Sherlock Holmes in Orbit

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “But you’ll have to come along!” Doris exclaimed.

  “We can’t do it without you!” Brian agreed.

  “We will foil him at every turn!” Stan enthused.

  “Come, Watson!” Carruthers called with a wave of his pipe. ‘The game is afoot!”

  “Wilson,” Samantha corrected.

  Maybe, she thought, the day might turn out better after all.

  THE FAN WHO MOLDED HIMSELFby David Gerrold

  EDITOR’S NOTE: Seventeen copies of this manuscript were delivered to my office over a period of three weeks. Some were mailed, some arrived by courier; three were faxed, two were uploaded to CompuServe and one to GEnie. Several arrived by messenger. All seventeen arrived under different names and from different points of origin. I believe that more copies than seventeen were posted, but only seventeen arrived.

  The following cover letter was enclosed with every copy:

  Dear Mr. Resnick,

  I apologize for taking such unusual steps to bring this manuscript to your attention, but after you read it, you will understand just why I had to go to such lengths to ensure that at least one copy of this will reach your desk.

  By way of explanation, I am not the author of the piece, although in the absence of other heirs to the estate, I do claim full ownership of the rights. The enclosed essay, story, letter, confession—call it what you will—came into my hands in a very curious way.

  I was never very close to my father; he was a stem and rigorous man, and I moved out of his household as soon as I was old enough to make my own way in the world. I even went so far as to change my name and move to another city. For some time, I avoided all contact with my father (who I shall not name in this manuscript); so you can imagine my surprise and annoyance to find him on my doorstep one evening. Although I felt little warmth for the man, I still felt obligated to invite him in. He cared with him a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied up with heavy twine.

  “I have your legacy here,” he said, by way of explanation. He placed the package on a side table and shrugged off his heavy wool overcoat and hung it on the rack in the hall. It was a familiar action on his part, and it jarred me to see it again in my own home. I felt very ill at ease in his presence, and did not know how to respond.

  “I know that you believe that I have not been a very good father to you,” he said. “I did not lavish the kind of attention on you in your formative years that another parent might have. I felt that to do so would weaken you and turn you into one of those men who are less than men. Now that you are grown, I can see that I was right to do so. You have a hardness of character about you that bodes well for your ability to take care of yourself. I always felt that independence was the greatest gift I could give a son. No, don’t thank me. I hope you will do the same for your child someday. Never mind that now. I don’t have much time and there is much that you need to know.”

  He took me by the arm and led me into the parlor. It was an old house that I had taken, one that could be dated all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century. He sat down opposite me, placed his parcel on the table between us, and began to speak quietly. “Perhaps you may have wondered why I have had so few friends and acquaintances over the years, and why during your childhood, we kept moving to a new place every few months. Perhaps you have wondered why I have kept such distance from you for the past few years, not even trying to seek you out. All of this has been for your own protection. I did not want him to find you.”

  “After I leave, you will be free to forget me as you will; I will not trouble you again. I will leave this package with you. You may do with it as you wish. But I must caution you, that if you accept delivery of this, your life may be in terrible danger, the worst kind of danger you can imagine. No, even worse than you can imagine. You may examine the contents of the package, as I did when I was your age. You may toss it on the fire, as I was tempted to. You may choose to pass it on to your own son, someday. Or you may feel that the time is right to reveal this information. The choice will be yours, as it was mine. Perhaps I made mistakes, but ... I did the best I could. If you must curse someone, curse your grandfather, because it was he who first accepted custody of this—this secret.”

  I had only the dimmest memories of my grandfather. He died when I was very young. He had always seemed a nervous man to me. Whatever secret my father was about to impart, he certainly had my attention now. I had never seen the man act like this before. In the space of the past few moments, he had said more words to me than he had said during the entire last year we had lived together under the same roof. Incongruously, all I could think to say was, “Would you like some tea?” I simply wanted to acknowledge his attention in some way, and indicate that regardless of all else that had passed between us, he still had my grudging respect.

  My father blinked at me in confusion as well as in some annoyance. His train of thought had been derailed by the question. But his features eased at the thought of my hospitality; perhaps he took it as a sign that I held some gratitude for his actions, or even affection. Perhaps I did; my own thoughts were not clear to me at that point, I was so confused by his confession. I hurried to the kitchen to put the kettle on. My face was flushed with embarrassment. My curiosity had been terribly aroused by his long preamble, and now we would both have to delay the denouement even that much longer.

  Shortly, however, the kettle was boiling and the tea was brewing in the ceramic pot between us, filling the room with friendly and reassuring vapors. As I placed a tray of biscuits on the table—that I had baked myself only this morning—my father resumed his narrative.

  “Your grandfather,” he said, portentously, “was the nephew of the famous Dr. Watson—yes, that Dr. Watson.” He paused to let that sink in.

  I had known that there was some secret about our family’s past, simply due to my father’s reluctance to discuss it with me; but I had always assumed it was something criminal in nature. Possibly a relative who had been hung for stealing horses or some other great disgrace. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you. Why should that be something to keep secret? It seems to me that we should be proud of our ancestor.”

  My father tapped the parcel on the table. “When you read this, you will understand. This is the truth about his so-called adventures. I’m going to leave this with you. It’s yours now. If you want my advice, you’ll toss it in the fire and be done with it. Because once you open it, once you read it, you’ll never know a peaceful night again.”

  He finished his tea in a single swallow, glanced impatiently at his watch—more for performance, I believe than because he had a schedule to keep—and rose immediately from his chair. “I must go now. But I’ll give you one last piece of advice, perhaps the most important piece of advice I can ever give you, and you will have to take it as an acknowledgment of how much I truly do care about you and how proud I am of what you have made of yourself. Whatever you do, son, wherever you go, keep yourself secret. Keep yourself impossible to trace. Leave no record of where you may be found. It will save your life. Believe me.”

  And then he was gone. He slipped back into his dark old overcoat and vanished into the night as abruptly and mysteriously as he had come. The parcel remained unopened on my parlor table.

  Now, at this point, perhaps I should explain a little bit about who I am. I am a single man in my late thirties; I live alone in an old house. I have never wed, I have no children, no pets, and I keep mostly to myself. I believe that this is in no small part due to the disruptive nature of my upbringing; deprived as I was of the opportunity to form attachments during my impressionable years, I have almost no social skills at all. Rather than inflict my clumsy fumblings at friendship on others, I prefer to live vicariously through the many volumes of books I have managed to collect over the years.

  That my father had presented me with what was obviously an unpublished manuscript either about or by the famous Dr. Watson, was an act of overwhelming generosity to me; but the manner of his presentati
on was so disturbing that it left me troubled and upset beyond my ability to describe. Perhaps another person would have opened the manuscript immediately, but I was in such a state from my father’s visit that it was all I could do to finish my tea and wash the cups. I allowed myself the luxury of a long hot bath to calm my nerves and then went immediately to bed. I would resolve what to do about the package the following morning.

  To my dismay, the package was still in the parlor the next day. I had hoped that my father’s dismaying visit would have turned out to have been merely an apparition of a troubled sleep. But no such luck. Nor had anyone broken into the house and made off with the mysterious parcel either. Whatever it contained, it was still my responsibility.

  After a meager breakfast of tea, toast and marmalade, and a single soft-boiled egg, I sat down in the parlor and prepared to examine my “legacy.” There were twenty-three handwritten pages. The writing was hurried and crabbed, as if the author were working under great stress. In some places, it was nearly indecipherable.

  I worked my way slowly through the pages, reading them carefully, not going onto the next until I was fully certain I had understood everything before. When I finished, my thoughts were in greater turmoil than ever. Had I not been presented with this manuscript by the hand of my very own father, I would have been absolutely certain that this was the most elaborate literary hoax in history.

  If even the smallest part of the manuscript was true, then my father was right; my life was in terrible danger. I could do nothing to validate the truth of this information without calling attention to myself and giving him a clue to my whereabouts as well as my whenabouts.

  After thinking about this matter for several days, I decided to make typescript copies of the pages, have them duplicated, and distribute them via as many channels as possible to prevent him from interfering with the eventual publication.

  I know that most people who read these words will blithely assume that this is merely a clever piece of fiction and will casually dismiss it. However, if even one or two people who are in a position to act will take this revelation seriously, then we may be able to stop him before it is too late. I am sure that your curiosity is now sufficiently aroused. With that in mind, I will now get out of your way, and let you read the pages of my ancestor’s last story.

  Dr. Watson’s Tale

  Subsequent to the success of my literary efforts for the Strand magazine, a great deal of attention has been focused on the personal affairs of Sherlock Holmes and myself. Much of this attention has been quite unwelcome, especially those amateur analyses and salacious speculations into the nature of our relationship. I can only assume that those who waste their energies in such efforts have much too much time on their hands.

  The truth is that our relationship was entirely professional in nature. Holmes and I had early entered into a partnership of convenience, which subsequently proved to be of greater mutual benefit than either of us had originally conceived. Consequently, we were stuck, as it were, with the situation as it evolved. We were holding a tiger by the tail. Neither of us could extricate himself from the partnership without the risk of considerable personal damage, and I think that neither of us really wanted to try to let go of the tail of this particular tiger. Together, we had both fame and fortune. Apart, who knew what we might have?

  Although we shared a high regard for each other’s abilities, in truth, there was little real affection between us. Mostly, we needed each other’s particular abilities. Holmes had a native shrewdness and cunning which transcended his somewhat meager intellect; I had some skills, not as a reporter, but as a fabricator of tales.

  Indeed, this is the substance of my confession—that Sherlock Holmes as he was known by the general public on both sides of the Atlantic simply did not exist. He was a total fabrication.

  Let me state it clearly at the beginning that I make no claims of innocence in this accounting. I am as guilty of fraud as the man who posed as Holmes. (For simplicity’s sake, I shall refer to him as Holmes throughout the rest of this manuscript.) Although most of the physical circumstances of Holmes’s illustrious career were engineered by the man who was generally known as Holmes, the literary creation of Sherlock Holmes as a superlative intellect, skilled in the art of criminal deduction, was entirely a work of fiction, and that is the part of the fraud for which I must claim authorship. It greatly amused both of us to have created such a remarkable public figure as Sherlock Holmes, eminent detective.

  This is not to say that Holmes did not solve the cases he did. In fact, he had the most astonishing degree of success in resolving criminal matters of any detective then or since, a fact which brought no small degree of distress to the late Inspector Lestrade. Even those incidents which were never fully described in my public writings, such as the curious affair of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, were well-known among the investigators of Scotland Yard as evidence of Holmes’s incredible facility with the facts.

  There was a remark I gave to Holmes in one of my stories, The Sign of Four. “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.*’ Holmes found this epigram so clever that after he read it in print, he began using it in his daily conversation; he was not without vanity, and on more than one occasion, I had to literally drag him away from gathering admirers. This frequently annoyed him. He enjoyed the swoons of impressionable young women and the hearty congratulations of naive bystanders; but I was afraid that he might inadvertently say something so at odds with what the public believed about him that he would trigger a cascade of embarrassing questions and investigations that would leave us both destroyed. I felt then, and I still feel, that an impenetrable air of mystery would serve us both.

  Even with this instruction waved so blandly in the face of the authorities, not a single one of them ever followed the thought to its natural conclusion and realized that Holmes was taunting them to figure out the real reason for his remarkable string of successes.

  I must pause here to acknowledge that even at this late date, I find it difficult to discuss the matter of the curious belt candidly. It seems to me a betrayal of everything that both of us worked so long and hard to create. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to impart to paper the real explanation of Holmes’s skill.

  The man the public later came to know as Sherlock Holmes first approached me after the death of my beloved wife, Tess. He said he had a proposition for me. He was an American; he had that dreadful flat nasal quality in his voice that identifies the speaker as a native of that nation where the King’s English has been systematically abused for generations. His name was Daniel James Eakins and he said he was from the state of California. When I pointed out to him that California was still a territory, not yet a state, he flushed with embarrassment and begged my apology; sometimes he forgot when he was.

  “ ‘When?’ What a curious way of phrasing,” I remarked. Then he told me a curious tale.

  “Imagine,” he said, “that all of time is laid out like an avenue. If we walk west along this way, we shall find ourselves in Thursday next. But if we walk east far enough, we may travel back to last Sunday’s partridge dinner. What would you do if you had such a power?”

  “A fanciful conceit,” I admitted. “You should try your hand at writing. Perhaps the Strand might be interested in such a fantasy.”

  “But what if I told you it was not a conceit, Dr. Watson? What if a device existed that would allow you to walk the avenues of time?”

  “It strikes me as a very dangerous invention. What if you killed your grandfather before your father was born?” “Nothing happens,” he said. “I tried it. Paradoxes are impossible. He died. I remained.” He then lifted up his waistcoat to reveal that he was wearing a most curious belt and harness affair. “This is a timebelt,” he said. “With it I can travel anywhen I want to.”

  This was such an outlandish claim that I was immediately certain that the man had escaped from one of those facilities used for detaining the dangerous
ly insane.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I shall give you proof. Right now.” He pulled a newspaper out of his pocket, the Evening Standard, and placed it before me. “Look at the date,” he said. The newspaper was tomorrow’s evening edition. “Keep this paper. Wait twenty-four hours. Then buy a copy of the Standard. If the two are identical, you will have to ask yourself, how did I come by this paper before it was printed? I went forward in time and brought it back. That’s how.”

  I examined the paper carefully. If this were a hoax, it was an elaborate one. And if it were a hoax, why invest so much time and energy in the creation of a document that could be proven false so easily?

  It was at this point that my eye fell upon a small article in the lower left comer of the page. The headline said ‘TREVOR MYSTERY REMAINS UNSOLVED.” I pointed to that and said, “Perhaps your machine would allow you to travel backward to the day of this tragedy and prevent it?” He took the paper from me and studied the article. “Perhaps indeed,” he agreed. “I shall be back momentarily,” and he stepped out the door with never a by-your-leave. He returned almost immediately, but this time he was wearing a totally different costume, something he had no doubt picked up in one of the more expensive booths at Harrods: a deerstalker cap and cane, a baroque pipe after the German fashion, and a long gray fogcoat. I had seen quick-change artists in the theater before, but off the stage, such a feat of physical prowess was startling. Mr. Eakins was also carrying another newspaper which he brandished at me proudly.

  It was the same newspaper, only this time the headline read, “PRIVATE DETECTIVE SOLVES TREVOR MYSTERY.” I read it aloud. “Mr. Sherlock Holmes of 22IB Baker Street—” I looked up at him, dismayed. “Why that’s my address.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. “That’s very astute of you, my good Watson. I had to tell the reporters something. If you don’t like it, I will tell them something else. Come, the game is afoot. This is tomorrow’s newspaper. If this story is to come true, we must go to the police now and tell them about the code in the mysterious message. If you read every third word in the note, you’ll see that it says something quite different altogether.”