The House of Rumour (25 page)

But Jack Parsons became the forgotten story in the dream of space. It was sadly apt that he should play some part in our movie. I knew he would never suspect me for what had happened to him and I was glad that I could put some work his way. We lowered the plywood spacecraft, and Jack detonated its retro rockets. It looked fantastic. I caught sight of his face in the fierce firelight, alive once more in transcendent wonder.

The film came in on budget and it made a reasonable profit at the box office, going on to become something of a B-movie classic. A spate of flying saucer features followed.

Nemo went back to Cuba in 1951. He’d had enough of the USA. He felt harassed and constantly under surveillance (though he never guessed how close the watchers really were). There was real change happening in Latin America, he told me. That was where the future was.

Larry and Sharleen got married in the fall of that year. I don’t know why I felt so resentful about it but I did. I’d taken him for granted for so long. And he’d stopped loving me just when I could have loved him back. Another adjustment. Who knows what could have been? So I concentrated on work. I had a career now.

Television, that was the new big thing for the 1950s. I got a job with an anthology series called
The Scanner
: half-hour dramas of fantasy and science fiction.
You are now tuned to
The Scanner.
Your television set is picking up signals from distant worlds, images from other dimensions
. . . I was hired to direct twelve of the episodes of the first season. We adapted existing stories by established writers including Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein (as well as Larry Zagorski and Nemo Carvajal). I was even asked if I wanted to write something myself, or have one of my stories used, but I said no. I still loved the genre but now felt too detached about it. I didn’t want to come up with any new ideas, or to end up in that world of fiction where reality and fantasy start to coincide.

Dexter came to see me at the television studio. He took me to lunch and told me that he had a new job as an art dealer, specialising in Abstract Expressionism. He hinted that he had moved on in his secret career as well. I had expected him to ask me to put little touches of his into some of my programmes but when I tentatively mentioned ‘psychological strategy’ he smiled and shook his head.

‘There’s no big conspiracy, Mary-Lou, really there isn’t,’ he insisted. ‘We can let things run by themselves for a while. But you know what’s really interesting? We all live in a science-fiction world now. It’s become part of mass consciousness.’

It reminded me of what Larry had said about the great future being already behind us. Within our short lives so many fantasies had been made commonplace: atomic power, computers, rockets, automation, jet travel, television. With them came the horrors of nuclear weapons, biological warfare, radiation, eugenics and seemingly endless nightmares of power. Only space travel was as yet unrealised, and even that seemed already confirmed by countless flying saucer sightings. The biggest adjustment was in what and how people believed.

Soon after the best-selling success of
Dianetics
, his psychological therapy system, L. Ron Hubbard announced his new creation: the Church of Scientology. That someone from the field of speculative fiction was founding a religion was hardly a surprise to any of us. Every pulp writer I knew had at one time had that drunken conversation about setting up a cult; most of us had written stories based on the premise. But it took a truly brilliant charlatan to actually make it work.

Hubbard stole some basic elements from the Ordo Templi Orientis from his time at the Lodge at number 1003. And he looted all kinds of theosophical and esoteric traditions (some real, some taken from
Weird Tales
magazine). But his real genius was the instinct that pre-war mystical societies needed updating in order to succeed in the flying saucer age. So he added modern terminology and gadgetry: auditing techniques, engrams and e-meters; he used the very present fear of mind-control and brainwashing that had come out of horror stories of GIs captured by the communists in the Korean War. And he gave his faith a cosmic theology: a creation myth of aliens banished to earth by an intergalactic warlord. He took Jack Parsons’ arcane utopia of rocketry and the occult, and transformed it into a grotesque space-opera. And he had a business plan: to charge high prices for his therapy system and cash in on tax concessions available to churches.

This was the belief system for our times: the flickering needle of an electronic device, the immortal soul measured by the galvanic response of human flesh. I wondered at first if Dexter might have had something to do with it. He denied it strenuously.

‘Believe me, Mary-Lou, I’d love to have control over something like that. In actual fact my friends in the Bureau are quite worried about it.’

And I wondered, too, if anyone had been involved in the death of Jack Parsons.
ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION
: the report said that he had died in a blast that had ripped apart his garage laboratory. That he had dropped a flask of fulminate of mercury, a highly volatile compound, which had ignited other chemicals in the room, causing an infernal holocaust.

If it was murder, it was cleverly done. More likely is was an accident, perhaps suicide. Maybe it was somewhere between the two. I imagine Jack a little high on something, halfway through some absurd ritual or obscure experiment, sad and weary, he who had seen too much, though never enough, just letting go, letting the explosive slip between his fingers.

I can mourn for him now as I do for that whole part of my life. A time of illusion and a hopeless search for enlightenment. I think of how he looked on the last occasion I ever saw him as we were setting up the special effects for
Fugitive Alien
. The expression of delight on his face as the flares ignited to fake the flying saucer landing. The young man who had tested rockets in the Arroyo Seco, the child who had played with fireworks and dreamt of space travel. It’s how I’ll always remember him.

9

the hermit

Cato found a room in a boarding house in Hastings Street. He’d decided that the best thing was to come to Detroit and start all over again. A new town, a new beginning. It was a good enough place to find work as a musician. Jimmy had said that the Flame Show Bar house band was looking for a new rhythm guitarist. And if he couldn’t get a gig somewhere soon there was always the automobile factory. Jimmy was coming by that evening to take him to this meeting he’d talked about. Cato wasn’t keen but Jimmy had insisted he come along. ‘It’s a good place to make contacts,’ he had said.

The room was small, bare and gloomy. Cato heard a distant wailing. He went to the window. The view was the brick wall of the adjacent apartment block. He dropped his case by the bed and his whole body shook for a second in a sickening shudder of grief. There was something hard and heavy in the pit of his stomach, a solid lump of remorse that he could not shift. As he sat down on the edge of the bed the mattress let out a sorrowful creak.

Taking off his shoes, he stretched out, closed his eyes and tried to take a nap, but he felt restless. It was hard to sleep during the day with no radio to keep him company. His head just filled up with unwelcome thoughts. He felt so goddamn lonely, that was the worst of it. He sat up and hauled his suitcase onto the bed. Rummaging through his things, he found a handful of magazines:
Reader’s Digest, Confidential
, a
Time
from last year with Martin Luther King on the cover, and an old copy of a garish pulp called
Incredible Stories
.

Something to read on the bus ride, he’d thought, though in the end he had simply stared out of the window at the passing world. He picked out
Incredible Stories
. It had a battered cover showing a blue-skinned humanoid flying through a red sky with a ringed planet on the horizon.

He stared at it, trying to work out why he had put this thing in his case. It belonged to Sharleen, of course. She loved this craziness. She had even been in one of those flying saucer B-movies back in the fifties. And she’d been married to a guy called Larry who wrote this kind of stuff. There were times when they got drunk or high that she would tell him weird stories of people from other planets and secret societies on earth who had made contact with them. Cato wondered if it hadn’t been science fiction that had sent her a little mad. Or maybe all those bad things she said had happened to her when she was a kid were true.

He couldn’t work out why she had kept this old pulp magazine. It was metaphysically out of date. With stories supposed to be set in a future that was already lost in the distant past. He read the date on the masthead.
June 1941
. Hell, that was three months before he was born. Over twenty-five years ago. He opened the book and one of the stories was called ‘Armageddon 2243’. Numbers reeled in his head for a moment. Jimmy had told him that numbers were the key. According to him, the whole universe was some kind of numbers racket.

‘God has three hundred and sixty degrees of knowledge,’ he had told Cato. ‘The devil has only thirty-three degrees. That’s how the Masons calculate their learning. Masons are in the power of the devil, that’s how they run things. They in charge of white folks.’ And at another time: ‘Eighty-five per cent of the people are the dumb masses controlled by the ten per cent who are the slave-makers. The other five per cent are the poor righteous teachers. Them that know the truth.’

Cato flipped through the magazine. There were advertisements for mouthwash and correspondence courses; line-drawing illustrations for far-out tales called ‘Plague Planet’ and ‘Robot Mission to Alpha Centauri’. One story caught his eye, perhaps because it was shorter than the rest. He lay on the bed and began to read:

THE HERMIT

By Nemo Carvajal

A humble hobo hides a cosmic secret!

In saffron robes and with flowing white hair and beard, the Hermit was a familiar sight on Hollywood Boulevard. He patrolled that stretch of sidewalk between Orange Drive and Highland Avenue in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He would never ask for money directly, though he would show passers-by his open palm and entreat them with a smile: ‘Please, let me help you.’ At other times he would offer this advice from Matthew 19: 21: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast and give it to the poor – and thou shalt have treasure in the heavens – and come, follow me.’ But he knew it was hard for most people to understand his mission on earth. They judged him merely as one of the many eccentrics who furnished the streets of this absurd city. Progress was slow. Most days he simply noted observations and looked for possible new developments to transmit in his daily report.

Noticing a beat cop approach, he prodded Sirius, the spotted mongrel curled up at his feet. Sirius gave a plaintive whimper and looked up at him imploringly. The Hermit reached down and patted him gently. Dogs (he had noted long ago) were the only animals on this planet that had a clear understanding of injustice. They could hear a higher frequency and it gave them a more finely tuned moral instinct. Their howls were the lamentations of worldly iniquity and dispossession. It was a clear signal but one that only the Higher Ones seemed to understand. Most humans had no conception of injustice. They thought only of justice, never the lack of it. They failed to register the canine wail that could provide them with such precious information and guidance. They would insist upon some warped sense of entitlement, a self-righteousness that could lead to nothing but an escalation of suffering.

The Hermit started to walk towards the cop so that he would be on the move by the time the cop reached him. Sirius trotted along beside him. He found a gait that would match the confident stroll of the beat officer, so that when they met they were travelling at the same pace. A little dance to the jaunty swing of the cop’s night-stick.

‘Hi, Pete,’ the officer called out with a smile.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ the Hermit replied. ‘For they shall be called the children of God.’

They passed each other to the count of three twirls of the baton. This was the rhythm of the upright and principled, thought the Hermit. This was the tick-tock in the minds of humans when they thought of the word justice. But he bowed graciously to the policeman. He did not despise the cops as some of the other Higher Ones did. At least they understood the burden of power that they carried. Sirius gave out a little yelp. She had spotted something.

‘What is it, girl?’ the Hermit asked.

Sirius yelped once more and the Hermit then understood what she was saying. She was calling the name ‘Duke’. Sirius had the capacity to recognise his fellow Higher Ones – this was another canine virtue the Hermit had noted during his time on earth. He looked in the direction of his companion’s call and there he was. The Duke of Sunset was on the other side of the boulevard. In his top hat and crimson-lined cape, he was the most famous bootblack in Hollywood. He spotted them both and crossed the road, shouldering his shoeshine box.