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Holmes's crow of "Precisely!" rivaled the roar of the falls. "One set of tracks you knew to be my own, and the others you took to be that of the black-clad Englishman-the very Napoleon of crime!"
"Yes."
"Having seen these two sets approaching the falls, and none returning, you then rushed to the very brink of the falls and found-what?"
"Signs of a struggle at the lip of the precipice leading to the great torrent itself."
"And what did you conclude from this?"
"That you and Moriarty had plunged to your deaths, locked in mortal combat."
"Exactly so, Watson! The very same conclusion I myself would have drawn based on those observations!"
"Thankfully, though, I turned out to be incorrect."
"Did you, now?"
"Why, yes. Your presence here attests to that."
"Perhaps," said Holmes. "But I think otherwise. Consider, Watson! You were on the scene, you saw what happened, and for three years-three years, man!-you believed me to be dead. We had been friends and colleagues for a decade at that point. Would the Holmes you knew have let you mourn him for so long without getting word to you? Surely you must know that I trust you at least as much as I do my brother Mycroft, whom I later told you was the only one I had made privy to the secret that I still lived."
"Well," I said, "since you bring it up, I was slightly hurt by that. But you explained your reasons to me when you returned."
"It is a comfort to me, Watson, that your ill-feelings were assuaged. But I wonder, perchance, if it was more you than I who assuaged them."
"Eh?"
"You had seen clear evidence of my death, and had faithfully if floridly recorded the same in the chronicle you so appropriately dubbed 'The Final Problem.'"
"Yes, indeed. Those were the hardest words I had ever written."
"And what was the reaction of your readers once this account was published in the Strand?"
I shook my head, recalling. "It was completely unexpected," said I. "I had anticipated a few polite notes from strangers mourning your passing, since the stories of your exploits had been so warmly received in the past. But what I got instead was mostly anger and outrage-people demanding to hear further adventures of yours."
"Which of course you believed to be impossible, seeing as how I was dead."
"Exactly. The whole thing left a rather bad taste, I must say. Seemed very peculiar behavior."
"But doubtless it died down quickly," said Holmes.
"You know full well it did not. I have told you before that the onslaught of letters, as well as personal exhortations wherever I would travel, continued unabated for years. In fact, I was virtually at the point of going back and writing up one of your lesser cases I had previously ignored as being of no general interest simply to get the demands to cease, when, much to my surprise and delight-"
"Much to your surprise and delight, after an absence of three years less a month, I turned up in your consulting rooms, disguised, if I recall correctly, as a shabby book collector. And soon you had fresh adventures to chronicle, begi
"Yes," said I. "Wondrous it was."
"But Watson, let us consider the facts surrounding my apparent death at the falls of Reichenbach on May 4th, 1891. You, the observer on the scene, saw the evidence, and, as you wrote in 'The Final Problem,' many experts scoured the lip of the falls and came to precisely the same conclusion you had-that Moriarty and I had plunged to our deaths."
"But that conclusion turned out to be wrong."
Holmes beamed intently. "No, my Good Watson, it turned out to be unacceptable-unacceptable to your faithful readers. And that is where all the problems stem from. Remember Schrödinger's cat in the sealed box? Moriarty and I at the falls present a very similar scenario: he and I went down the path into the cul-de-sac, our footprints leaving impressions in the soft earth. There were only two possible outcomes at that point: either I would exit alive, or I would not. There was no way out, except to take that same path back away from the falls. Until someone came and looked to see whether I had re-emerged from the path, the outcome was unresolved. I was both alive and dead-a collection of possibilities. But when you arrived, those possibilities had to collapse into a single reality. You saw that there were no footprints returning from the falls-meaning that Moriarty and I had struggled until at last we had both plunged over the edge into the icy torrent. It was your act of seeing the results that forced the possibilities to be resolved. In a very real sense, my good, dear friend, you killed me."
My heart was pounding in my chest. "I tell you, Holmes, nothing would have made me more happy than to have seen you alive!"
"I do not doubt that, Watson-but you had to see one thing or the other. You could not see both. And, having seen what you saw, you reported your findings: first to the Swiss police, and then to the reporter for the Journal de Genève, and lastly in your full account in the pages of the Strand."
I nodded.
"But here is the part that was not considered by Schrödinger when he devised the thought experiment of the cat in the box. Suppose you open the box and find the cat dead, and later you tell your neighbor about the dead cat-and your neighbor refuses to believe you when you say that the cat is dead. What happens if you go and look in the box a second time?"
"Well, the cat is surely still dead."
"Perhaps. But what if thousands-nay, millions!-refuse to believe the account of the original observer? What if they deny the evidence? What then, Watson?"
"I-I do not know."
"Through the sheer stubbor
"And so?"
"And so the world, which should have one concrete reality, is rendered unresolved, uncertain, adrift. As the first observer on the scene at Reichenbach, your interpretation should take precedence. But the stubbor
"But this is all too fantastic, Holmes!"
"Eliminate the impossible, Watson, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Which brings me now to the question we were engaged by this avatar of Mycroft to solve: this paradox of Fermi. Where are the alien beings?"
"And you say you have solved that?"
"Indeed I have. Consider the method by which mankind has been searching for these aliens."
"By wireless, I gather-trying to overhear their chatter on the ether."
"Precisely! And when did I return from the dead, Watson?"
"April of 1894."
"And when did that gifted Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, invent the wireless?"
"I have no idea."
"In eighteen hundred and ninety-five, my good Watson. The following year! In all the time that mankind has used radio, our entire world has been an unresolved quandary! An uncollapsed wave front of possibilities!"
"Meaning?"
"Meaning the aliens are there, Watson-it is not they who are missing, it is us! Our world is out of synch with the rest of the universe. Through our failure to accept the unpleasant truth, we have rendered ourselves potential rather than actual."
I had always thought my companion a man with a generous regard for his own stature, but surely this was too much. "You are suggesting, Holmes, that the current unresolved state of the world hinges on the fate of you yourself?"