The Second Mack Reynolds Megapack by Mack Reynolds

Author:Mack Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, sci-fi, pulp fiction, short stories
ISBN: 9781479402960
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2014-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

THE ADVENTURE OF THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

Some ago I wrote a pastiche based on Sherlock Holmes and hopefully sent it off to the late Tony Boucher, as I wrote earlier, possibly the most beloved editor by writers that I’ve ever worked with. Belonging to the Baker Street Irregulars himself, he was horrified at the many mistakes I had made in depicting the great sleuth. He suggested I turn it over to one of the faithful members of that club for a rewrite, since there were several in the s-f field, and that the story then come out as a collaboration. It wound up with August Derleth and, over the years, we did several similar pastiches together.

But the challenge remained, and I studied up on the Conan Doyle stories and wrote this one, which was first published in Analog and later republished in the fifth annual Analog anthology of the best stories from that magazine. It was so well received that I took another hero of my youth, Tarzan, and wrote a story of his senile years called Relic. It appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (and was, by the way, my 500th sale). Although I haven’t gotten around to doing a senile Tom Swift, I’ll sue any fellow writer who steals the idea and does it first.

—Mack Reynolds

* * * *

From the chess problem, over which he had been nodding, my companion slowly raised his head. His aged-crooked fingers relinquished their hold on the knight— I suspected he had forgotten the square from which he had originally lifted it—and he leaned back.

His once lean, hawklike face worked before he cackled, “We are about to have company, Doctor.”

London was lost in fog, a heavy autumnal curtain shutting the city away from our lodgings in Baker Street, and at first there was only the distant hum of diminished traffic that was the pulse of the city and the several small noises of water dripping; then I heard the low purr of a heavy vehicle, traveling a short distance, stopping, then coming forward again.

“Must be looking for this number,” the aged detective prattled. “Who else at this hour of the night, eh?”

“Whom else,” I said. Sometimes I suspect he thinks himself living in the days of nearly half a century ago, when clients were continually presenting themselves at odd hours. I have wondered if it wasn’t a mistake to allow his relatives to coax me into returning to the rooms at 221b Baker Street to act as his companion in his final years. They had explained, at the time convincingly, that the octogenarian sleuth had never been happy on the bee farm in Sussex to which he had retired at the age of sixty in 1914.

“Eh,” he was saying, listening intently. “He has left his car just a few doors away. He has gone to the door, eh? He has flashed his torch on the number. Heh, that is not the number, but it cannot be far away. Now, eh? He returns to his car but does not get in.

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