One warm April evening, the Falladas had been invited to our house for a barbecue. Around nine o’clock, Kirsten Fallada rang my mother to ask if she could bring a guest; naturally, my mother said yes. Half an hour later, they arrived with a man we all recognised as the famous Commander Carlsen. Only that morning, a national news magazine had reported that Carlsen had turned down a sum of nearly two million dollars for his book on the space vampires. For more than two years, his whereabouts had been a secret; Universe magazine reported that he was living in a Buddhist monastery in the Sea of Tranquillity area of the moon. And now the legendary figure strolled onto our patio and began to talk about the art of frying reindeer steaks. . .
Even then, when he was approaching eighty, Carlsen was a big man, well over six feet tall. At a distance, you would have taken him for fifty; you had to get close up to observe the fine wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. My sister Marcia said he was the most attractive man she had ever met.
It is unnecessary to say that I spent the evening in a state of tongue-tied hero worship. Like all schoolboys, I wanted to be a space explorer. I should add that most of the family shared the emotion; it was like having Marco Polo or Lawrence of Arabia to dinner.
For the next couple of hours the conversation revolved around general topics, and we all relaxed. I was allowed a mug of homemade beer with my chicken. When nobody was looking, I sneaked to the barrel and refilled it. Towards midnight my mother told me to go to bed; when she told me a third time, I went around the table saying good night. When I got to Carlsen, I stood staring at him, then blurted out: “Could I ask you something?” My mother said: “No, go to bed,” but Carlsen asked me what it was. “Do you really live in a monastery on the moon?” Dad said: “That’s enough, Siggy. Do as your mother says.” But Carlsen didn’t seem offended. He smiled and said: “Why, no. As a matter of fact, I’ve been living in a lamasery at Kokungchak.” “Where’s that?” I asked (ignoring my father’s head-shaking). “In the central highlands of Tibet.” So there it was. The secret that any journalist would have given his eyes for — handed out to a twelve-year-old schoolboy. And still I wasn’t satisfied. “Why don’t you come and live here at Cambridge? Nobody’d bother you.” He patted me on the head and said; “I may at that.” Then he told my father: “I’m going back to Storavan, in northern Sweden.”
At this point I sat and listened, and nobody told me to go to bed. Now the ice was broken, and Carlsen didn’t seem to mind answering questions. My sister Marcia took up the questioning (as a child she was known as Keyhole Kate because of her insatiable curiosity). She asked him what he’d been doing in Tibet; he said he’d gone there to escape the publicity after the vampire story appeared in Universe magazine. [The Killers from the Stars: The True Story of the Stranger Incident by Richard Foster and Jennifer Geijerstam — 26 January, 2112, later expanded into the book of the same title.] My father asked whether trying to escape publicity didn’t produce the opposite effect. Carlsen said that was true, but it hadn’t always been true. When the vampires were destroyed [in 2080], he needed time to be alone and think. Fallada needed time to rewrite his book. If the full story had been published then, their lives would have become a hell of nonstop publicity. Whatever happened, they had to avoid that.
At some point, I switched on my portable tape recorder; then I fell asleep behind the armchair. My father carried me up to bed. The next morning, Carlsen had gone. But my recorder was still running under the armchair. And I still possess the recording of the conversation. Most of what was said appeared later in Carlsen’s book The Stranger Incident. But that book ends with the story of the recovery of the Stranger and its landing on the moon. Carlsen went on to discuss his life in Storavan and his work on vampire theory with Ernst von Geijerstam; this ended with von Geijerstam’s death in a skiing accident at the age of 105. Carlsen was convinced that von Geijerstam would have died anyway. His “benevolent vampirism” prolonged his life, but only by slowing down the normal metabolic change. The problem, Carlsen said, was not merely to slow it down, but to reverse it.
This idea was apparently new to Fallada, who says at this point: “It is a physical impossibility to reverse time.”
Carlsen replies: “Time in the abstract, yes. But not living time. In our universe, time is another name for metabolism — or process. In our bodies, this process ticks on, like the hour hand of a clock, gradually burning away our lives. But every time we concentrate, we slow this process — that is why scientists and philosophers tend to live longer than most men. Benevolent vampirism increases the length of human life because it increases the power to concentrate. The Space Vampires acquired a kind of immortality by concentrating for a thousand years on avoiding destruction in a black hole. But they failed to recognise the meaning of their discovery. They thought they had to keep on absorbing life energy to keep alive. They were wrong. It only stimulated them, like a glass of whisky.”
My father interrupts: “But if they’d grasped the meaning of their discovery, would that have made them immortal?”
“No. Because they still hadn’t realised that the true solution lies in time reversal. I should have realised it that day in Downing Street [He apparently is addressing Fallada.] All that power flowing from the Nioth-Korghai. . . [words inaudible here; someone is throwing logs on the fire].
Fallada asks: “Then why were the Nioth-Korghai mortal?”
“Because they had pursued a line of development that involved abandoning their bodies. That made them subject to absolute time. The body protects us from absolute time. Which means that we have less freedom of movement, but more possibility of control. Our physical time can be reversed. Not permanently, of course. But for a split second, as you might halt a stream for a moment, or as the wind can hold back the tide. . .”
Fallada: “Are you telling me that this supersedes my theory of vampirism?”
Carlsen: “On the contrary, it completes it.”
My father: “But is there any evidence that we could achieve time reversal?”
Carlsen: “I have done it.”
At which point, you would expect someone to ask how or when. Instead of which, my mother asks: “Would anyone like coffee?” and my sister says: “I’ll make it. . .” The conversation then returns to matters of vampirism and victimology — the title of von Geijerstam’s last book. At which point, the tape capsule runs out.
This was the only occasion on which I spoke to Carlsen. After the decision of the World Court to protect his privacy against journalists, he retired once more to Storavan. Five years later, I wrote to remind him of that evening, and to ask if I could call and see him when I came to Europe. He replied, courteously but firmly, that his researches had reached a crucial point, and that he was unable to receive visitors.
I saw him only once more — in his coffin. I arrived in Stockholm the day after his death was announced, and immediately hired a private plane to take me to Storavan. His third wife, Violetta, received me kindly, but told me it would be impossible to invite me to stay. But she allowed me to join them at dinner — Carlsen’s family seemed to be enormous — and then conducted me into the mausoleum behind the chapel. This was an octagonal room containing a number of stone sarcophagi. These, apparently, were the tombs of von Geijerstam’s ancestors. [Editor’s note: Buchbinder is mistaken; the tombs are those of the de la Gardie family.] Von Geijerstam’s body was not among them; his last request had been that it should be sunk, in a granite coffin, in the middle of the lake. In the centre of the room stood four copper sarcophagi. Mrs Carlsen told me that one of these contained the ashes of Queen Christina’s lover, Count Magnus. Next to this, on a stone platform, stood the sarcophagus of Olof Carlsen. The lid had been pulled down to reveal his face. I was amazed to see that he looked no older than when I had last seen him. If anything, he looked younger. I placed my hand on the sunburned forehead. It was cold and had the slackness of death; yet the mouth looked firm, as if he were pretending to be asleep. He looked so lifelike that I overcame my misgivings and asked Mrs Carlsen if the doctor had performed a lambda test. She said he had, and that it indicated a total cessation of all normal metabolic change.