Sherlock Holmes in Orbit Read online

  “Well?” I asked. “What do you make of it?”

  Holmes did not answer but instead thrust the letter into his greatcoat and quickened his pace. I had noted an increasing tendency toward taciturnity in my friend as he aged, so I made no further attempt at engaging him.

  Suddenly he turned toward me, a look I remember well etched upon his features. “Watson, I thank you for your speed in bringing this to me. Time is of the essence. Indeed, I knew that there were bits of web left by that vile spider Moriarty that remained in place after his death; this is an opportunity to sweep away a most pernicious bit. And a piquant mystery as well. Bees can only maintain one’s interest for so long, my friend. Would you care to accompany me on this one?”

  I indicated I wouldn’t miss it for anything.

  Holmes and I returned to London immediately and took one of the new motorized cabs to the address of the Belgravia townhouse mentioned in the letter. We were ushered into a sitting room where a handsome woman of imperious appearance sat behind a desk of the old style. Her complexion was ruddy and her blonde hair was tied back into a severe bun. She motioned us to sit.

  “I am very glad you decided to come, Mr. Holmes,” she said, Russian accent barely noticeable. “Although I must say I did not expect that you would be so ... swift.”

  Holmes leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands steepled together. “My dear lady,” he said, “your letter was most remarkable. Although you do not know it, your case touches an especial response in me. I would like to go over the elements of this remarkable circumstance with you piece by piece.”

  “As you have already ascertained, I am Nadya Filipovna Dolgoruky,” she said. “I am the daughter of Count Filip Alekseyevich and Countess Natalya Petrovna Dolgoruky, who were brutally murdered in Baden-Baden in February of 1891. At the time I was only six. My mother, who was of English descent, had relatives in London, and I was sent to live with them. I was raised as an Englishwoman. I had almost forgotten the tragic circumstances of my youth, when, ten days ago, I received a package bearing a gold ring and a letter.”

  “Could I see the ring?” asked Holmes.

  “Yes, of course.” The countess opened a drawer of her desk and drew it out, then handed it to my friend, who examined it closely. “Go on,” he said. “My attention may appear to be diverted, but it is not.”

  She nodded. “I have read many of Dr. Watson’s accounts of your eccentric habits. In fact, the first book I ever read in English was A Study in Scarlet, given to me by a friend of my mother’s. Well, to continue, the letter, purporting to be a last testament written by my father, explained the long and bizarre history of our family. I have had the letter translated into English and you can examine it for yourself, Mr. Holmes, so I will be brief.

  “Apparently, my great-great-grandfather, Nikolai Dolgoruky, was a participant in the failed insurrection against the Tsar of December 1825. The uprising was a dismal failure, and he and his comrades were arrested and most of them exiled to Siberia. Eventually he sent for his family, who joined him in 1833. According to my father’s testament, Nikolai managed to flourish in that remote wilderness and amassed great wealth. Suddenly in 1844, for no apparent reason, he sent his wife and teenage son back to St. Petersburg. Less than a year later, this ring was delivered to them with a scrawled note saying that they would not see him again. Heartbroken, my great-great-grandmother died soon afterward.”

  Holmes had put the plain gold band on his little finger, lodged just above the first joint. “A woman’s ring,” he said. “Tell us more.”

  She sighed. “Yes. From here, the story skips several generations. My father, a most intrepid man, vowed that he would find out what had happened. This is what the testament says, mind you, and I have no other evidence. He went to Siberia and found a man loyal to my great-great-grandfather, who explained that Nikolai had long feared that the jealousies he was arousing amongst the native tribesmen would prove fatal, and he had sent his family away because he feared for their lives. Nikolai knew that he had been marked for death, and he took his accumulated wealth to a secure spot, where he buried it. He intended that he would be buried there as well. The night before he was murdered, he sent the message and ring.

  “In 1891, my father became involved with a man named Moran. Apparently, this Moran promised that he would provide the resources for a return trip to Siberia to recover the family wealth that had been hidden.”

  Holmes turned to me, index finger in the air. “Note, Watson. Enter the spider.”

  As she told the story, the countess’s face had grown progressively whiter. She put on her spectacles and referred to a sheaf of papers on the desk. “I will translate the last paragraph for you. ‘They are coming for me now, Moran and that awful man named Moriarty. I have made the ultimate mistake of telling them about the ring. As my ancestor before me, I must endeavor to hide this ring and make sure that it passes to my descendants. Moriarty will not rest until he has it in his possession.’ “

  Holmes sat back, rubbing the base of his neck, a mannerism that I had never noticed in him before. “And suddenly, seventeen years later, you receive the testament and ring out of the blue. I note that the paper is of authentic vintage. Could I see it more closely?”

  As Holmes drew a pince-nez out of his pocket and clipped it to his nose, a look of embarrassment passed across his features. I wondered how long he had needed them. “Yes, everything looks quite authentic. Postmarked Baden-Baden, February 6, 1891. You may recall, Watson, that that was only a few months before our misadventure at Reichenbach Falls. Unfortunately, we rid the world of that monster a little too late to help in this instance. The least we can do is try to rectify matters.”

  I mumbled agreement, wondering what I was letting myself in for.

  “And the ring, my dear countess,” continued Holmes, holding the object in question up to the light, “is engraved with a secret message. Ah, I can just make it out—

  60 55 12 101 57 55 6 16 7 TEHb Kчybi COCHbl.

  (60 55 12 101 57 55 6 16 7 )’”

  “The last three words are Russian, Mr. Holmes, for ‘shadow of the mound of the pine.’”

  Holmes chuckled to himself. “Remind you of anything, Watson?”

  I hesitated. “The Musgrave Ritual?”

  “Of course. Hardly a mystery to decipher. The first six numbers designate the longitude and latitude of a location in the far east of the Russian Empire. The next two are apparently a date, mostly likely in the Julian reckoning. The final one is a time, probably seven a.m.”

  “Amazing,” I exclaimed. “Holmes, your powers have not grown dusty with disuse. Are you certain?”

  “It is unmistakable, my dear friend. I have no doubt that the shadow of the mound of the pine will be as easy to unravel.”

  “I hesitate to ask ...” started the woman.

  “No need to worry, Countess. We will follow this thing to the end. Right, Watson?”

  I frankly could not understand Holmes’s enthusiasm for this project, though a desire to clean up the messes left by his former nemesis was certainly part of it. It took two weeks to prepare for the journey. Through Mycroft we quickly obtained the necessary visas and letters of passage, and it was only a matter of booking tickets on the recently completed Trans-Siberian Railway. I had been cultivating a young doctor to eventually take over my practice when I retired, and I felt confident that he could look after my patients until I returned. Though my wife was not especially happy about my leave-taking, she knew the depth of affection I had for Holmes, and let me go with the proviso that I not be gone longer than two months.

  We left from Charing Cross Station on May 20, with forty days to reach the designated location. Since Jules Verne’s famous adventurers had made it halfway around the globe in that amount of time, I felt that we would not be late.

  The journey across the Russian Empire was fascinating. I have long been an aficionado of rail travel, and, at first, I could not have been more delighted with our accommodations. A n
oble family, Prince Vorontsov and his retinue, were traveling to Vladivostok at the nether end of this enormous railway, and we were permitted to ride with them in their special cars.

  We spent ten days in transit across a magnificent, ever-changing landscape. We traveled through the picturesque though often rundown Russian countryside, across prairie and steppe, finally into pristine Boreal forest, miles upon miles of endless wilderness dotted with beautiful bright lakes.

  As we penetrated deeper into Siberia, the towns took on a makeshift, tumbledown appearance, and the railway stations were nothing more than piles of lumber. Holmes and I spent this time to good effect, preparing for the rough journey to come. I made friends with the Vorontsovs, and they kindly volunteered two of their retainers to accompany us to our destination. One, Vassily by name, spoke English very fluently, and would act as translator. The other, of strong peasant stock, was called Borya. Vassily indeed had some knowledge of the Siberian hinterlands, and told me much about what we were likely to encounter once we left civilization.

  We arrived in Krasnoyarsk on the first day of June, greeted by auspicious, clear weather. I was struck by the pioneer atmosphere of this bustling town on the banks of the Yenisey River, and was intrigued by the resemblance to pictures I had seen of the American West. The streets were nothing but dirt tracks, made impassable by deep gullies, and I ventured the opinion that heading cross-country would be quicker. The hotel in which we stayed was awful, filled with cockroaches of enormous proportions as well as every other form of vermin known to man. For four days we stayed in Krasnoyarsk, as Holmes and Vassily attempted to purchase passage up the Yenisey.

  No doubt the reader thinks that we must have lost our minds to undertake such a perilous journey into the remotest comer of this wild country. I daresay that I was a little mad, driven so by the tedious humdrum of my practice. I can only say that I looked forward to the adventure with an excitement that I had not felt since the earliest days of my association with Sherlock Holmes.

  Finally, we managed to convince a bourgeois young river man named Gortov, normally employed in the fur trade, to take us where we wished to go. Holmes had already purchased horses and other necessary provisions, and we loaded this unpainted, ramshackle boat to the gunnels, starting out on the fifth of June, cheered on by fine weather, though the midges and mosquitoes on the river were appalling.

  Because it was downriver, Gortov’s boat at first made more than fifteen knots. It took several days to reach the Yenisey’s confluence with the Angara, and from then on our course took us up this smaller river, still wider than the Thames at Greenwich. The evergreens pressed down to the river’s edge, and this dark green barrier grew quite monotonous. Our speed dropped to between five and ten knots. As the days passed, we came to know Gortov well, and my worry that he would not wait for us at Aksenovo evaporated. Holmes appeared to be enjoying himself, taking great delight in the nature that was all around us. Each night he would take out his surveying tools and carefully measure our position, comparing it with the coordinates on the ring.

  It took us more than two weeks to reach the spot that Gortov identified as the town of Aksenovo, three rough-hewn dwellings along the river, one of which purported to be an inn. As we packed our horses, I had my first sight of the Evenki tribesmen, dark, wrinkled men with gaptooth smiles. One, named Tengiz, agreed to be our guide.

  According to Holmes’s computations, it was a little over two hundred and fifty miles to our destination. Our mounts were small, dun-colored, steppe horses, shaggy beasts that would almost be considered ponies back in England. They were the best that could be had in Krasnoyarsk, healthy and well-shod. We started out the next morning, and the transit through those dense woods, while never easy, was manageable. We camped each night under the whispering, creaking boughs, with hardly ever a glimpse of the stars.

  On the evening of the twenty-ninth, we made camp less than a mile from the spot of Dolgoruky’s grave. It had been raining, and the evergreens were still damp, occasional drips falling with an eerie crackle. I congratulated Holmes on our success, barely able to confine my excitement. When we retired that night, I was for a long time unable to sleep, wondering what we would find come daylight.

  We were up before dawn, which was magnificent. Holmes had already made detailed calculations of the location of the grave, with an accuracy of about two-tenths of a mile. As we made our way northeast, the ground grew a little swampy, and the trees were not so thick. Tengiz pointed out a clearing, and we made our way there with bated breath. As expected, in the center of the clearing stood a mound of rounded stones as tall as a man.

  It was now 5:15. Orange sunlight slanted through the tall trees, shadows scoring the little clearing. The mound itself cast a long shadow, but there were many pine trees within its range. Holmes examined the monument carefully, then carried on a heated conversation with Tengiz through Vassily, asking ever more detailed questions, growing visibly agitated. When I asked him what was wrong, he brushed me aside, saying, “No time. No time!”

  Suddenly Holmes threw himself on the mound like a wild man, pulling out the cobbles as fast as he could, throwing them aside. Without understanding, I followed his example, until we had tom the pile apart and reached the soil underneath. Holmes continued to dig with his bare hands, after a minute pulling a small rusted box out of the ground.”

  “But, Holmes,” I stammered. “That’s not right. It’s supposed to be—”

  “My friend,” he exclaimed, “there is no grave, except perhaps our own.”

  From the box he drew a single sheet of heavy paper, upon which a series of mathematical equations were laid out. Beneath them, a diagram showed two intersecting ovals. Holmes held it out to me with a strange, sickly grin on his face. “Moriarty,” he said. “Master mathematician. Specializing in orbits, Watson. His magnum opus was The Dynamics of an Asteroid. It all begins to make sense now.”

  Holmes consulted his watch. “I doubt we can escape his diabolical design, but we can try. Watson, ride for all you’re worth.” And with that he jumped up and vaulted onto his horse, riding headlong into the forest. My head spinning with bewilderment, I followed, with Vassily, Borya, and Tengiz not far behind.

  We spurred the horses along the narrow track that led from the clearing, galloping until the horses faltered. “Fast trot now,” Holmes shouted over his shoulder. “If we push them any harder, they’ll go down.” The ground was growing marshier, but the track widened. We kept the horses at a trot for five miles, then urged them into a canter for fifteen minutes or so. When the horses could not go on, we dismounted and led them at a fast run. We made perhaps two miles that way. By this time the horses were sufficiently rested to trot for another five miles.

  Rocky outcroppings were showing through the mossy soil here, and the ground was beginning to slope downward. We suddenly found ourselves in a precipitous valley leading to a small stream. Following Holmes’s example, we dismounted and led our horses down into this declivity, eventually coming to the stream itself, which was surrounded by large boulders of all sizes. It was by now almost seven, and Holmes kept looking up at the sky as if expecting some angelic visitation. He motioned us to sit with our backs against the largest of the boulders, and we did so, holding the horses as close as possible.

  A minute passed, then several more. The stream made its amiable noise and birds sang in the trees, which were stirred by the gentle morning breeze. Tengiz, in particular, wore an expression of utter bemusement, as though these strange Europeans were even crazier than he had surmised.

  I had almost begun to rebel when the scene brightened slightly, as though the sun were coming out of light cloud. I was about to comment on this phenomenon, when the world exploded in white light, as bright as a limelight, etching the world in my eyes, sharp black shadows everywhere. As the light faded, I noticed that the world had grown completely silent. There was a sudden sharp jolt in the ground, almost like an earth tremor but more violent. “Holmes!” I shouted, but someho
w my voice disappeared. In less time than it takes to tell, an improbably fast wall of dust shot over our heads and past us into the trees on the far side of the stream. The horses were knocked down and the trees, hammered by this burning wind, whipped over, all at once, bending almost to the point of breaking before snapping back. Only then did I notice the terrible sound, a noise louder than any I have ever heard, a deafening thunderlike noise that went on and on. When the wind had stopped, I could not restrain myself any longer. I got up and looked back.

  The sky above the trees had turned brassy gold. Pink overtones shadowed the sides of my vision, striated clouds visible overhead, picked out by brilliant shafts of illumination. As it faded, the sky turned blood red, with streaks of vermilion showing here and there. Towering into the sky was a black, mushroom-shaped cloud, streaked with red, as of fire boiling in its depths. “Good God!” I said. “Holmes, you must see this!” If his ears were ringing as badly as mine, I doubt that he heard me.

  The dark cloud grew larger, blotting out the sky, causing a sort of artificial evening. By this time the others, seeing that I had not come to harm, had joined me. The horses, mercifully unhurt, were also on their feet. My eyes seemed to have recovered, although there were still dark afterimages floating before me.

  I turned to Holmes, who bore the same uncharacteristic grim smile I had noticed at the mound.

  “Oh, Watson,” he said, “We’re fools ... fools! It’s so plain to me now. Perhaps I have grown old and feeble-minded while tending my bees. That devil Moriarty! Damn his soul. Seventeen years beyond the grave, and he still almost gets his revenge.”

  I stammered some foolish question.

  “It’s all here, man,” he said, brandishing the document. “During the period Moriarty was a working astronomer, he observed the breakup of a comet, and calculated the exact orbits of the individual pieces. He determined that one of them was in fact going to collide with the Earth, and figured out precisely where and when. No doubt a mind like his savored this knowledge for many years. He realized that, when he and I finally came to grips, he might not be the victor; and he formulated an ingeniously simple way to assure that his vengeance would be enacted. His henchman came here, to Tunguska, and built the mound.”