The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

by edited by John Joseph Adams

  "I will not hear this sedition spoken," said Lestrade. "I must warn you—"

  "I must warn you not to be such a fathead," said my friend. "Because it was the Restorationists who killed Prince Franz Drago. They murder, they kill, in a vain effort to force our masters to leave us alone in the darkness. The prince was killed by a rache—it's an old term for a hunting dog, Inspector, as you would know if you had looked in a dictionary. It also means 'revenge.' And the hunter left his signature on the wallpaper in the murder room, just as an artist might sign a canvas. But he was not the one who killed the prince."

  "The Limping Doctor!" I exclaimed.

  "Very good. There was a tall man there that night—I could tell his height, for the word was written at eye level. He smoked a pipe—the ash and dottle sat unburned in the fireplace, and he had tapped out his pipe with ease on the mantel, something a smaller man would not have done. The tobacco was an unusual blend of shag. The footprints in the room had for the most part been almost obliterated by your men, but there were several clear prints behind the door and by the window. Someone had waited there: a smaller man from his stride, who put his weight on his right leg. On the path outside I had seen several clear prints, and the different colours of clay on the boot scraper gave me more information: a tall man, who had accompanied the prince into those rooms and had later walked out. Waiting for them to arrive was the man who had sliced up the prince so impressively . . . "

  Lestrade made an uncomfortable noise that did not quite become a word.

  "I have spent many days retracing the movements of His Highness. I went from gambling hell to brothel to dining den to madhouse looking for our pipe-smoking man and his friend. I made no progress until I thought to check the newspapers of Bohemia, searching for a clue to the prince's recent activities there, and in them I learned that an English theatrical troupe had been in Prague last month, and had performed before Prince Franz Drago."

  "Good Lord," I said. "So that Sherry Vernet fellow . . . "

  "Is a Restorationist. Exactly."

  I was shaking my head in wonder at my friend's intelligence and skills of observation when there was a knock on the door.

  "This will be our quarry!" said my friend. "Careful now!"

  Lestrade put his hand deep into his pocket, where I had no doubt he kept a pistol. He swallowed nervously.

  My friend called out, "Please, come in!"

  The door opened.

  It was not Vernet, nor was it a Limping Doctor. It was one of the young street Arabs who earn a crust running errands—"in the employ of Messieurs Street and Walker," as we used to say when I was young. "Please, sirs," he said. "Is there a Mr. Henry Camberley here? I was asked by a gentleman to deliver a note."

  "I'm he," said my friend. "And for a sixpence, what can you tell me about the gentleman who gave you the note?"

  The young lad, who volunteered that his name was Wiggins, bit the sixpence before making it vanish, and then told us that the cheery cove who gave him the note was on the tall side, with dark hair, and, he added, had been smoking a pipe.

  I have the note here, and take the liberty of transcribing it.

  My Dear Sir,

  I do not address you as Henry Camberley, for it is a name to which you have no claim. I am surprised that you did not announce yourself under your own name, for it is a fine one, and one that does you credit. I have read a number of your papers, when I have been able to obtain them. Indeed, I corresponded with you quite profitably two years ago about certain theoretical anomalies in your paper on the Dynamics of an Asteroid.

  I was amused to meet you yesterday evening. A few tips which might save you bother in times to come, in the profession you currently follow. Firstly, a pipe-smoking man might possibly have a brand-new, unused pipe in his pocket, and no tobacco, but it is exceedingly unlikely—at least as unlikely as a theatrical promoter with no idea of the usual customs of recompense on a tour, who is accompanied by a taciturn ex-army officer (Afghanistan, unless I miss my guess). Incidentally, while you are correct that the streets of London have ears, it might also behoove you in the future not to take the first cab that comes along. Cabdrivers have ears, too, if they choose to use them.

  You are certainly correct in one of your suppositions: it was indeed I who lured the half-blood creature back to the room in Shoreditch. If it is any comfort to you, having learned a little of his recreational predilections, I had told him I had procured for him a girl, abducted from a convent in Cornwall where she had never seen a man, and that it would only take his touch, and the sight of his face, to tip her over into a perfect madness.

  Had she existed, he would have feasted on her madness while he took her, like a man sucking the flesh from a ripe peach, leaving nothing behind but the skin and the pit. I have seen them do this. I have seen them do far worse. It is the price we pay for peace and prosperity.

  It is too great a price for that.

  The good doctor—who believes as I do, and who did indeed write our little performance, for he has some crowd-pleasing skills—was waiting for us, with his knives.

  I send this note, not as a catch-me-if-you-can taunt, for we are gone, the estimable doctor and I, and you shall not find us, but to tell you that it was good to feel that, if only for a moment, I had a worthy adversary. Worthier by far than inhuman creatures from beyond the Pit.

  I fear the Strand Players will need to find themselves a new leading man.

  I will not sign myself Vernet, and until the hunt is done and the world restored, I beg you to think of me simply as,

  Rache

  Inspector Lestrade ran from the room, calling to his men. They made young Wiggins take them to the place where the man had given him the note, for all the world as if Vernet the actor would be waiting there for them, a-smoking of his pipe. From the window we watched them run, my friend and I, and we shook our heads.

  "They will stop and search all the trains leaving London, all the ships leaving Albion for Europe or the New World," said my friend, "looking for a tall man and his companion, a smaller, thickset medical man, with a slight limp. They will close the ports. Every way out of the country will be blocked."

  "Do you think they will catch him, then?"

  My friend shook his head. "I may be wrong," he said, "but I would wager that he and his friend are even now only a mile or so away, in the Rookery of St. Giles, where the police will not go except by the dozen. They will hide up there until the hue and cry have died away. And then they will be about their business."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Because," said my friend, "if our positions were reversed, it is what I would do. You should burn the note, by the way."

  I frowned. "But surely it's evidence," I said.

  "It's seditionary nonsense," said my friend.

  And I should have burned it. Indeed, I told Lestrade I had burned it, when he returned, and he congratulated me on my good sense. Lestrade kept his job, and Prince Albert wrote a note to my friend congratulating him on his deductions while regretting that the perpetrator was still at large.

  They have not yet caught Sherry Vernet, or whatever his name really is, nor was any trace found of his murderous accomplice, tentatively identified as a former military surgeon named John (or perhaps James) Watson. Curiously, it was revealed that he had also been in Afghanistan. I wonder if we ever met.

  My shoulder, touched by the Queen, continues to improve; the flesh fills and it heals. Soon I shall be a dead shot once more.

  One night when we were alone, several months ago, I asked my friend if he remembered the correspondence referred to in the letter from the man who signed himself Rache. My friend said that he remembered it well, and that "Sigerson" (for so the actor had called himself then, claiming to be an Icelander) had been inspired by an equation of my friend's to suggest some wild theories furthering the relationship between mass, energy, and the hypothetical speed of light. "Nonsense, of course," said my friend, without smiling. "But inspired and danger
ous nonsense nonetheless."

  The palace eventually sent word that the Queen was pleased with my friend's accomplishments in the case, and there the matter has rested.

  I doubt my friend will leave it alone, though; it will not be over until one of them has killed the other.

  I kept the note. I have said things in this retelling of events that are not to be said. If I were a sensible man I would burn all these pages, but then, as my friend taught me, even ashes can give up their secrets. Instead, I shall place these papers in a strongbox at my bank with instructions that the box may not be opened until long after anyone now living is dead. Although, in the light of the recent events in Russia, I fear that day may be closer than any of us would care to think.

  S——M——Major (Ret'd)

  Baker Street,

  London, New Albion, 1881

  You See But You Do Not Observe

  by Robert J. Sawyer

  Robert J. Sawyer is the author of twenty novels, including Hominids, which won the Hugo Award, The Terminal Experiment, which won the Nebula Award, and Mindscan, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Sawyer's novel Flashforward is currently being adapted for television and is scheduled to air on ABC this fall. His latest novel project is the WWW trilogy, consisting of Wake, Watch, and Wonder. The first volume, Wake, was recently serialized in the pages of Analog and was released in hardcover in April.

  "Where is everybody?" These words, exclaimed by Los Alamos physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950, led to his formulation of what's known as the Fermi paradox: Why haven't we found any evidence of extraterrestrial life, given the seemingly high probability that such life exists? Even if intelligent life evolves only rarely, the sheer scale of the universe would mean that advanced civilizations should be commonplace. (The Drake equation is a well-known model for organizing this line of reasoning.) There ought to be civilizations billions of years older than ours, in which case they should have colonized Earth long ago, or at least built large engineering projects such as Dyson spheres that we could detect with our instruments. But so far, nothing. Many explanations have been proposed, including that intelligence is much rarer than we think, that advanced civilizations tend to destroy themselves or each other, or that advanced civilizations have chosen not to talk to us, perhaps because they don't want to meddle with our development or because we're just too primitive to bother with. Our final tale presents a solution to the Fermi paradox that we can virtually guarantee you've never considered before.

  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 twenty-first 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.