The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (50 page)

“I understand. What is the half-life?”

“Oh, I'm not sure. Six months, maybe? It's supposed to remain detectable for a year.”

“Thank you.” Syaloch stalked off. Ramanowitz had to jump to keep up with those long legs.

“Do you think Carter may have hid the box in his paint can?” suggested the human.

“No, hardly. The can is too small, and I assume he was searched thoroughly.” Syaloch stopped and bowed. “You have been very kind and patient, Mr. Ramanowitz. I am finished now, and can find the Inspector myself.”

“What for?”

“To tell him he can lift the embargo, of course.” Syaloch made a harsh sibilance. “And then I must get the next boat to Mars. If I hurry, I can attend the concert in Sabaeus tonight.” His voice grew dreamy. “They will be premiering Hanyech's
Variations on a Theme by Mendelssohn
, transcribed to the Royal Chlannach scale. It should be most unusual.”

It was three days afterward that the letter came. Syaloch excused himself and kept an illustrious client squatting while he read it. Then he nodded to the other Martian. “You will be interested to know, sir, that the Estimable Diadems have arrived at Phobos and are being returned at this moment.”

The client, a Cabinet Minister from the House of Actives, blinked. “Pardon, Free-hatched Syaloch, but what have you to do with that?”

“Oh…I am a friend of the Featherless police chief. He thought I might like to know.”

“
Hraa
. Were you not on Phobos recently?”

“A minor case.” The detective folded the letter carefully, sprinkled it with salt, and ate it. Martians are fond of paper, especially official Earth stationery with high rag content. “Now, sir, you were saying—?”

The parliamentarian responded absently. He would not dream of violating privacy—no, never—but if he had X-ray vision he would have read:

“Dear Syaloch
,

“You were absolutely right. Your locked room problem is solved. We've got the jewels back, everything is in fine shape, and the same boat which brings you this letter will deliver them to the vaults. It's too bad the public can never know the facts—two planets ought to be grateful to you—but I'll supply that much thanks all by myself, and insist that any bill you care to send be paid in full. Even if the Assembly had to make a special appropriation, which I'm afraid it will
.

“I admit your idea of lifting the embargo at once looked pretty wild to me, but it worked. I had our boys out, of course, scouring Phobos with Geigers, but Hollyday found the box before we did. Which saved us a lot of trouble, to be sure. I arrested him as he came back into the settlement, and he had the box among his ore samples. He has confessed, and you were right all along the line
.

“What was that thing you quoted at me, the saying of that Earthman you admire so much? ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.' Something like that. It certainly applies to this case
.

“As you decided, the box must have been taken to the ship at Earth Station and left there—no other possibility existed. Carter figured it out in half a minute when he was ordered to take the thing out and put it aboard the
Jane.
He went inside, all right, but still had the box when he emerged. In that uncertain light nobody saw him put it ‘down' between four girders right next to the hatch. Or as you remarked, if the jewels are not
in
the ship, and yet not
away
from the ship, they must be
on
the ship. Gravitation would hold them in place. When the
Jane
blasted off, acceleration pressure slid the box back, but of course the waffle-iron pattern kept it from being lost; it fetched up against the after rib and stayed there. All the way to Mars! But the ship's gravity held it securely enough even in free fall, since both were on the same orbit
.

“Hollyday says that Carter told him all about it. Carter couldn't go to Mars himself without being suspected and watched every minute once the jewels were discovered missing. He needed a confederate. Hollyday went to Phobos and took up prospecting as a cover for the search he'd later be making for the jewels
.

“As you showed me, when the ship was within a thousand miles of this dock, Phobos gravity would be stronger than her own. Every spacejack knows that the robot ships don't start decelerating till they're quite close; that they are then almost straight above the surface; and that the side with the radio mast and manhatch—the side on which Carter had placed the box—is rotated around to face the station. The centrifugal force of rotation threw the box away from the ship, and was in a direction toward Phobos rather than away from it. Carter knew that this rotation is slow and easy, so the force wasn't enough to accelerate the box to escape velocity and lose it in space. It would have to fall down toward the satellite. Phobos Station being on the side opposite Mars, there was no danger that the loot would keep going till it hit the planet
.

“So the crown jewels tumbled onto Phobos, just as you deduced. Of course Carter had given the box a quick radioactive spray as he laid it in place, and Hollyday used that to track it down among all those rocks and crevices. In point of fact, its path curved clear around this moon, so it landed about five miles from the station
.

“Steinmann has been after me to know why you quizzed him about his hobby. You forgot to tell me that, but I figured it out for myself and told him. He or Hollyday had to
be involved, since nobody else knew about the cargo, and the guilty person had to have some excuse to go out and look for the box. Chess playing doesn't furnish that kind of alibi. Am I right? At least, my deduction proves I've been studying the same canon you go by. Incidentally, Steinmann asks if you'd care to take him on the next time he has planet leave
.

“Hollyday knows where Carter is hiding, and we've radioed the information back to Earth. Trouble is, we can't prosecute either of them without admitting the facts. Oh, well, there are such things as blacklists
.

“Will have to close this now to make the boat. I'll be seeing you soon—not professionally, I hope!

Admiring regards
,

Inspector Gregg”

But as it happened, the Cabinet minister did not possess X-ray eyes. He dismissed unprofitable speculation and outlined his problem. Somebody, somewhere in Sabaeus, was farniking the krats, and there was an alarming zaksnautry among the hyukus. It sounded to Syaloch like an interesting case.

EVIDENCE STRONGLY SUGGESTS
that Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was a great fan of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. In addition to being a popular and successful author, notably for his five volumes of stories about Father Brown, Chesterton was an illustrator whose caricatures were published in many magazines and books, and he frequently made Holmes the subject of his colored inks.

Early in his life he turned from most artistic pursuits to write in many genres, including poetry, journalism, detective fiction, religion, biography, and art and literary criticism, becoming a profoundly influential voice in both religious thought and literature, founding the important and eponymous magazine,
G. K.'s Weekly
(1925–1936) after editing its predecessor,
The New Witness
, for seven years.

In its pages were theological and political articles by such significant authors as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, but also pieces about spiritualism, the great late-life preoccupation of Conan Doyle. Chesterton had been involved in this area of study himself, and he published this anonymous parody of Holmes and his encounter with a medium. It has been speculated that Chesterton himself wrote it, but there is no evidence to definitively state that this is true.

“Sherlock Among the Spirits” was first published in the August 15, 1925, issue of
G. K.'s Weekly
.

THE SPIRITUALIST SÉANCE
, which my friend Conan Doyle had induced me to hold in my old rooms in Baker Street, was just over. It had been a tremendous revelation. The medium, Dr. Magog, whom I assumed from the first to be a charlatan (for my training had been strictly scientific and rational), because of his long white hair and beard and his Lithuanian name, astounded me with the accuracy of his suggestions. He even converted Sir Arthur's other friend Dr. Challenger, whom readers of the
Strand Magazine
may remember as having discovered a world of prehistoric animals, whose manners and demeanour he seemed to share. He had begun by having grave doubts, which he expressed by hurling the table to the end of the room and dancing on several of the enquirers after truth; but half way through the proceedings he burst into sobs that shook the building.

I could understand his feelings. The medium mentioned things that could only be known in the innermost domestic circle; such as a knock given to a girl when she was a child, now recalled by the spirit of her brother killed in the war. Sometimes this intimacy was even distressing; as in the picture called up before us of a girl sobbing in a remote chateau in France, and the gloomy admission by a young man present that the memory moved him to remorse. Perhaps the most remarkable case was that of the spirit of a daughter who told her father not to neglect his appearance from grief at her death, seeing that the Shining Ones liked to see him in a single eyeglass and spats. Now the man in question was indescribably shaggy and shabby, but he admitted that he had indeed been thus adorned in happier days.

I was brooding on these things after the others had left, when I heard a step on the stair that told of one of them returning. Dr. Magog himself hurriedly re-entered the room, saying: “I had forgotten my hat. Interesting occasion, wasn't it?”

“You absolutely amazed me,” I answered.

“You have often told me so, my dear Watson,” he replied.

I sprang to my feet and stood stiffened with incredulous stupefaction, for I had caught a note of something more marvelous than any psychical marvels.

He seated himself languidly and removed the white wig, showing the unmistakable frontal development of the greatest detective in the world. “If you had used my methods, Watson,” he said, “you would have known that a man never forgets his hat except when he is wearing a wig. It was a deplorable lapse. Well, you see, I converted Challenger.”

“A wonderful achievement,” I said. “The discoverer of the prehistoric world.”

“A very appropriate occupation, Watson,” he said. “I should say Dr. Challenger's powers of scientific observation were just about equal to noticing one of the larger Plesiosauri a few yards off. With a little more attention to minutiae he might even see a mammoth on the mat.”

“But how on earth did you manage it?” I asked. “How did you know of that nursery incident, for instance?”

“The girl was good looking and healthy and
she had false teeth. More probably she had them knocked out; and who should knock them out if not her brother?”

“And what about the eyeglass and spats,” I demanded.

“I have myself written a little monograph on ‘The Monacle of Crime,' and we saw something of its devastating effect when we looked into that little problem of the Haunted Hat Peg. The man had different markings in the two eye sockets, in a way only produced by the single eyeglass. Did you ever know a shabby, unshaven man to wear a single eyeglass? His beard bristled like that of all men who were once clean shaven. I guessed the spats; but I was careful only to say that the higher intelligences would like to see them. There is no accounting for taste.”

“And how did you know,” I asked, lowering my voice, “that the young man had broken the heart of a lady in a chateau?”

“He hadn't,” replied Sherlock Holmes, “but I could see by his face he would be the last man to deny it. Rather too obvious, Watson. Will you pass me my violin?”

ALTHOUGH AN OUTSTANDING
scholar and collector of Sherlock Holmes, Logan Clendening (1884–1945) is now forgotten except for his single short-short story, which Ellery Queen described as “one of the shortest and cleverest pastiches of Sherlock Holmes ever conceived,” and Edgar W. Smith, the head of the Baker Street Irregulars, called a classic piece, even suggesting “The Navel Treatise” as a possible alternative title.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Clendening became one of the city's greatest doctors and most beloved citizens, as famous for his wit and charm as he was for his literary scholarship and medical expertise. His column, “Diet and Health,” was syndicated in nearly four hundred newspapers, and his most important book,
The Human Body
(1927), was a bestseller that remained in print through successive editions for many years. Its success encouraged him to give up private practice for writing and journalism. His sense of humor came to the front when he was asked why he had quit private practice. He replied, “My boy, about this country are several headstones marking my progress in the operating field. I desisted, I may say, almost by universal acclaim.”

When the great Sherlockian scholar and collector Vincent Starrett was forced by financial difficulties to sell his Holmes collection, Clendening wrote to him. “I hear that you have just parted with your own collection, and I think you ought to start another. Why not start with mine? It is small but goodish—it contains a number of the better pieces that you might have difficulty duplicating—and I am boxing it up this afternoon and getting it off to you tomorrow morning. You will really take a load off my mind if you will accept it.”

“The box,” Starrett wrote in his autobiography,
Born in a Bookshop
(1965), “contained some twenty of the most desirable items in the field, including the desperately rare first printing of
A Study in Scarlet
. It was the nucleus of a new collection….I suppose no finer thing ever was done for one collector by another.”

“The Case of the Missing Patriarchs” was privately printed in an edition of thirty copies for friends of Edwin B. Hill (Ysleta, Texas, 1934).