This below is a short story written by science-writer John Gribbin. It first appeared in the January 1990 issue of Analog, and then more recently in his collection Don’t Look Back, published by Elsewhen.
It is printed here with Dr Gribbin’s permission. You can read an interview with him about the short story here.
If you spot any typos/stray words etc, that is because I had to scrape the text from images I took. I’ve done my best to tidy up the text/correct strays etc. Please point them out if you see them!
The Carbon Papers
“Parcel for you.” It was totally unexpected, I scarcely ever even get letters, let alone parcels, and it certainly wasn’t my birthday.
“For me?” The postman was obviously used to dealing with half-asleep people clutching pieces of toast.
“Name Murray? Right?” I nodded.
“Sign here.”
I did so, and sticking the toast in my mouth for safekeeping, carried the package over to the table. It was sealed with tape and tied with string, which seemed to be taking security a little too far. Definitely, a two-handed job to open it. I finished the toast, gulped a swig of coffee, and set to work on the wrappings with the bread knife. The security didn’t stop there. Under the first layer of paper there was a letter; and under the letter was another layer of wrapping, an old, brown paper parcel, secured not with tape but with a genuine – as far as I could tell – wax seal. In fact, two wax seals, securing paper and string, and bearing a claw imprint, written in a circle, like a postmark – “Cox’s Bank, Charing Cross.”
I was late. I didn’t want to miss the bus. But I couldn’t resist a quick look first. The covering letter was from a firm of lawyers – impressive address, Inner Temple, London. But it didn’t say much. They had the pleasure to be my obedient servant, and it was their duty under the terms of some arrangement made in 1890, exactly 100 years ago this week, to convey this package to me, the heir of one William Arrol James, in accordance with the wishes of some old doctor, one John H. Watson, M.D.
I glanced at the clock. I’d probably missed the bus already. And I hadn’t learned anything useful at all. Didn’t even know I had an ancestor called William Arrol James – though my grandmother’s maiden name was James, so he might have been an uncle of hers, assuming they’d got their facts right. It was a big, Victorian family; that’s all I ever knew about them, and more than I particularly wanted to know. I had my own life to lead, here, in the present.
It didn’t look as if the parcel contained anything valuable. But I was late anyway, so what the hell. The knife did job its on the string, and I managed to lift one of the seals off more or less intact, as a souvenir. The other one crumbled into pieces as I pulled the parcel open. It was full of papers. Some old newspaper cuttings; a sheaf of typewritten pages, with the heading “On the Retardation of Infrared Flux by the Gaseous Carbonic Acid Constituent of Planetary Atmospheres’ by W.A. James; and a thick wad of manuscript, handwritten in an old-fashioned but clear style with black ink. I pushed the typescript and the newspaper to one side, clearing a space on the table. Carbonic acid fluxes, whatever they were, were way over my head. But one more coffee and a quick look at the handwritten stuff wouldn’t do any harm. It wasn’t a letter. It was laid out like a story, with a heading at the top – The Carbonic Acid Affair. But it read as if it was addressed directly to me.
The Carbonic Acid Affair
In taking up my pen to record the details of the curious business of the carbonic acid affair, I know that I am acting against the express wishes of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, and in defiance of instructions from representatives of Her Majesty’s Government. But in fairness to the memory of an honest man, whose great contribution to scientific knowledge might otherwise go unreported, I cannot let this matter rest with the official histories of our time. By the time you read these words, the name of William Arrol James will be no more than a footnote in history. Yet if his contribution to science is correct, as I believe it to be, the carbonic acid business will, for good or ill, be part of public debate, whatever the wishes of governments. Honours and recognition may have passed your ancestor by; his life has been cruelly cut short. For this, I must take some of the blame myself. But at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that his heirs will discover the truth, and may even, if they wish, be able to gain some belated recognition for this true genius of the Victorian age.
The affair began in the second week of November, in the year 1889. A dense, yellow fog settled upon London. I had got into the habit of visiting my old friend in the rooms we had formerly shared in Baker Street, at least twice a week. His manner worried me. He alternated between bouts of frenetic activity, and periods of listless torpor that in a lesser man I would have termed laziness. His mind lacked the intellectual challenge of some great criminal case on which to exercise its talents, and I feared that he had recourse, more often than was medically wise, to a 7 percent solution of cocaine. I almost wished that some master criminal would take advantage of the fog enshrouding the city to perpetrate some act to provide a new challenge for Holmes, and to restore him to his old spirits.
Salvation came in the homely form of Mrs. Hudson.
“A young lady to see you, Mr. Holmes.”
“At this hour? What do you say, Watson? Shall we receive her?”
“Oh, by all means, Holmes.” Nothing could have pleased me more. In my experience of Holmes’s affairs, the arrival of young ladies, without prior appointment, at unusual hours was always likely to involve some problem worthy of his mind.
He sighed, and stretched his long legs in front of the fire. “Very well, Mrs. Hudson. But she must take us as she finds us, if she has any aversion to smoke, then I fear she has come to the wrong rooms.”
“The smoke and clutter of a bachelor’s rooms are the least of my concerns, Mr. Holmes.”
A slight girl, no more than twenty-five years old, and dressed in black which made the red of her hair all the more striking, had stepped from behind Mrs. Hudson and across the threshold.
“Forgive my presumption. But you are the only person who can help.”
“Pray, take a seat, Miss -” Holmes stood, nodding to Mrs. Hudson that all was well.
“James. Felicity James.” She took the proffered chair. “And this, Miss James, is my friend and colleague -“
“Dr. John Watson, I have read your booklets, Dr. Watson. A Study in Scarlet, and The Sign of Four. They are the reason I am here.”
Holmes raised one eyebrow.
“Your fame, Watson, seems to have gone before you.” He turned to the girl again. “Are you sure it is I you wish to see, Miss James, and not Dr. Watson?”
“Oh, please both of you, I am sure. But it is you, Mr. Holmes, that is the detective. Only you can help me now.” Holmes returned to his seat. “James. The name is a common enough one, but seems familiar.”
“Murder, Holmes.” It was my turn to speak. “A straightforward murder, reported in the Chronicle this morning.” I had been searching out the paper while he had exchanged pleasantries with Miss James, happy, for once, to be ahead of Holmes in something. “Here it is. William Arrol James, shot dead by a burglar he disturbed in his rooms. Nothing there to tax your powers, I am sure.”
“But he wasn’t.” The girl was increasingly agitated, twisting her gloves in her hands, leaning forward in her seat and glancing from Holmes to myself.
“Wasn’t murdered?”
“No, no. William is dead. Shot dead. But not murdered by a common thief. He had been in fear of his life for weeks. There was some plot against him. He came to me, to tell me; he made me promise that if anything suspicious happened to him I would not let the matter rest. I thought he was ill, overworking; I took no notice. I told him to rest. But then this happened. And the police say the matter is clear, that the rooms had been ransacked, that William surprised a burglar in the act and was shot trying to apprehend him. But, Mr. Holmes, if that was an ordinary burglar, how could William have known in advance that it would happen?”
“Such things do occur, Miss James. The world is full of coincidences. Had we time, I am sure Dr. Watson would delight in telling you the story of the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant. But with nothing more than this to go on, we must accept that the police know their business.”
“But there is more.”
“Ah.” He stood and began to pace the room, long-fingered hands clasped behind his back. “I thought as much.” “There are papers.” She pulled them from her bag, and since Holmes ignored them, she offered them to me. I read the title aloud; those same papers, together with the newspaper reports of the James murder, accompany this memoire.
“Carbonic acid hardly seems a matter for murder, Miss James. Your brother, I take it, was a scientist; but what is the significance of these carbonic acid papers?”
“My brother, sir, was not just a scientist, but a great scientist. He was older than I am, by nine years, and he had already begun to make a reputation for himself. I know nothing of science, but I do know that he was highly regarded by his peers. Last year, there was talk that he might be elected to the Royal Society by the age of forty. He had set himself upon a course unique in the academic world, or so I believe, the study of the atmospheres of the planets, combining elements of both chemistry and astronomy, and more besides. In scientific terms, William was a polymath – although I must say, in matters of the everyday world he could be much more obtuse.”
“It is so often the way.” Holmes had taken up a position by the window, gazing out into the swirling fog. “The mind is like an attic, with room to store only a certain amount of furniture. Fill it up with science, and there is no room left for anything else. Which is why I have taken such care to avoid learning any science outside of a few items with some forensic value. I leave such things, and those papers, in the hands of Watson, here. But go on – tell us more of your brother’s preoccupation.”
The story that Felicity James unfolded to us was a queer one, to be sure, but not, on the face of things, a murdering matter. William James had simply reached an impasse in his scientific career. After publishing several scientific papers and a learned monograph on the subject of planetary atmospheres, he had found it impossible to find anyone willing to take on his latest calculations. It was, he had told Felicity, the best work he had ever done, of incalculable importance to the future of mankind. Since she was only a girl, he had not tried to explain the details to her. But he had poured out his frustration at the response of the scientific community. Nobody would publish his calculations. The Royal Society refused to allow him to speak upon the subject; even Lockyer, at Nature, no stranger to controversy, had rejected the very papers that I now held in my hand, and at which I peered in, I must confess, incomprehension. This had gone on for months. At last, James had become convinced that there was a plot against him, a conspiracy to blacken his name, and to discredit his scientific work. He had been overlooked for advancement at the university, and no longer received invitations to lecture elsewhere. A broken man, he had poured out his worries to his sister, handed her the papers, and made her promise that if anything untoward happened to him she would see that they were published, somehow, somewhere.
“But I never expected this, Mr, Holmes.” By the end of her story, she was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I don’t care about the papers. You can keep them. But if there was a conspiracy against my brother, I want the assassins brought to justice. You must help!”
He turned from the window.
“We will do what we can. Watson, see, has made a note of your late brother’s address. In the morning, we will visit the scene of the crime. But you must rest, and leave all the worrying to us.”
“Thank you.” She smiled: “I begin to feel better already, knowing that you are taking up the case.”
The house was tall and narrow, part of a terrace facing on to a square near the river. If anything, the fog was worse there, with the upper storeys of the terrace almost lost from view. I was glad to get out of the cab and inside the building, where we were confronted by a familiar figure.
“Sergeant Bull!”
“Good day to you, Mr. Holmes.” He touched a finger to his forehead in salute. “I didn’t know you were in on this case.”
“Yes, here I am, Bull. But a bit late in the day. I suppose everything’s been tidied up by now?”
“Mostly so, down here at any rate. But not at the scene of the crime.” He inclined his head towards the staircase.
“Up there, eh?” Holmes rubbed his long hands together.
“On the top floor?”
“Indeed so, Mr. Holmes. The professor’s lab’ratory, they calls it. With a window opening on to the roof, where the murderer made his escape.” The stolid sergeant shook his head. “We’ll never catch that one, not now. And it hardly seems worth a man’s life, the few trinkets he got away with.” “Yes, Bull, I’m sure it’s a very sad case. But you don’t mind if I take a look around? With my colleague Dr. Watson?”
“Oh no sir. Not if you’re on the case.”
“Good, good. Top floor, you say? Come, Watson, we’ve very little time.”
I tried to interrogate my colleague as we hurried up the stairs, but he was a flight ahead of me before we reached the top.
“Come, Holmes,” I puffed at last, “what is this nonsense? James is dead. Our bird has flown. Why the sudden hurry?” “I am expecting a visitor. There is no time to lose.” His sharp eyes darted about the room. Along one wall there was a long table, which had clearly served the occupant of the house as a chemical laboratory. The usual retorts and tubes were there, some of them smashed, and the remains of what seemed to have been a large glass tank. For some reason, this fascinated Holmes. He examined the fragments of glass carefully, then turned to the floor under the table. There was a damp patch. Removing his glove, he rubbed a finger over the damp wood, and held it to his tongue.
“Careful Holmes! There could be any number of poisons in that brew.”
“Not at all, Watson.” He shook his head. “Come, taste for yourself. Salt. Nothing more than brine. Just as I suspected.”
I followed his example, rubbing the damp patch with a finger and tasting the salty residue of the puddle that had lain there. While I did so, Holmes had crossed the room to the window, flinging it wide and gazing out onto the rooftops beyond. The square below was lost in the fog. I joined him.
“That is where the murderer made his escape, eh Holmes?”
“At least, Watson, it is where the weapon made its escape.” He was examining the window frame, carefully. First the bottom, then the sides, and finally the top. He pulled a glass from his overcoat pocket, and peered intently through it at the paintwork just above our heads.
“Look at this, Watson.”
I did as he instructed. A deep indentation and several smaller scratches marked the paintwork.
“I fear I don’t see the significance of this, Holmes. Just a few scratches.”
But he had already turned, and was flinging open the cupboards that lined the other wall of the laboratory.
“Those few scratches, Watson, suffice to confirm that Professor William Arrol James was not murdered at all.”
“Not murdered? But, Holmes, his sister has identified the body.”
“Aha!” He had found what he wanted in the cupboard. Some lengths of copper wiring, two copper plates and a series of electrical cells. Quite normal equipment to find in any scientific laboratory. I failed to see why they should be so pleasing to him.
He turned back to me, and, flipping the tails of his coat back out of the way, clasped his hands behind his back.
“Watson, you must have realised, from the story Miss James told us, that murder was the least likely cause of her brother’s death. It is given to very few people to know in advance that they will be murdered, and to make appropriate arrangements with their kin. But there is a form of death which is very often planned in advance, and before which the victim usually communicates with his friends or relations.”
“Suicide?”
“Exactly, Watson.”
“But how?”
“That is what we came here to find out. It was, of course, obvious to me that James had killed himself. But how? And why? As to the former, his profession itself gave me the clue. A chemical meteorologist, one of the most brilliant minds of the century, he would be sure to have devised some ingenious trick that made use of his special skills. The brine puddle, the scratches on the window and the electrical apparatus show just how ingenious he was. A sad loss, indeed, to science.”
“But Holmes, how?”
“You mean you haven’t seen it yet? Come, Watson, what is produced by the action of electricity upon a brine solution?” My puzzled expression seemed to exasperate him. He took a pace towards me, thumping his right fist into his left palm. “Hydrogen gas, my dear Watson. And what is the most important property of hydrogen gas?”
I knew that one.
“Why, of course, it is lighter than air.”
“Indeed, Watson. Lighter than air. Suppose, now, that you stood in the room, about here,” he had taken up a position by the window, “and you had in your hand a small revolver, attached by a cord to a balloon, full of hydrogen gas, floating just outside the window. If you were to release your grip on the revolver, as you fell with a mortal wound in your temple, what would happen to it?”
“Why Holmes?” My eyes darted from his upraised hand to the window! “If the balloon were big enough, it would carry the revolver out into the air. And on the way…@
“Yes.” He smiled. “On the way, Watson, it would bang not against the bottom of the window frame, but the top. Once out in the night, it might drift for miles, unobserved through the fog, before the balloon would burst and deposit the revolver in the garden of some astonished citizen. The picture is clear. James killed himself, in such a way as to make it seem like murder, after alerting his sister to the possibility.” “But why would he do that? To avoid the scandal of a suicide in the family?”
“I think not. James, remember, was a scientist. In my experience, such men are little concerned about social niceties of that kind. No, Watson, I flatter myself that James had another motive, and one in which he has succeeded. He must, of course, have known of his sister’s taste in reading matter. His mysterious warnings to her, and the nature of his death, were intended to achieve one object, apart from his own departure from a world he had found intolerable. Simple suicide would hardly be a matter to attract the attention of one who specialises in the more intricate problems of detection. But murder, foretold, in advance, with a hint of mysterious plots that, James reasoned, should be sure to attract the attention of the man.”
“Holmes! You can’t mean -?”
“But I do, Watson. This elaborate ploy, which has stimulated me out of the lethargy on which you remarked only yesterday, was designed to attract my attention and bring me here to this building.”
“But why?”
“As to that,” he cocked his head slightly, and I heard the sound of a heavy tread making a measured way up the stair, “I believe that just the man we need to explain the rest of the mystery is with us now. Welcome, Mycroft!” He turned with those words, extending his left arm with a flourish to the door, which now framed the tall, portly figure of Sherlock Holmes’s elder brother. I sat down, astonished, on the tall stool alongside the long table.
I knew very little about Mycroft Holmes, except that he worked in some senior and secret capacity for the government. The brothers seldom met, and Sherlock seldom spoke of their relationship. But I had sensed a certain sibling rivalry. If Sherlock Holmes had a genius for detection, his brother was comparably brilliant, in his own way. Now I understood the urgency in Holmes’s mind to solve the case before Mycroft appeared. But how had he known that his brother would appear?
“I had hoped to find you alone, Sherlock. I have left Lestrade downstairs. I suppose it is too much to hope that Watson and yourself are still in ignorance about this affair?”
“Why Mycroft, we know very little, I assure you. Simply that the greatest scientist of his generation has been hounded to his death, by you, in order to ensure that his studies of carbonic acid vapour are never published; that he committed suicide,” the barb, to Sherlock Holmes’s evident delight, shot home, and Mycroft gave a little start, “in a manner which Watson will be glad to elaborate on for you later, and that you are here to demand our silence, for the good of the country. You will need to be persuasive indeed, in order to achieve that end. I believe Watson is already planning another of his little books.”
I was completely left out of the conversation. I would have to wait until later to find out how Holmes had known of the involvement of government agents in the plot. Although, on reflection, as I sat and listened to the two of them, it became clear to me, as it must have been to James himself, that nobody else could have organised so thorough a suppression of James’s work. No doubt Holmes, with his agile mind, had worked that out even before Felicity James had left his rooms.
“If James committed suicide – and if you say so, then I don’t doubt that it is true – that may be the best piece of news in all of this affair. No, I don’t wish such a death upon any man. But we had feared French agents. There are papers missing-“
“We know of their whereabouts.”
“Then that is good news indeed, and I am almost glad to find you here, after all. An explanation is certainly required, but it must go no further than this room. Not even to the ears of Miss Felicity James. You must persuade her, Sherlock, that her brother died at the hands of a common thief, and that his talk of plots was no more than the tortured imagination of a mind pressed too far by scientific labours. It is indeed,” and here he turned his attention to me, “for the good of the country.”
“And just what is so secret and important about carbonic acid vapour? How are the French involved?”
“You have put your finger on the nub, Dr. Watson. Allow me to explain. The story goes back almost seventy years. The Napoleonic wars had not long ended; relations with France were even more precarious than they are today. It was a Frenchman, Baron Fourier, who first studied the puzzle of how the world keeps warm, in the 1820s.”
“How the world keeps warm?” I could not keep silent. “My dear sir, the Earth keeps warm because the Sun shines upon it! Why, the Greeks knew that!”
“Exactly so, Dr. Watson. But I would be grateful if you did not interrupt. Baron Fourier showed that there is more to the story than this. If you have a little box, with a glass lid, that you keep out in the sunlight for some time, then the air in the box becomes warmer than the air outside. The Baron explained that in the same way the blanket of air around the Earth keeps the whole planet warmer than it would otherwise be. He was beginning to investigate how mankind’s activities might alter that natural state of affairs, when he died.” Mycroft paused, reflectively. Sherlock Holmes stepped into the gap.
“Of natural causes?”
“Officially, he died of a disease that he contracted while in Egypt with Napoleon. Unofficially, while I do not entirely approve of all the actions of my predecessors, they were
usually effective.”
“I begin to see the drift of your argument. Pray continue.” “Nothing more was heard of this business until 1863. Then a British scientist, John Tyndall, picked up the thread. He studied the transmission of heat through the atmosphere, and through certain other gases.”
“Carbonic acid vapour!”
“Indeed, Watson. He found that this vapour, the dioxide of carbon, is a particularly effective heat trap. Fortunately, my predecessors were able to persuade him to take his studies in a slightly different direction from those of Baron Fourier, and there was no need for any drastic measures. If you search out the volume of the Philosophical Magazine for 1863, you will find that Tyndall is now immortalised for his suggestion that the great Ice Age was caused by a lowering of the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, allowing more heat to escape into space. Tyndall is still alive, I sincerely hope that no news of this affair, or of James’s work, reaches his ears.”
“I see it now.” Sherlock Holmes seemed satisfied. I, however, was still in the dark.
“Damned if I do, Holmes. You might let me in on the secret.”
“It really is quite simple, Watson, now that all the facts are before us. If a reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide in the air makes the world colder, then increasing the amount must make it warmer, like the inside of a greenhouse.”
“Of course. But so what?””
“How is carbon dioxide produced, Watson? From the combustion of carbon-“
“Well, yes, of course, but -“
“And what is the most common form of carbon?” He had crossed to the fireplace, and was holding up a black lump from the bucket beside it. “Coal! The very basis of our Empire!” Flinging the lump of coal down, and brushing his hands together in an ineffectual attempt to remove the grime, he began to pace the room.
“The British Empire is built on coal. Coal for our great industries, coal to power the ships of the Royal Navy and of the merchant fleet. And all the while, making the world heat up like a greenhouse. How long do we have, Mycroft?” He turned on his brother with the question.
“According to James, perhaps a hundred years before the problem becomes acute. By then, we expect human ingenuity to have found a solution to the problem. But if the discovery were publicised too widely, and dramatically, then the French…”
“Ah yes, the French. Let me see what is in your mind.” Sherlock Holmes paused, head bowed, with a finger to his lips. “I believe I understand the workings of the political animal. Britain has a great Empire, an Empire founded on steam and coal. France, and other lesser nations, are jealous of this. No other nation has the resources of coal that Britain has, and no other nation uses as much coal as Britain does. If it were widely known that the burning of this coal may, in the long term, convert the world into a hothouse, with spreading deserts and crops failing in the fields, then no doubt the French might try to orchestrate a tide of international opposition to the activities of the British Empire, a league of nations seeking to impose restrictions and quotas on the amount of coal consumed. By offering such a seemingly reasonable case, to protect the globe from disastrous heating, they could restrict the use of coal, and cripple the British Empire at a stroke.”
“Exactly so, Sherlock. The choice is clear. If we keep this matter quiet then our Empire, and its science, can continue to grow. By the end of the twentieth century, surely that science will be able to solve the problem of this growing greenhouse effect. But if we fail to keep the matter quiet, then a clamouring of the nations of continental Europe may be able to use this imagined threat as a rallying call. At best, it would mean war, to maintain our way of life. At worst, imposing be no growth in our industrial and scientific prowess, and their will upon us in the name of fairness. Then, there would there would be no advanced twentieth century civilisation to ensure the well-being of mankind.”
***
And so, my story is complete. Faced with such a choice, what action could we take but to agree with Mycroft Holmes’s demand for discretion? Felicity James has been left not only without a brother, but with her faith in the remarkable abilities of Sherlock Holmes completely (and quite unjustifiably) destroyed; her brother’s reputation is left untainted by any hint of suicide, but without the gloss that his scientific achievements truly merit. To you, his heir of the late twentieth century, the carbonic acid problem may well have been solved many years ago, and this story out of your past will mean little. But to me, it means a great deal for honour to have ensured that the genius of William Arrol James is known a hundred years from now.
The last page of the manuscript was signed, in a bold hand, ‘John H. Watson’, and dated 17 January 1890. What would you have done with it? I could hardly send the typescript of a hundred-year-old paper off to Nature for publication in 1990. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t know how to rework my ancestor’s paper to make it presentable today. But Dr. Watson was an accomplished storyteller, and his accounts of the cases he worked on with Sherlock Holmes are still widely read today. As an eye-witness, he can certainly describe those events of November 1889 better than I could ever dream of doing. I needed a home for that description, in a magazine that regularly publishes popular, factual accounts of scientific work. I did have just a little trouble persuading the editors to take it on; they usually prefer descriptions of more recent discoveries. But in the end they agreed, provided that I wrote a few words to explain why the tale had not been told before. It’s too late to make a difference to William Arrol James; but like Dr. Watson before me, I’m glad to have made the effort to ensure that his story is not forgotten, and that his true genius is at last acknowledged.