Sherlock Holmes in Orbit

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “A few of the editors, at least,” I said.

  The Inspector leaned forward and removed one book from the shelf. I recognized its form as that of a memory block, the type of book prevalent in the mid-twenty-first century.

  “Here’s an interesting oddity, Holmes,” LeBeck said. “An expanded but limited edition of ‘The Final Problem’—the story of your death.”

  Holmes broke off another absentminded and futile search of his pockets for his pipe, and raised one eyebrow slightly.

  “Yes, Moriarty and I supposedly went over a waterfall, locked in each other’s embrace. That was, however, merely a device that Watson used, writing as Conan Doyle, to gain us some breathing space. Unfortunately, the popularity of my purportedly fictional adventures were such that poor Watson was forced to bring me back to life, so to speak.”

  I took the book from LeBeck’s hand and glanced at its cover. “The editor,” I said softy, “is a certain Professor Moriarty.”

  Holmes once more raised his eyebrow, and took the book in his own turn. He adroitly activated the memory block—we work quite often in that era—and scanned its contents.

  “Most interesting, indeed, Watson. He relates your original story in essentially an unadulterated format, but adds a long afterword.”

  I stepped closer to look over Holmes’s shoulder, while bemoaning the fact that my work was long since public domain. Surely some sort of copyright law to protect time-traveling authors could be formulated? Why must I continually suffer seeing my work in print without a farthing’s worth of payment?

  “See?” Holmes said, running his finger rapidly down the book’s display.

  “Indeed,” I said, taking it in almost as rapidly as he.

  LeBeck was lost. “What?” he asked.

  “It’s a commentary on Holmes’s fictional death, as related in my story, ‘The Final Problem’ “ I explained. “And, it appears, as more than just an intellectual exercise, the despicable Professor Moriarty propounded upon ways to actually do away with Holmes, proposing this and that trap. It seems, he has found one.”

  LeBeck look puzzled. Holmes handed him the book. LeBeck then finally started understanding, recalling the portents of Moriarty’s essay from his own reading of the book at some time in the past.

  “Yes, he proposes setting a trap for our time-traveling detective. Luring him by committing murders that could be attributed to a serial killer over the period of twenty years or so.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Horrid crimes executed to such a state of perfection that local police would be baffled. A case, if you will, that only the great Sherlock Holmes, himself, could solve.”

  “The scent of Moriarty’s machinations are about us,” Holmes said.

  “Stench, rather,” I said, nodding.

  “But ...” LeBeck said, thinking, an array of emotions crossing his face. First, disbelief. Next, dawning realization. Finally, a mixture of acceptance, resolve, and remorse.

  “Precisely, right, Chief Inspector,” Holmes said. “You’ve been and are being used by one of the most diabolical criminal minds of all Time”

  “What can I do to assist you?” Chief Primary Inspector Charles LeBeck asked, his attitude now completely changed. “I am at your service.”

  “Let us play it out,” Holmes replied. “Show us what you have on the murders, and especially today’s, since it is the trigger that got us here.”

  LeBeck laid a series of computer storage media on his equally gleaming desk. Thanks to our embedded computers, the files looked like standard manila file folders. Holmes and I quickly “thumbed” though the virtual ‘‘folders” and assimilated the information.

  “I’ve rounded up the usual suspects, and those are their files,” LeBeck said.

  Holmes and I exchanged amused looks. The classic Humphrey Bogart film, Casablanca, was a favorite of ours, and we often watched it when on holiday in the twentieth century or above. The inspector in that movie had used much the same line at the film’s conclusion, and with equal lack of results.

  LeBeck watched patiently as Holmes and I pored through files invisible to him, but he did not have long to wait.

  “Obviously none of these,” Holmes said, absently patting his sanitized coat pocket for his confiscated pipe.

  “Agreed,” I said, seating myself in a comfortable floater chair, as did Holmes.

  LeBeck looked at us, astounded. “You dismissed twenty years of investigation in little more than seconds?”

  Holmes sighed. “All a waste of storage space. The murderer is not among them. You have hundreds of suspects. Must I go through and show you why each one is eliminated? Since the murders took place over twenty years, most will be obvious even to a layperson in detective work. Some die, some move to other localities, some have alibis that are easily verified, some—”

  LeBeck waved his hand, silencing Holmes. “All right, all right. You’ve made your point. So who is the murderer?” “Since the latest murder was only this morning,” Holmes said, “a visit to the crime scene is now in order.”

  “That’s long since cleaned up,” LeBeck said. “Nothing like that could be allowed to sully our pavements a second longer than necessary.”

  Holmes said nothing, but his very position in the chair showed his disgust. In any other era, such a quick cleansing of a crime scene would have been unthinkable. Here, it was simply standard procedure, cleanliness taking precedence.

  “We do,” LeBeck continued somewhat defensively, “have extensive recorded hologram records. Which you may view in the room next door.”

  Holmes again sighed, but nodded. “This is, at least on rare occasions, useful,” he said.

  We viewed the holograms of the victim and the crime scene, walking among the three-dimensional images and viewing them carefully from all angles.

  “Much better than you’re accustomed to in the nineteenth century, eh?” LeBeck said, not being able to prevent himself from being a little supercilious.

  Again, the thought crossed my mind that his personality could not have been better picked for us to dislike and suspect him as the killer. Certainly, that much was no accident. Precisely the sort of detail that Moriarty would carefully put in place. But, while LeBeck fitted as a suspect for the previous murders, I knew he could not have done this one.

  “Indeed,” I replied. “We must make do with the actual body and a totally undisturbed crime scene.”

  “Forced to sift through one clue after another just to see the victim,” Holmes added in some distraction as he continued to inspect the recorded murder scene.

  The dead man was dressed as a tourist of the era—garish coveralls sporting a floral pattern in vivid pinks and greens. He was a middle-aged gentleman of not-quite portly girth but still had fed well in recent years. A scarlet cloth with a slogan on it in two lines of white letters was knotted securely behind his neck—his purplish face with protruding eyes and tongue showing that the scarf was the murder weapon. The murder itself had all the earmarks of having been committed by a Martian, since strangling was an exceptionally popular method in this era, appealing to the Martian cleanliness phobia by avoiding such nastiness as spilled blood.

  In other words, precisely the same method as the previous thirteen murders spread out over the past twenty years. Both Holmes and I found the right angle and read the slogan on the image of the scarf:

  BLACK DOME FOR MARTIANS ONLY.

  TOURISTS WILL DIE.

  “Just like all the others,” I said, quite unnecessarily, of course.

  “Not quite,” Holmes said, first stooping, then actually getting down on his hands and knees to peer at the slightly wavering edge of the hologram. ‘There were no grains of sand found by the other bodies.” He rose as far as his knees and made file-flipping motions in the thin air. “Hmmm. Hard to be absolutely sure, working from an image, but I*d wager the grains of sand next to the victim and those we took from Chief Inspector LeBeck’s boots are a perfect match.

  LeBeck shrugge
d. “The sand was why I took a breather pack and exited the dome at the nearest air lock to investigate. That investigation was interrupted by the call from my superiors, demanding that I obtain your and Watson’s services.”

  ‘Then,” said Holmes, “let us, with dispatch, complete your investigation of the area.”

  “And what if it’s a trap?” I asked.

  Holmes looked at me and smiled. “Of course it’s a trap, dear Watson, and what better way to defuse it than by springing it?”

  He turned and strode briskly in the direction of the air lock. LeBeck looked at me for an explanation, but I could only shrug. At times, Holmes was a mystery even to me.

  Red sand dunes rolled out to the horizon in front of us, like a static, grainy, dull scarlet sea. Our breathers hissed steadily as they compressed the thin Martian atmosphere enough for us to breathe. We stood at the top of a small dune, staring down into a wide depression. A hint of bright metal was visible against the depression’s far wall.

  “I followed footprints here from the air lock,” LeBeck said, “made suspicious by the grains of sand next to the body.

  Holmes and I both nodded; we could see the footprints going to and from the bright glint of metal.

  “A few more hours, and the prints will be gone,” LeBeck continued. “As I reached this very point, my communicator activated and I was instructed to fetch Sherlock Holmes immediately. I protested and detailed my find here. My superiors ordered me most emphatically to proceed no further, but to get you and let you investigate.”

  The compressors of our breathers hummed busily as we all considered it.

  “Hmmmm,” Holmes said, patting the coveralls of his environment suit as if looking for his beloved pipe. “A series of murders, designed to attract my attention, and to add credibility in convincing Watson and me that this is one of the Major Mysteries of Time that only we can solve. Events culminated in a few grains of sand, the only clue the killer has left in over twenty years. Suspiciously fortuitous.” LeBeck shook his head. “Much too much so.” He reached for his communicator. “I’m calling for the bomb squad.”

  I was closest, so it was my hand that knocked the communicator from his hand as Holmes carefully went down into the depression with sliding steps through the sand.

  “What?”

  “Be quiet if you please, Chief Inspector,” I said, “Holmes knows what he’s about.”

  We watched as Holmes moved across the floor of the depression and stooped by the glint of metal. He carefully brushed away the sand to reveal—

  “It is a bomb!” LeBeck yelled.

  “And I’ve activated it,” Holmes said, holding up a device with a keypad and flashing lights on its case. “Bit of a miscue here, I’m afraid. We have mere seconds to live.” Suddenly, a silver-suited figure materialized in front of Holmes. A few deft touches by the figure on the bomb’s keypad rendered the device obviously harmless, turning it into merely a gleaming box with no lights now flashing.

  The figure tossed back his hood to reveal the sardonic face of Professor Moriarty, wearing his own breather.

  “This one won’t work either, Holmes,” he said, sneering. “You won’t pin your murder on me this easily!”

  There were suddenly gold-suited figures around Moriarty. “Terran Rangers, our friends from the thirty-third century,” I explained to an astonished LeBeck. “Best law enforcement agency there has ever been, but still occasionally in need of assistance from the great Sherlock Holmes.”

  The gold-suited figures and Moriarty had now popped out of existence, and Holmes rejoined us. We trudged back into the dome, with LeBeck shaking his head.

  Out of our breathers and, at the insistence of LeBeck, having passed through cleaning devices, we were again pristine.

  “Moriarty was the killer?” LeBeck asked, in an obvious mixture, to Holmes and me, of relief and hope.

  “No, certainly not,” Holmes said. “Such a petty serial killing is far beneath him; his goals are far more evil. One of these had caused him to fall afoul of our friends, the Terran Rangers. We merely volunteered to help them apprehend Moriarty.”

  “But ... the body? Who ... ?”

  ‘There was no real body,” I said, being a medical man and feeling this fell within my field of expertise. “Merely a simulacrum provided by the Rangers. Quite realistic. Certainly fooled your forensic people.”

  LeBeck was struggling to understand. “But why would Moriarty not want you to die?”

  Holmes smiled. “I’m afraid Watson and I have become quite popular throughout Time. Our killer would be hunted by blood-hungry posses of the best law enforcement agents from all eras. The very last thing in the universe that Moriarty would want.”

  “So,” LeBeck said, shrugging, “all the other killings remain unsolved.

  “Of course not,” Holmes said. “You were the only one present at Black Dome during all the murders. Your motive was a pathological hatred of tourists, and of everything you considered unclean.”

  “We noted your physical discomfort,” I said, “when you visited us in Baker Street. It took quite an effort for you to remain for long in, what was to you, an unclean environment.”

  “Filthy,” LeBeck said weakly.

  “Solving the serial killings was easy,” Holmes continued. “You did it in a continuing attempt to discourage tourism. Not one of the Major Mysteries at all. Merely one warped person. We have already presented the evidence to your superiors. Your arrest is imminent.”

  LeBeck was now deflated, defeated.

  “I see,” he said. “So I was just a sideshow. You used Moriarty’s edition of ‘The Final Problem’ and everything else to subvert his trap for you and take him into custody?” “My dear chap,” I said. “It wasn’t Moriarty’s edition but, rather, one that I planted. All part of the plan to gain his attention wherever he was hiding in Time and draw him here. To create a situation he had to intervene in or suffer dire consequences.”

  We paused for a moment to observe the approach of several officers of the Martian Constabulary, coming to arrest LeBeck.

  “You see,” Holmes said in conclusion, “it wasn’t Moriarty’s trap at all but a trap for Moriarty. As you have already correctly surmised, you were just a sideshow. And now, if you will excuse us, Watson and I are returning to the nineteenth century—we are both dying for a good smoke.” “Yes,” I said, “but we really must come up with a better way of triggering our little adventures than you pretending to use drugs.”

  “Indeed, Watson, indeed.”

  THE CASE OF THE PURLOINED L’ISITEKby Josepha Sherman

  My name really is Dr. Watson, although I’m Alwin Watson, not John, and I’m an archaeologist, not a doctor. But it’s still a rather awkward name to have when you’ve been hired to head an excavation on Kholmes, the planet inhabited by the race known as the Shrr’loks. Most certainly awkward when their leader, The Shrr’lok of Shrr’loks, turns out to be an educated fellow who’s fascinated by Earthly detective fiction, and who has a wry sense of humor that’s very close to human—including a love of puns.

  Don’t get me wrong, I like The Shrr’lok, puns and all, and I suspect he likes me as well. We’ve spent quite a few leisure hours comparing Earthly and Shrr’lokian fiction. Mind you, he’s very much aware that he’s not human (how could he not be aware, when his people look like nothing so much as biped, upright Shetland ponies, hoofed feet, elongated muzzles, thick manes, and all?), let alone a certain Earthly fictional detective. But that doesn’t stop him from ... well ... detecting.

  “Good morning, Dr. Watson,” he’ll say with relish. “Did your early morning musings go well?”

  “How did you—”

  “You have misbuttoned your shirt, as though too lost in thought to notice what you did or correct the error, and there is a streak of ink across your left hand as though you had stopped to make hasty notes.”

  Ah well, you put up with a boss’s foibles. My team and I, humans all of us, mostly Earth-human, had been hired by
him to excavate one of the sites of his ancestors. Why humans on the dig and not Shrr’loks? The site we were investigating was set into a cave cut by time and weather—then sealed so neatly with the local form of mortar it was virtually invisible—out of the side of a pretty nearly vertical limestone cliff. People with non-cloven-hoofed feet don’t make very good climbers; in fact, most of the Shrr’loks have a built-in aversion to heights.

  Which made our site all the more intriguing. Whatever Shrr’loks had put it there had gone through an incredible amount of difficulty to get down there and back and to seal it away from the elements and looters. And that seemed to indicate one thing: While they’re a peaceful lot nowadays, once, back in the days of legendry, the Shrr’loks were incredibly warlike. Our site, like others cut into those limestone cliffs, could very well date from the last, most vicious of Shrr’lok wars, one that nearly wiped out their civilization and which included the hiding away of important artifacts. For all we knew, we might even have discovered the relics of Lesek-than, the powerful hero-king of Shrr’lok legend.

  “Good thing the Ponies can’t climb.” That was Pawl Seldan, one of the less diplomatic members of my team, muttering it when he thought I wouldn’t hear. Seldan was excellent with the charting minutiae that are still part of any dig, computerization notwithstanding, but he was the sort of man who likes to hide his education behind a vulgar mask. “Maybe we’ll find a royal tomb down there, Lesek-than or someone like that, with all the riches still intact.”

  “With all the information still intact,” I corrected coldly, not liking what I saw in his eyes, and the eyes of a few others.

  “Yeah. Sure. Of course.”

  All I needed: potential grave robbers. You don’t go into archaeology to get rich, and even the most devoted of team members can still be hit by temptation, particularly when it isn’t your own culture, or even species, involved. I knew that Drew Resten was absolutely bankrupt except for what this job was paying, and Sharin Cartrell had a family back on Earth. And Seldan, for all his rough pretense, was supporting a sickly wife who could never leave the weightlessness of the space station in which she lived. The expensive station. And here was this suddenly revealed treasure trove—temptation, indeed.