Jens Olafsen had been a world-class climber of mountains, a fact of which he was immensely proud. Then he had begun to suffer arthritis, even at the early age of 29, and just like that, his climbing days were over. He had stayed on in his beloved ski resort of Altobello, surrounded by Alpine mountains, living in a flat in a building adjoining one of the largest hotels available, and he was still there when, in the late 1990s, the resort began to fall on hard times.
The snows weren’t arriving consistently—in fact, had never been truly consistent—and Altobello was facing competition from more northerly and higher resorts.
The cable car stopped running and the ski lifts were put out of action. The hotel closed, except for the bar, and soon Altobello was nothing but a beautiful relic of better times, frequented by hikers and occasional groups of skiers who made their way up from the little town below.
Even food became difficult. He couldn’t afford to run a car, but fortunately his few remaining neighbours didn’t object to running him into town or even picking up a bit of shopping for the old man.
Olafsen didn’t have too many visitors in those days, but the few he did have always tried to persuade him to move down into the town below, and to this he would never agree, arguing that the mountain air was healthy, that he loved to be surrounded by mountains and that his friends were all up in Altobello.
Few of his guests dared to allude to the strange disappearance of Olafsen’s father, Erik Olafsen.
Yet, the strange fact was that Jens Olafsen—who was a Dane, or a Swede, depending on his mood or who you asked—had chosen to live out his remaining days in the very ski resort where his father had gone missing in 1973, when Jens was still a relatively young man.
Almost the only person who dared to raise this subject with Jens Olafsen, and did so frequently, was his friend Marco Galli.
Galli, in fact, proposed to write a biography of Olafsen, in spite of Olafsen’s repeated insistence that his climbing achievements were too meagre and too long ago to attract an audience.
“It’s not about attracting an audience.” Galli insisted. “It’s about telling a story that deserves to be told.”
Eventually Olafsen consented to the idea.
It was a fine summer’s day when Galli knocked on Olafsen’s door, as usual, and the two men went to the balcony so that Galli could make more notes on Olafsen’s early life. The thing that was a little different about that particular day was that Galli could no longer dance around the topic of Olafsen’s father, and was determined to finally tackle it head-on.
“It has to be done.” said Galli.
“It’s not relevant to my life or to who I am.” said Olafsen.
“Your father is not relevant to your life?”
“We weren’t close.”
“Why don’t you tell me about him and let me decide what’s relevant and what isn’t?”
“How about we leave it for a few months?”
“But why? What’s going to change?” said Galli, tapping his pen against the arm of his wooden chair in frustration.
“I’m getting close.”
“Close?”
“Close to … well, maybe it’s best if I show you.”
Olafsen rose to his feet and went back into the cool interior of the apartment.
Galli remained on the balcony, waiting for him to return, but when Olafsen threw an sheaf of papers down on the large wooden table in his living room, Galli got up and went to look.
The papers were covered in numbers.
“What is this?” asked Galli, leafing through the old yellowed documents.
“I thought it was a code.” said Olafsen. “For decades I’ve tried to decipher it, without success.”
“Isn’t it a code?”
“No.” said Olafsen, with a laugh. “I honestly think the old fox just wanted to waste my time, but the joke’s on him. Now I probably know more about ciphers than almost anyone else alive.”
“What’s that, Danish humour?” said Galli.
“If you like.”
They stared at the papers.
“Well?” said Galli, finally.
“Well what?”
“Are you going to tell me what this is, if not a code?”
“I’ll have to explain the whole background.”
“That’s what I came here for.”
“I thought you just liked my company.”
“Well, you’re wrong.” said Galli. “I don’t like you at all.”
Olafsen laughed.
“I’ve never liked you.” he said.
“Of course not; you’re a misanthropist.” said Galli with a smile. “You hate everyone.”
“Let’s go back to the balcony.” said Olafsen. “I’ll tell you about my father, but I’ll need something in return.”
“What?”
“I need you to help me get to a certain location in the mountains. No proper climbing will be necessary, but it’s steep up there and you’ll need to fix up ropes. I can’t do it. My hands …”
He trailed off, holding his bony arthritic hands in front of him, fingers splayed.
“Certo.” said Galli. “If that’s what it takes.”
Olafsen began to tell Galli about his father. At first he presented only various assorted thoughts, but soon his story began to acquire more focus.
“He was a strange man. Eccentric. He had an unusual ability, which I have inherited, although not to the same extent. He had a kind of synaesthesia, where the senses become mixed up. Sights become sounds, or at least evocative of them, odours evoke textures, and so on. In particular, every number to him possessed a definite colour. I feel something of the same, but not as strongly as my father. What’s funny is, we never even agreed about the colour scheme. He saw 9 as brown, for example, whereas for me it’s orange.”
“What happens if you see a green number 9?” said Galli, intrigued. “Do you see it as orange?”
“No, I see it as green, but it feels orange. Maybe it’s a bit like how you can be absorbed in day dreams, and you look at, let’s say, a car, but you’re thinking of a tree, and in your mind’s eye you see the tree. If the dream is strong enough, you may experience the tree more than the car. The car might even escape your conscious attention, but when you bring your focus to the things you literally see with your eyes, then the car is there nonetheless.”
“Maybe you should have gone into mathematics.”
“I’ve always been very drawn to it, but my father discouraged me. He developed the belief that we should try to balance our strange connection with numbers, not encourage it.” Olafsen gave a short sarcastic laugh. “He applied that more to me than to himself. He wanted me to interest myself mainly in sports, but as for he himself, he had trained as a architect as you know; a profession in which perhaps synaesthesia was useful to him, although he denied it.
“The really odd thing is, this idea of his, that I should develop my skills only in an athletic direction, seemed to begin quite suddenly, when I was at the age of seven years. My father changed completely at that time. He became obsessed with electricity and magnetism, and with physics.”
“What happened then, to bring about this change?” Galli asked, his curiosity particularly piqued.
Olafsen shook his head slowly, pursing his lips.
“Really nothing, except, our cat, Loki, died.”
“Your cat died?”
“Exactly. He was 14 years old and he died of old age. My father buried him by an old pine tree in the forest behind our house. After that, he was never the same again.”
“He must have been very attached to the cat. It can hit people very hard when a cat passes into the next world.”
“That’s the strange thing.” said Olafsen. “He never seemed particularly attached to Loki. I mean, he used to tickle him behind his ear, and sometimes Loki sat purring on his lap, but most of the time the cat came and went as he pleased and we didn’t even see much of him. My father was sad when he died, certainly, but very far from heartbroken. And yet, it was really almost at that very moment that my father developed his obsessions with various fields of mathematical science, while simultaneously trying to steer me away from them.
“After that, his obsession only grew stronger the older he got. As time went by, he worked less and less on architecture, spending more and more time on his hobby, surrounded by wires and electrical parts. He didn’t have much time for me. He was very keen that I should stay away from his experiments, and very determined to steer me in a non-technical direction generally. It is strange, is it not?”
“He must have been more attached to the cat than he let on.”
“I really don’t think so.”
“Then it’s a coincidence.”
“I’m not so sure.” said Olafsen.
“But then why the change?”
“It’s inexplicable. I can’t even properly put into words what he was like with regard to his obsession. It was as if electrical research both fascinated and repelled him. Perhaps he feared it.”
“And how did your mother handle it? Were they a close couple?”
“My mother put up with him. Often they exchanged hardly a word the whole day. She had her circle of friends and that was enough for her.
Then, when I was 19 years old, we moved to Altobello. My father had found some work in Italy, of all places. My mother protested bitterly, but after we visited Altobello she fell in love with the place, and she agreed to move here. The resort was undergoing heavy expansion at the time and my father would be helping with the design of the hotel.”
Olafsen gestured towards the abandoned hotel a few dozen metres away.
“How did you feel about moving to a new country?” said Galli.
“I loved the idea.” said Olafsen. “Not because I loved Italy—to be honest, I knew nothing about it beyond the stereotypes; pasta, people waving their arms about, the Renaissance, maybe—but because I loved mountains.”
“By then you were already establishing a reputation for tackling challenging climbs.”
“That’s correct. My problem was, I never had any money. I couldn’t afford to travel much. Moving to Italy opened up a whole new world for me, as far as climbing went. My father liked that. He was happy as long as I stayed away from electricity.”
“Weird.” said Galli.
“It was weird.” Olafsen agreed. “After we moved here, it got a lot weirder. For a while he worked hard, then the work dried up a bit and he took to spending more and more time in a room he used as a study. Sometimes he went for walks alone; he insisted on going alone, then at a certain point his walks turned into hikes and became a new obsession, alongside his existing obsession with electromagnetics.”
“It sounds like he was just a very obsessive person.”
Olafsen frowned, thinking.
“I don’t know.” he said, slowly. “He never really seemed interested in walking or scenery. I’ve always thought he was secretly doing experiments of some kind, high on the hills. But what? We never saw him up there. I used to scan the mountains with binoculars and I never caught sight of him. No-one I knew ever saw him on any of the popular trails either.”
“What do you think he was up to?”
“I never knew. Ten years ago, with the computer age in full swing, I began earnestly attempting to decode his notebooks. They were all written in some kind of cipher. Parts of them, I still haven’t been able to make any sense of. Most of his writings are purely technical, but here and there I find strange hints of what consumed him.”
“And what do these hints tell you?”
Olafsen shifted uncomfortably, then stood up and leaned on the edge of the balcony, staring at the mountains in the distance.
“It’s hardly worth going into.” he said. “My father was a bit crazy.”
“It’s interesting material for my book,” countered Galli, “No matter how strange.”
“Well,” sighed Olafsen, “he seemed to think it was somehow possible to travel backwards in time.”
He turned around to gauge Galli’s facial expression and was rewarded by a suitable look of astonishment on Galli’s face.
“I told you he was crazy.” said Olafsen, laughing.
“OK, maybe he was crazy, but this makes for fantastic material.” said Galli. “Your father became suddenly obsessed with—what, building a time machine?—and at the same time he steers you away from science completely, and then he moves you all to the Dolomites and ends up disappearing into the hills bit by bit, and then finally all at once and forever? Jens, this is a story that most certainly has to be told.”
“Even if there is no explanation for any of it?”
“Especially if there is no explanation for any of it.”
“Anyway, I’ve kept my end of the bargain.” said Olafsen. “Now you need to help me get to the bottom of something.”
“Most certainly.”
“First, I will show you what I have discovered. Come inside.”
Inside, Olafsen separated out nine of the papers and arranged them next to each other on the table, in a rectangle. Each of the papers was densely covered in numbers.
“There.” said Olafsen. “Do you see it?”
“I see only numbers.” said Galli. “Lots of numbers.”
“At first, that’s what I saw too. They don’t make much sense till you fit them together like this. Look at this region here.”
Olafsen circled an area with his finger.
“I don’t see anything.”
“I see something, but not distinctly. As I told you, my father’s sense of the colours of numbers was different to mine, and much stronger. For example these 7’s here”—he jabbed his finger at the papers—“look green to me, but to my father they appeared red, so they blended rather nicely with the 8’s next to them. We both agreed that 8 is a shade of brown.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.” said Galli, bewildered. “What is your conclusion about these numbers?”
“It’s a map.” said Olafsen. “It’s a map of the mountains, and this cluster of primes”—he circled a small area that looked to Galli much like the rest—“indicate a location.”
“The location of what?”
“That I don’t know, but I know where this is and I know my father always headed in that direction when he went on his walks. There are steep cliffs there. You need ropes to get up them. That’s what I need your help with.”
“When are we going?” said Galli.
“Tomorrow?”
“I’m at your service.”
The following day the two men set off to examine the location on Olafsen’s father’s map. They walked along a path that led steeply up the nearby hills, into the rolling patchy fog that concealed the tops of the mountains. From there they followed a narrow track below a cliff, and there Olafsen stopped, announcing they had gone as far as they could without ropes.
At that point a sharply-sloping scree led upwards for a further hundred metres, emerging onto a col.
“We can’t go up there.” said Galli nervously. “Rocks are falling down here all the time by the looks of it.”
“Relax.” Olafsen replied. “There are only small rocks. Worst that happens is you get a bruise. Besides, from the map I’d guess we only have to go a short distance. Probably to that.”
He pointed to an outcrop of mountain pine that formed a tangled bush, clinging to the rocks at the edge of the scree, ten metres up.
“What would be there, do you think?” said Galli.
“I don’t know.” said Olafsen. “Let’s go and see. I just need you to climb up and fix a couple of cams so I don’t slip and break my neck. When I was younger I would have scrambled up this unaided, but I’m too old for that now.”
Galli eyed the scree leading up to the bush apprehensively, wiping sweat from his forehead with his arm.
“Doesn’t look too bad, I suppose. If you’re sure we’re not about to get brained by a boulder.”
“Trust me.” said Olafsen.
Galli rolled his eyes, but nevertheless scrambled up the scree, fixing cams into cracks in the rocks, stringing a rope up to the bushes.
When he reached the dwarf pines, he said, “There’s an opening here.”
“I knew there would be.” shouted Olafsen.
Olafsen began to pull himself up the scree by the rope, his footsteps causing small loose rocks to scatter down, bouncing as they went. Galli watched him solicitously.
“Let’s go in then.” said Galli, as Olafsen drew level with him.
They scrambled through the opening, which was no more than a metre in diameter, and found themselves in a deep cave of uncertain size.
“I didn’t bring a light.” said Galli.
In reply, Olafsen switched on the flashlight he’d brought in his backpack, illuminating a passageway almost high enough to walk upright in.
“We can come back with professional cavers, maybe.” said Galli.
“Beh!” said Olafsen, and he stumbled forward into the cave.
After a few metres, they came to a door, and next to the door was a combination lock.
“What in the name of …?” said Galli.
“I knew it.” said Olafsen. “I knew it. He built a laboratory up here.”
“This door’s made of steel. How did he even get it up here?”
“He was an architect. He had friends who knew how to move building supplies around.”
“Yes, but up here? And we don’t know the combination.”
Olafsen confidently entered a five-digit number and the door sprang open.
“46656.” he said. “My father’s favourite number.”
“Weird choice. My favourite number’s seven.”
“It’s six to the power of six, and it’s also a perfect square and a cube.”
“Family of freaks.” said Galli pleasantly.
Inside they found a space several metres high and equally wide; almost a dome, in fact. In the centre of the dome were the charred remains of some kind of electrical apparatus: a cuboid frame wound around with wires and surrounded by melted cylinders that might once have contained a liquid.
“Incredible.” said Olafsen softly.
“What is it?” said Galli. “Or what was it?”
“It could be … but it’s impossible.”
“What?”
“There’s only one thing that his notes point towards him attempting to construct.”
“And that would be?”
“A time machine.”
They met again three days later, at the weekend. By then, each had formed their own theories about the strange machine in the secret mountain laboratory.
“I don’t want to be insensitive.” said Galli, as they sat on Olafsen’s balcony, staring at the mountains.
“What’s this,” said Olafsen, “some kind of new resolution?”
“I have an idea about what happened, but it’s not going to be easy for you to hear.”
“I’m Danish. We’re a blunt and direct people. Stoical. You don’t have to dress things up for me. Tell me your theory.”
“I thought you were Swedish?”
“I keep telling you, it’s complicated.”
“Well then, my idea is, your father tried to build a time machine, but of course it didn’t work, and when he stepped into it and activated it, it burned him to a crisp.”
Olafsen shook his head.
“No. It can’t be.”
“I know he was your father and everything, but —”
“There were no bones. You need an enormous fire to destroy bones. The machine wouldn’t be so intact if the fire had been that strong.”
“It was pretty well burned up.”
“It was still standing. There was nothing even resembling a human-shaped pile of ashes.”
“Fair point.” said Galli, and he lapsed into silence.
“I have a different theory.” said Olafsen eventually.
“Tell me.”
“What if he actually did go back in time, and the machine burned itself out afterwards? That would explain why he disappeared.”
“What time would he have gone back to?”
“I don’t know. Some time so long ago that he couldn’t find his future self and warn himself not to try it, for sure.”
Galli thought silently to himself for a while. Then he said, “There’s no such time. Think about it. He knew exactly what his future self would do. He knew what he’d see, what he’d look at. Even if he’d gone back a thousand years, he probably could have found some old monument or rock that he’d look at one day in the future, and he could have engraved some kind of warning on it that only he would understand.”
“Sound difficult.” said Olafsen. “Anyway, maybe he went back ten thousand years. There’s no way to know.”
“But it’s not easy to travel in space, right?” said Galli. “You can’t easily go to Australia or Japan or wherever. It takes energy. Effort. Maybe it’s the same with time. I would think, if he did go back in time, he would only go a short distance in time. Fifty years, a hundred, something like that.”
“Then why didn’t he warn himself not to do it?”
“It’s possible he didn’t consider disappearing from the present to be a bad thing.”
Olafsen shook his head.
“No.” he said. “He had a wife. And a son. He was a strange man, detached, eccentric, cold even, but I don’t believe he would have left everyone and everything he knew behind just like that. Not deliberately.”
The two men sat quietly, contemplating the mountains that in winter would be covered in snow, even if the snow wasn’t thick and lasting like in the old days. The tops of the mountains were wreathed in cloud, but lower down cows grazed the hillsides.
“If I were him, and I wanted to pass a message to my future self,” said Galli thoughtfully, “there’s an obvious place to put it.”
Olafsen turned to him and raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“Where’s that?”
“Under the pine tree, where he buried the cat.”
Olafsen stared at him, amazed.
“But, you’re right!” he said. “That’s it! That’s why he changed. He received a message from his future self! A message from the past!” He rubbed his temples with the tips of his fingers. “If he sent himself a message, why did he still go to the past? And he didn’t want anyone else to follow him. He didn’t want me to follow him.”
“If he sent such a message, it would have to be engraved on something that doesn’t decompose, like stone.” said Galli. “Then, probably he didn’t want anyone else to see it. If I were him, I would probably have just buried it again, with the cat.”
“It would still be there.” said Olafsen.
“It’s a long shot.” said Galli.
“Not impossibly long.” said Olafsen.
Galli smiled slowly.
“Let’s go and have a look, Jens.” he said. “It’s the only way to settle it.”
A week later they ate breakfast in a hotel in Copenhagen and then drove across the Øresund Bridge, travelling an hour and a half into Sweden, stopping along the way to buy a spade. Finally they arrived at a modest house, almost surrounded by forest.
“There are people living here.” said Olafsen. “What are we going to do? We can’t just go in and start digging up their garden. And we can’t tell them what we’re looking for, or they’ll want to see it.”
“You Scandinavians think too hard about everything.” said Galli. “Leave it to me.”
Galli marched up to the door and knocked loudly. A man answered, perhaps forty years of age and rather tough-looking, with a bald head and tattooed arms.
“Ja?” he said.
“Do you speak English?” said Galli.
“Of course I do.” said the man.
“Forgive the intrusion. My friend here”—he gestured at Olafsen—“is a Swede like yourself. He grew up in this house. When he was a small boy, his father buried a cat here. He would dearly like to relocate the body of this cat to—”
“Jens Olafsen?” said the man, an enormous smile appearing on his face.
“Ja.” said Jens.
The man began jabbering at Jens in Swedish, Galli completely unable to understand any of it.
It transpired that the man was well aware of the house’s former occupant, and was a fan of Olafsen’s mountaineering feats.
Soon they were drinking coffee in the man’s kitchen, in which hung an ancient photograph of Olafsen himself.
The man’s wife, a large woman with grey-streaked blonde hair, informed Galli in English that her husband was utterly obsessed with mountaineering and Olafsen in particular, although he had never tried his own hand at climbing at all.
“You want to dig up a dead cat?” said the man incredulously.
“Yes.” said Olafsen. “It would mean a lot to me.”
“He wants to be buried with his cat.” said Galli, patting Olafsen on the back. “Not yet, of course, because he’s still alive now, but eventually. When he’s dead.”
“You want to be buried with your childhood pet?” said the man.
“Exactly.” said Olafsen.
“Well, no problem.” said the man. “I ask only that you would be so kind as to send me a copy of this biography you say you’re writing, Mr. Galli. Signed by Jens, of course.”
“Naturally.” said Galli.
Soon they were busy digging around the old pine tree, with the man hovering around curiously. Olafsen couldn’t remember exactly where his father had buried Loki, nor how deeply, but on their third attempt their spade broke through a slate. The man who owned the house happened to have retreated to the kitchen at the time.
“It’s got writing on it!” said Galli excitedly. “Quick, let’s put it in the bag!”
They extracted the two halves of the broken slate and place them in a supermarket carrier bag, which was the only suitable bag they had with them.
“He’s expecting the bones of a dead cat to be in here.” said Olafsen solemnly.
“We’ll put in some earth and twigs and tied it up.” said Galli, and so they did.
Back at the hotel in Copenhagen, Olafsen rinsed the soil off the slate and they pored over a desk in Olafsen’s room, where they fitted the two broken halves together.
The slate was engraved with perhaps two or three hundred words in a tiny Danish script.
“What does it say?” asked Galli eagerly.
But Olafsen was absorbed in reading the carefully-engraved text.
As he read, he frowned and muttered to himself.
When he finally finished reading he shook his head and massaged his forehead with his hand.
“Well?” said Galli, softly.
Olafsen’s eyes were moist.
“I need a drink.” he said.
The following day, they located a report in an old newspaper at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm.
In 1921, a man who called himself ‘Loki’ and otherwise refused to identify himself, had murdered a man by the name of Axel Karlsson, who, strangely, had adopted the name of the Norse god Baldur, associated with light, goodness and wisdom, by which moniker he was known in communist political circles. The murderer had been beaten to death by Baldur’s associates before the police could intervene.
“It’s either all true or else he found this article and wove a story around it.” said Galli. “I would say, being completely honest with you, he probably made it all up. Think about it. If he went to the past and changed it in such a significant way, how could he then know that his future self, not yet even born, would still bury the cat by the oak tree?”
“Unless …” said Olafsen, grasping for the right words, “… his theories were correct. There are stable loops in time, the same events occurring again and again, infinitely. How they get started, who knows. Once they are started, they continue, forever, because nothing else makes sense anymore. Like a ball bearing rolling around the bottom of a bowl, in a stable equilibrium. Or a planet revolving around the sun. Otherwise … what? He built a machine in the mountains and set fire to it, and then disappeared, for nothing?”
Galli stared blankly into space.
“We’ll never know.” he said.
“I know.” said Olafsen, and he smiled.
From his bag, a small grey rucksack, he took out the two pieces of slate and fitted them together again.
Again he stared at the inscription with moist eyes.
“He was a hero.” he said.
The following is a translation into English of the text the slate contained.
Erik Olafsen, read this carefully. Your life and those of many others depend on it. The past is not fixed, no more than the future is yet set. I grew up in a Scandinavian state united by one man—an evil genius by the name of Axel Karlsson, who went by the name of ‘Baldur’.
In 1923, a year after the fascist Mussolini marched on Rome, Baldur became supreme dictator of Sweden, establishing a communist dictatorship. Within five years he controlled all of Scandinavia, ruthlessly murdering all those who opposed him, by the tens of thousands.
I live in a communist superstate where no-one is free and everyone lives in fear. Every day people are rounded up and tortured, or sent to be worked to death in the sprawling gulags of Finland.
Erik Olafsen, you will invent a time machine, and in 1973 you will finally get it working. You must step into the machine and activate it, and you must ensure that after it transports you back to 1921, it destroys itself.
In 1921, you must kill Baldur. You yourself will die shortly afterwards.
If you do not do this, after you are subsequently born you will live a life of misery, and many thousands will die terrible deaths.
I am you Erik Olafsen. After burying this message by the old pine tree at the end of the garden at [here the address of Erik’s childhood home is given], I will kill Baldur.
You may not believe me now, but when the machine sends you back to 1921, you will know the truth.
I, too, doubted. But the machine worked, and now I know the truth.
Do not be afraid, Erik Olafsen. There is no death.
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