"Which of course you believed to be impossible, seeing as how I was dead."
"Exactly. The whole thing left a rather bad taste, I must say. Seemed very peculiar behavior."
"But doubtless it died down quickly," said Holmes.
"You know full well it did not. I have told you before that the onslaught of letters, as well as personal exhortations wherever I would travel, continued unabated for years. In fact, I was virtually at the point of going back and writing up one of your lesser cases I had previously ignored as being of no general interest simply to get the demands to cease, when, much to my surprise and delight—"
"Much to your surprise and delight, after an absence of three years less a month, I turned up in your consulting rooms, disguised, if I recall correctly, as a shabby book collector. And soon you had fresh adventures to chronicle, beginning with that case of the infamous Colonel Sebastian Moran and his victim, the Honorable Ronald Adair."
"Yes," said I. "Wondrous it was."
"But Watson, let us consider the facts surrounding my apparent death at the falls of Reichenbach on May 4th, 1891. You, the observer on the scene, saw the evidence, and, as you wrote in 'The Final Problem,' many experts scoured the lip of the falls and came to precisely the same conclusion you had—that Moriarty and I had plunged to our deaths."
"But that conclusion turned out to be wrong."
Holmes beamed intently. "No, my Good Watson, it turned out to be unacceptable—unacceptable to your faithful readers. And that is where all the problems stem from. Remember Schrödinger's cat in the sealed box? Moriarty and I at the falls present a very similar scenario: he and I went down the path into the cul-de-sac, our footprints leaving impressions in the soft earth. There were only two possible outcomes at that point: either I would exit alive, or I would not. There was no way out, except to take that same path back away from the falls. Until someone came and looked to see whether I had re-emerged from the path, the outcome was unresolved. I was both alive and dead—a collection of possibilities. But when you arrived, those possibilities had to collapse into a single reality. You saw that there were no footprints returning from the falls—meaning that Moriarty and I had struggled until at last we had both plunged over the edge into the icy torrent. It was your act of seeing the results that forced the possibilities to be resolved. In a very real sense, my good, dear friend, you killed me."
My heart was pounding in my chest. "I tell you, Holmes, nothing would have made me more happy than to have seen you alive!"
"I do not doubt that, Watson—but you had to see one thing or the other. You could not see both. And, having seen what you saw, you reported your findings: first to the Swiss police, and then to the reporter for the Journal de Genève, and lastly in your full account in the pages of the Strand."
I nodded.
"But here is the part that was not considered by Schrödinger when he devised the thought experiment of the cat in the box. Suppose you open the box and find the cat dead, and later you tell your neighbor about the dead cat—and your neighbor refuses to believe you when you say that the cat is dead. What happens if you go and look in the box a second time?"
"Well, the cat is surely still dead."
"Perhaps. But what if thousands—nay, millions!—refuse to believe the account of the original observer? What if they deny the evidence? What then, Watson?"
"I—I do not know."
"Through the sheer stubbornness of their will, they reshape reality, Watson! Truth is replaced with fiction! They will the cat back to life. More than that, they attempt to believe that the cat never died in the first place!"
"And so?"
"And so the world, which should have one concrete reality, is rendered unresolved, uncertain, adrift. As the first observer on the scene at Reichenbach, your interpretation should take precedence. But the stubbornness of the human race is legendary, Watson, and through that sheer cussedness, that refusal to believe what they have been plainly told, the world gets plunged back into being a wave front of unresolved possibilities. We exist in flux—to this day, the whole world exists in flux—because of the conflict between the observation you really made at Reichenbach, and the observation the world wishes you had made."
"But this is all too fantastic, Holmes!"
"Eliminate the impossible, Watson, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Which brings me now to the question we were engaged by this avatar of Mycroft to solve: this paradox of Fermi. Where are the alien beings?"
"And you say you have solved that?"
"Indeed I have. Consider the method by which mankind has been searching for these aliens."
"By wireless, I gather—trying to overhear their chatter on the ether."
"Precisely! And when did I return from the dead, Watson?"
"April of 1894."
"And when did that gifted Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, invent the wireless?"
"I have no idea."
"In eighteen hundred and ninety-five, my good Watson. The following year! In all the time that mankind has used radio, our entire world has been an unresolved quandary! An uncollapsed wave front of possibilities!"
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the aliens are there, Watson—it is not they who are missing, it is us! Our world is out of synch with the rest of the universe. Through our failure to accept the unpleasant truth, we have rendered ourselves potential rather than actual."
I had always thought my companion a man with a generous regard for his own stature, but surely this was too much. "You are suggesting, Holmes, that the current unresolved state of the world hinges on the fate of you yourself?"
"Indeed! Your readers would not allow me to fall to my death, even if it meant attaining the very thing I desired most, namely the elimination of Moriarty. In this mad world, the observer has lost control of his observations! If there is one thing my life stood for—my life prior to that ridiculous resurrection of me you recounted in your chronicle of 'The Empty House'—it was reason! Logic! A devotion to observable fact! But humanity has abjured that. This whole world is out of whack, Watson—so out of whack that we are cut off from the civilizations that exist elsewhere. You tell me you were barraged with demands for my return, but if people had really understood me, understood what my life represented, they would have known that the only real tribute to me possible would have been to accept the facts! The only real answer would have been to leave me dead!"
Mycroft sent us back in time, but rather than returning us to 1899, whence he had plucked us, at Holmes's request he put us back eight years earlier in May of 1891. Of course, there were younger versions of ourselves already living then, but Mycroft swapped us for them, bringing the young ones to the future, where they could live out the rest of their lives in simulated scenarios taken from Holmes's and my minds. Granted, we were each eight years older than we had been when we had fled Moriarty the first time, but no one in Switzerland knew us and so the aging of our faces went unnoticed.
I found myself for a third time living that fateful day at the Falls of Reichenbach, but this time, like the first and unlike the second, it was real.
I saw the page boy coming, and my heart raced. I turned to Holmes, and said, "I can't possibly leave you."
"Yes, you can, Watson. And you will, for you have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end." He paused for a moment, then said, perhaps just a wee bit sadly, "I can discover facts, Watson, but I cannot change them." And then, quite solemnly, he extended his hand. I clasped it firmly in both of mine. And then the boy, who was in Moriarty's employ, was upon us. I allowed myself to be duped, leaving Holmes alone at the Falls, fighting with all my might to keep from looking back as I hiked onward to treat the nonexistent patient at the Englischer Hof. On my way, I passed Moriarty going in the other direction. It was all I could do to keep from drawing my pistol and putting an end to the blackguard, but I knew Holmes would consider robbing him of his own chance at Moriarty an unforgivable betrayal.
>
It was an hour's hike down to the Englischer Hof. There I played out the scene in which I inquired about the ailing Englishwoman, and Steiler the Elder, the innkeeper, reacted, as I knew he must, with surprise. My performance was probably half-hearted, having played the role once before, but soon I was on my way back. The uphill hike took over two hours, and I confess plainly to being exhausted upon my arrival, although I could barely hear my own panting over the roar of the torrent.
Once again, I found two sets of footprints leading to the precipice, and none returning. I also found Holmes's alpenstock, and, just as I had the first time, a note from him to me that he had left with it. The note read just as the original had, explaining that he and Moriarty were about to have their final confrontation, but that Moriarty had allowed him to leave a few last words behind. But it ended with a postscript that had not been in the original:
My dear Watson [it said], you will honour my passing most of all if you stick fast to the powers of observation. No matter what the world wants, leave me dead.
I returned to London, and was able to briefly counterbalance my loss of Holmes by reliving the joy and sorrow of the last few months of my wife Mary's life, explaining my somewhat older face to her and others as the result of shock at the death of Holmes. The next year, right on schedule, Marconi did indeed invent the wireless. Exhortations for more Holmes adventures continued to pour in, but I ignored them all, although the lack of him in my life was so profound that I was sorely tempted to relent, recanting my observations made at Reichenbach. Nothing would have pleased me more than to hear again the voice of the best and wisest man I had ever known.
In late June of 1907, I read in The Times about the detection of intelligent wireless signals coming from the direction of the star Altair. On that day, the rest of the world celebrated, but I do confess I shed a tear and drank a special toast to my good friend, the late Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the following:
Jeremy Lassen and Jason Williams at Night Shade Books, for letting me edit all these anthologies and for doing such a kick-ass job publishing them. Also, to Ross Lockhart at Night Shade for all that he does behind-the-scenes, and to Marty Halpern for catching all my tyops.
David Palumbo, for the Holmesarific cover.
Gordon Van Gelder, the Dr. Joseph Bell to my Sherlock Holmes (i.e., the model upon which my career is based). Of course, unlike Holmes, I am not a fictional character, or so the voices tell me.
My agent Jenny Rappaport, the Mrs. Hudson of my literary estate.
David Barr Kirtley for serving as my Watson during the assembly of this volume. All the clever things in the header notes are his work. Anything lame you came across is mine.
Rebecca McNulty, for her various and valuable interning assistance—reading, scanning, transcribing, proofing, doing most of the work but getting none of the credit as all good interns do.
My mom, for the usual reasons.
All of the other kindly folks who assisted me in some way during the editorial process: Charles Ardai, Jack Byrne, Frances Collin, Andy Cox, Ellen Datlow, Jake Elwell, Jennifer Escott, Emily Giglierano, Lina M. Granada, Merrilee Heifetz, Patricia Hoch, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dorothy Lumley, Donald Maass, Andrew Marszal, Linda Moorcock, Barbara and Christopher Roden, Betty Russo, Charles Schlessiger, Steven Silver, J. L. Stermer, Craig Tenney, everyone who dropped suggestions into my Holmes fiction database, and to everyone else who helped out in some way that I neglected to mention (and to you folks, I apologize!).
The NYC Geek Posse—consisting of Robert Bland, Christopher M. Cevasco, Douglas E. Cohen, Jordan Hamessley, Andrea Kail, and Matt London (plus Dave Kirtley, who I mentioned above, and the NYCGP Auxiliary)—for giving me an excuse to come out of my editorial cave once in a while.
The readers and reviewers who loved my other anthologies, making it possible for me to do more.
And last, but certainly not least: a big thanks to all of the authors who appear in this anthology.
About the Editor
John Joseph Adams is the editor of the anthologies By Blood We Live, Federations, The Living Dead, Seeds of Change, and Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. Forthcoming work includes the anthologies Brave New Worlds, The Living Dead 2, The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, and The Way of the Wizard. He is also the assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
He is a columnist for Tor.com and has written reviews for Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. His non-fiction has also appeared in: Amazing Stories, The Internet Review of Science Fiction, Locus Magazine, Novel & Short Story Writers Market, Science Fiction Weekly, SCI FI Wire, Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, and Writer's Digest.
He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Central Florida in December 2000. He currently lives in New Jersey. For more information, visit his website at www.johnjosephadams.com.
—————
[1] Most of which appeared in the pages of The Strand Magazine.
[2] These abilities will be highlighted in the forthcoming Guy Ritchie film, Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes, due out in theaters this December.
[3] In "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire."
[4] From The Sign of the Four
[5] Don't let the bylines fool you into thinking you know which way—mystery or fantasy—a story will resolve; although some of the fantasy authors here do deliver fantasy tales, some of those tales are merely improbable rather than impossible, and some of the leading lights of the mystery genre may have some surprises for you as well. So, as Sherlock Holmes would surely advise, don't make too many assumptions.
[6] The initials of Victoria Regina, Queen of England from 1837–1901.
[7] In "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual."
[8] From "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane."
[9] "A Scandal in Bohemia."
[10] Sherlock Holmes maintained an extensive series of commonplace books in which he recorded all manner of information that came to his attention. We learn from the stories that he spent several hours compiling and cross-indexing his books, but generally when we read of him referring to his "index" he seems to be referring to the commonplace books themselves.
[11] I believe in order that I may understand.
[12] You cling to your own ways and leave mine to me.
THE END
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The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Table of Contents
Introduction
by John Joseph Adams
A Sherlockiana Primer
by Christopher Roden
The Doctor's Case
by Stephen King
The Horror of the Many Faces
by Tim Lebbon
The Case of the Bloodless Sock
by Anne Perry
The Adventure of the Other Detective
by Bradley H. Sinor
A Scandal in Montreal
by Edward D. Hoch
The Adventure of the Field Theorems
by Vonda N. McIntyre
The Adventure of the Death-Fetch
by Darrell Schweitzer
The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland
by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Adventure of the Mummy's Curse
by H. Paul Jeffers
The Things That Shall Come Upon Them
by Barbara Roden
Murder to Music
by Anthony Burgess
The Adventure of the Inertial Adjustor
by Stephen Baxter
Mrs Hudson's Case
by Laurie R. King
The Singular Habits of Wasps
by Geoffrey A. Landis
The Affair of the 46th Birthday
by Amy Myers
The Specter of Tullyfane Abbey
by Peter Tremayne
The Vale of the White Horse
by Sharyn McCrumb
The Adventure of the Dorset Street Lodger
by Michael Moorcock
The Adventure of the Lost World
by Dominic Green
The Adventure of the Antiquarian's Niece
by Barbara Hambly
Dynamics of a Hanging
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Page 73