ‘undue’ is quite flexible. I’ve read John’s accounts.”
I began to defend myself, but she stopped me.
“Don’t misunderstand, Sherlock. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Good.”
“I’m sorry about your friend, Dirac.”
Was he my friend? Was I his friend? Dirac never knew my true identity. The Heinrich von Schimmel with whom he occasionally dined these past months was no less fictional than Oliver Twist. So, how could I consider myself to have been among Dirac’s friends? Did he have other friends? I don’t know. He was not gregarious. Indeed, he was socially inept. But he seemed to enjoy Von Schimmel’s company. As I enjoyed his. I respected him. His untimely death represents a great loss to the world. Surely, I am sorry he is gone. Angry too. An empty space opened in my life where once there had been a man. Still, this didn’t feel quite as it does when one loses a true friend. I’d experienced that once before in my life, and so I recognized well the difference.
CHAPTER TEN
That we should come now to two old men, brothers, sitting among the comfortab
le furnishings in the otherwise unoccupied visitors room of the Diogenes Club, the only room in the London gentlemen’s club where speaking is allowed, may seem insufficient, both in setting and action, when compared to many of the dramatic climaxes that John chronicled in our cases. For example, the encounter with the great, red-eyed beast on the moors near Baskerville Hall, to say nothing of the bog itself, into which a man might, with one wrong step, sink to a slow, tortuous death; or, waiting in darkness and silence in the underground vault of the City and Suburban Bank for the dangerous John Clay to burst through the wall at the completion of his ingenious tunnel from the basement of an adjacent pawn shop; or the equally suspenseful anticipation, huddled in a young girl’s deserted, candle-lit bedroom, of the appearance of a deadly snake, a speckled band, as it slithered down a rope pull to sink its fangs into the unsuspecting flesh that, absent our warning, would have lain abed. These are settings of inherent drama. Whereas the Diogenes Club is intended to provide quite the opposite of conflict or suspense. Founded by my brother, Mycroft, and a handful of other powerful men who cannot tolerate the relative sociability of other like clubs, the exclusive, comfortably appointed Diogenes Club provides its members with serenity that belies their professional lives, which, while appearing to be comprised of staid business or governmental administration, often consists instead of clandestine operations and manipulations in and of the greater world. Rumors hold that some members work for the King’s intelligence services. I know this to be true, at least in the case of Mycroft. Of course, reference to any such endeavors is forbidden, along with spoken references to anything. No talking. Such brief and innocuous matters as when the footman is to bring a member another gin and tonic or single malt scotch are communicated with the merest gesture of the chin, absent even eye contact. The only sounds are the occasional tinkling of ice in tumblers or the crimpling of newspaper pages.
Before entering my brother’s club, I stopped at a pub around the corner and slipped into the WC to change out of the disguise I had maintained in public since returning to London from Cambridge. Goodbye again to Professor von Schimmel. After my meeting with Mycroft there would be no further reasons to move about incognito, I suspected. Meanwhile, Mrs. Watson and Conan Doyle had taken refuge in my third and final safe house in London, a tiny flat near Madame Tussaud’s, just around the corner from my old Baker Street residence. When I emerged from the WC in my own clothing and without the other accoutrements of disguise, I was recognized by a few of the pub patrons. Two or three asked to shake hands. I obliged, leaving a five pound note with the barkeep to cover a few rounds, and made it out the door before the back slapping or the “tell us how it really was” could begin. I crossed the busy street, attempting to comprehend the almost offensively counterintuitive proposition that in countless other simultaneous incarnations, lived, until now, exactly as I’d lived this life, I had just been run down by an almost infinite variety of carelessly driven motor cars, malfunctioning motor omnibuses, or ill-disciplined horse-drawn delivery wagons. It is enough to make one grateful for managing ever to cross a street alive, except that, statistically, there is a far greater number of cosmological instances in which one makes it across just fine. At least, such is my understanding of poor Dirac’s theory.
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