The Case of the Displaced Detective

by Stephanie Osborn

“Indeed,” was all he said.

  * * *

  The telephone rang after lunch, and Holmes hurried to answer it. Skye was in her study, rummaging through drawers and files trying to find all her notes and papers, so she let him handle the call. She heard his muffled, indistinct voice at the other end of the house, and smiled fondly, her mind on her search.

  “Aha! There you are, you dratted thing!” she muttered, coming up with the all-important battered spiral-bound notebook. It was vital because it contained her thoughts for the article she intended to write on the tesseract’s theory. “I thought I’d never find you.” She flipped several pages and lost herself in planning. Holmes appeared in the door.

  “Skye?”

  “Yeah, Sherlock?” she said over her shoulder, without looking up from her notebook.

  * * *

  Holmes surveyed her, taking in her abstraction; he needed her undivided regard. So he enjoined, “Please stop what you are doing, sit down, and listen to me for a few moments, my dear.”

  The solemnity of his tone arrested her attention, and Skye placed the notebook on the corner of her desk, turned the desk chair to face him and sat in it. Holmes was gratified by the immediate, serious response; her expression was grave and intent, her eyes fixed on his face. She said nothing, waiting for him to speak.

  “Obviously you know, by the fact that I have been armed for the last twenty-four hours, even when asleep, even when…with you, that the game is afoot,” he pointed out, treading delicately over the previous night’s activities. “I had not intended telling you, to avoid disturbing you, but I have reconsidered that plan.”

  “Something to do with the Schriever case?”

  “Indeed. It seems our eliminating a certain saboteur has rendered his unknown superior most irate. He—or possibly she, though the profile appears masculine, in my opinion—is especially angry with you, it appears, and is intent upon revenge. Fortunately he does not know who you are, nor does he seem to know you were injured—although he apparently considers it a possibility—but Schriever intelligence sources think he is searching. Skye…one military policewoman, matching your general physical description, has already been shot. While off-base.”

  “Oh, no. Is she dead?” Skye gasped in dismay.

  “No, but she is in intensive care. She will recover.”

  “Okay. I’ll get out my Glock and make sure it’s cleaned and ready to go. What shift do you want me to take?”

  Holmes paused, startled by her response. An answer worthy of Watson, and just as immediate and forthright from The Woman. I am indeed fortunate. She is an amazing creature. No wonder I lov—

  Holmes clamped down on that thought hard. This is hardly the time to change your entire battlefield philosophy, old chap, he told himself, a frisson of dread chilling his loins. Cold, hard intellect is what you need now, not rank sentimentality. You have lost Watson. If you wish to keep this…comrade in arms, you must keep a clear head.

  What he said was, “Please ensure your pistol is on your person at all times, my dear. But I am neither asking, nor permitting, you to stand guard. No, I will not have it,” he raised his hand to forestall her protests. “It is my turn to ‘dictate.’ You are convalescing. And you are the designated target. It does not do for the target to guard itself.”

  “Sherlock, you have to sleep sometime. You can’t stay up twenty-four/seven guarding me. I won’t have it, either.” Skye’s forehead creased in concern.

  “You’ll not have to. I have been in touch with General Morris. A clandestine unit is being sent up the Pass to sweep the ranch and guard our perimeter. I expect them within the hour.” Holmes smiled.

  “They’ll report here?”

  “Yes, but undercover. To all appearances, you will have five new ranch hands, my dear Skye.” He winked. “You mentioned some time back you’d been thinking about breeding Iris, after all.”

  “Works for me, as long as they know something about horses and can maintain that cover story.” Skye chuckled, then shook her head.

  “According to Morris, all will be well,” Holmes answered, before bending over and impulsively planting a gentle kiss on her worry-puckered forehead.

  * * *

  Within the hour, five new stable hands appeared on Skye’s doorstep. They came inside to introduce themselves, and discussed the situation. They made it plain they had the cover story of ranch hands well under control, dropping into and out of the lingo and dialect with ease, as well as knowledgeably discussing the chores and duties of the ranch. Then they asked for details of the property layout.

  Skye retreated to her study, and after a few minutes of digging in her filing cabinet, emerged with a plat of the ranch, as well as a topographic map on which she had marked her property line. Everyone, even Holmes, who already knew the ranch well, studied these items, committing as much as they could to memory. Skye’s historic ranch was a modest forty-acre spread, divided into several pastures, plus the house lot. A well-maintained, modernized, but currently unused bunkhouse wing was attached to the old barn, giving it its characteristic L-shape, and the guard unit made plans to utilize it as their barracks and general headquarters.

  Then they informed the pair they intended to walk the property, paying special attention to the periphery and the copses of trees dotting the pastures.

  “It is already late in the day,” Holmes noted, “and that will take some time.”

  “Yes,” the unit leader, Captain Braeden Ryker, admitted. “But it has to be done. You may or may not be aware that there is already a security monitoring system set up on the ranch, by FBI Agent Smith and Colonel Henry Jones, for your safety. With their—and your—permission, we intend to add to it and tap into it.”

  “I agree; and I had wondered what the tiny objects perched on the barn ridgeline and some of the fence posts might be. I had noted the camouflage colouration of one of the fence post objects while fetching a recalcitrant horse for dinner one evening, and was able to barely discern the deliberately smudged stencil, ‘USAF,’ upon it. I decided it originated from Jones, though I was unaware of their purpose. Skye?” Holmes turned toward his companion.

  “Um, yeah, sounds good.” Skye’s eyebrows were raised in surprise. “Damn.”

  “Now, Skye, do not berate yourself; you have been healing,” Holmes soothed his pupil’s frustration at her failure to spot the monitors. “You have scarcely been outside enough to determine the weather, let alone observe these devices.”

  “Will the two of you be all right here until we return to set up guard?”

  “Yes. I have my Smith & Wesson, and Dr. Chadwick, her Glock. And we are both capable observers.”

  “Very good. I’ll come by with a tap on the back door when we get back.” He gestured at the French door in the den. “Do either of you know Morse code?”

  “Yes,” Holmes replied.

  “Good. The tap will be Morse B for ‘back.’”

  “Excellent.”

  And the guard contingent left for their survey of the ranch.

  * * *

  The rest of the day was quiet. Skye and Holmes went about the house armed and wary, but nothing happened, and no news was heard. Skye got her notes together; around dusk, they went to the barn to drop feed for the horses. Returning to the house, they ate a light dinner together, repaired to the den and watched television from the sofa. Holmes was fascinated—though not impressed—by television, and had been since his first introduction to it, although he was disappointed the medium had essentially co-opted newspapers.

  “After all, there was so much to be had from the papers—the headlines, the agony columns, the gossip of the various districts, the personal advertisements. My dear Skye, I could go on for days, singing the praises of the London newspaper! While television may be entertaining, there is much less scope of discovery in it for the modern detective, I fear.”

  Skye could not argue this point. Other than the occasional investigatory documentary, which offered some training to her r
eady mind, she felt there was little to recommend the medium. Even she didn’t watch most of the crime dramas; an intrigued Holmes had insisted upon watching episodes of two different series, and ended up turning off the TV in disgust both times, complaining of the inaccuracies and monumental stupidities.

  They did watch a science documentary on a satellite channel that night. It was on cosmological string theory and membranes, and Holmes watched with interest, absorbing all he could. Periodically he turned to Skye with a question, or a request for elaboration. She did her best to provide easily assimilable information, and after the show’s end, they spent an additional hour in discussion. Skye was once more impressed with how very intelligent this man was.

  And he’s just as passionate as he is intelligent, she thought happily, noting the increasing lateness of the hour, even if he won’t admit it to most people.

  “And so this is the complete theory behind your Project: Tesseract?” Holmes queried as the program ended. Anna had wandered in partway through the documentary and now slept on Holmes’ lap. Skye watched his long, slender fingers stroking the soft fur and it hit her that the two were similar: sleek, graceful, skilled, intelligent hunters. And she loved both of them.

  “Yep, that’s about the size of it. It’s a lot more complicated than what you just saw, which was brane theory for lay people, but the complete gist of how it operates was in that show.”

  “Elucidate, please.”

  “Well, as you saw,” Skye stared into space with unfocused eyes, waving at the television, “you have bound strings, and you have unbound strings. The bound strings are connected to p-branes—”

  Holmes broke in to enquire dryly, “Do most scientists these days have such outlandish senses of humour? I mean really, Skye, the oblique reference to ‘pea-brains’ could not have been more obvious.” He jabbed a finger at his temple by way of clarification. Skye let out a rich laugh.

  “Yeah, I’m afraid we do, Sherlock. Offhand I dunno who came up with that term, but I’d lay money it was a deliberate pun. But the computer geeks are even worse! In all fairness, though, let’s face it: ‘n-dimensional membrane’ is a real mouthful, especially if you have to say it very often. So the bound strings ‘live on,’ or are connected to, the branes, and to some extent this helps define a given universe.”

  “Via fixing the physical properties, constants, and the like,” Holmes added, to show he understood.

  “Right. So that’s where the parallel continuums come in. My observations indicate adjacent brane/string bound systems seem to constitute adjacent continuums, especially if it’s a separate string, but the same branes; those continuums strongly resemble each other, according to our data. Families, if you will. Completely unrelated brane/string systems appear to constitute entirely separate universes. Which says, I suppose, that there’s something definitive about the branes, though we haven’t figured out what, yet. But the closed-loop strings act like particles, and by being unbound, can ‘float’ between bound strings, and even between branes.”

  “Interesting,” Holmes murmured, taking his turn at staring into space as he attempted to visualize the theory. “So I assume your tesseract utilises the closed-loop strings.”

  “Right,” Skye smiled, delighted at his comprehension. “I did the basic theoretical work during my post-doctoral studies with Kip Thorne at Caltech.”

  “Caltech?”

  “California Institute of Technology. One of the big American universities, our equivalent in the States to an Oxford or Cambridge.”

  “Ah. Pray, continue.”

  “I’d met his mentor, John A. Wheeler, when I was in graduate school and Dr. Wheeler came in to give a seminar. Wheeler and I hit it off, and he arranged the post-doc with Thorne. If that hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t be a Project: Tesseract. The concept Thorne and I developed was strange. You’ve heard me talk about wave-particle duality?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand it?”

  “Better, after reading the textbooks you loaned me.”

  “How many men from 1891 could pick up a 21st-century college text on quantum mechanics and understand it?” Skye wondered. She shook her head with a wry, admiring grin, causing Holmes to flush.

  “Perhaps another immediately comes to mind, although we ended his opportunity. In fact, though I am loath to give such credit, it is partly because of Moriarty that I understand; I made it a habit to keep up with the workings of that mind, even to the reading of his theoretical papers, which were evidently well advanced of his time. I am sure, however, there were several more intellects capable of such comprehension in 1891.”

  But she saw the look of gratified pride shining in the grey eyes, and she grinned wider.

  “Anyway, those closed-loop strings seem to exhibit that kind of duality,” Skye elaborated, returning to the subject. “There was some notion one variety is the graviton, the particle that transmits the gravitational force—the project has since demonstrated it for fact. So what Kip and I did first was postulate how closed-loop strings might be generated virtually. Then we considered how to impress a specific Schrödinger-type waveform on the virtual string. If we could do that, it would allow us to create any sort of closed string we wanted. Then we worked on how to generate them in quantity.”

  “Hm. Is that not potentially dangerous?”

  “Possibly, yes. If we didn’t maintain adequate control of the vibrational state, we ran the risk of creating a flood of a particular type of boson, which can have its own dangers. For instance, if we’d inadvertently initiated a burst of tachyon condensation, we could have bled away the rest energy of one of our parent branes and annihilated it. Or we might have accidentally generated too many gravitons, which would have resulted in a virtual singularity—a black hole collapse, right in the lab. So we cycle through the waveforms to maintain a nice distribution. Needless to say, Project: Tesseract has safeguards and to spare on the waveform bottle. But that, of course,” she admitted, rueful, “is exactly what caused the emergency shutdown during testing.”

  “I should imagine. My theory would be that the bottle was the ultimate target of our saboteur.”

  “Mine, too. Pity he didn’t realize there was already an ethics problem; it would’ve saved his life, and kept me from getting shot. But it’s the waveform control that makes the thing work. By manipulating the waveform, we’re able to create a…I suppose you could call it a string laser, for want of a better term. A coherent beam of closed-loop strings, that—by shifting the frequency as a unit—enables us to tunnel between branes. It’s a kind of wormhole effect, although not the sort normally meant.”

  * * *

  Holmes looked at her for a long moment, assessing. Finally he voiced what he was thinking.

  “My dear Skye, do you have any idea how brilliant you are?”

  Skye blushed furiously.

  “Well, I didn’t do it all by myself,” she pointed out. “A big chunk of it was Kip’s idea. I had a really good team assembled to build the darned thing, too. And it was Kip’s notion it needed to be classified. He’s not normally into such things, but he saw the potential for misuse on this, and even wrote a letter to Lieutenant General Schott, the then-head of the Defense Science Institute, about the matter.”

  “Ah. And so this is how it came to be constructed in what is effectively the sub-sub-cellar of Schriever Air Force Base?”

  “It is. And how you come to be here, alive and whole…if without Watson,” she added regretfully.

  “Watson would want it so,” Holmes said confidently, albeit subdued. He drew a deep breath. “And it is not as if I am alone.”

  “No,” she agreed, snuggling into his side as they turned their attention back to the TV.

  * * *

  About ten-thirty, Skye gave Holmes a gentle, seductive glance and rose, moving to the door into the north wing. Pausing in the doorway, she looked back and added a smile into the seduction. Holmes’ grey eyes twinkled, although his expression never chan
ged; her smile grew wider, and she vanished down the hall into the bedroom.

  There, she disrobed and prepared for bed. Certain Holmes would be in soon, Skye turned off all lights save the lamp and slipped between the sheets.

  She waited.

  And waited.

  Holmes never came.

  Crushed, Skye turned out the lamp and cried herself to sleep.

  * * *

  Holmes waited impatiently in the den, expecting to hear the pre-arranged tap on the back door at any time, signal that their guard contingent had returned; but it never came. Turning out the lights in order to avoid presenting a possibly unfortunate silhouette, he moved to the panoramic windows overlooking the ranch. In the moonlight—it was nearly first quarter—he could barely make out the shades of men working at the far fence line. He nodded to himself; all was well, they were merely taking their time and doing the job right.

  Holmes glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now past one a.m. He was deeply uncomfortable about leaving Skye alone in the bedroom any longer, but he was not yet ready to retire himself, determined as he was to await the captain’s signal. So he compromised, moving to Skye’s bedroom and seating himself in the armchair in the corner. There, he could watch over her, yet remain awake to hear any signal from the back door.

  But as the moonlight filtering through the window curtains fell across Skye’s sleeping face, Holmes saw, to his consternation, tearstains on the flushed cheeks. He also observed the bare shoulders and nude leg protruding from the blankets, a silent message clearer than any words.

  Uncertain what to do, he moved to the overstuffed chair in the corner and sat, to ponder the matter. This is, he thought ruefully, precisely why I have avoided entanglements of the heart for all these years. It is a morass far more vast than the Grimpen Mire, and nearly as dangerous. But it is much too late. Quite aside from last night’s…events, I fear The Woman in the bed already firmly possesses the organ in question; I never even knew when it was given. Holmes’ gut knotted tight in apprehension and worry.

  He knew the cause of her tears: The provocative glances she had given him on her way to bed were impossible to miss, and he had honestly intended to follow as soon as possible. But it had not occurred to him the bodyguards would take so long in beating the bounds, and evidently Skye had thought he didn’t want to come to her. He sighed, troubled, and she stirred at the sound.