Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

Larry had regained his physical sense of balance, but psychologically he still seemed at a slight angle to the world. When I asked him about his writing he made this queer little shrug, like he had an itch on his back that he couldn’t reach.

‘Gee, Mary-Lou, I’m finding it hard to write that outer-space stuff these days. I mean, don’t you find it difficult?’

I told him that I was busier than ever with my job as script girl at the studio and that it was difficult selling stories to magazines because of the paper shortage but I knew this was an excuse. I had hardly written anything for months.

‘Whatever happened to “The City of the Sun”?’ he asked.

‘ Superlative Stories went out of business.’

‘But you never finished the story?’

‘No.’

‘You should. It was a good idea.’

‘Thanks. Maybe I will.’

‘But I don’t know, Mary-Lou,’ he went on, ‘sometimes it feels like all our great futures are already behind us.’

I knew what he meant. There was a distinct feeling that the age of wonder was over. A lot of science fiction writers came by number 1003 that summer. Nemo Carvajal would often stay over — he lived close by in Burbank where he had a job at the Lockheed factory. Robert Heinlein was back from doing war work out east for the navy and he came to visit. As did Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton, all of them possessed with a more sombre attitude to the future.

Tony Boucher had written a mystery novel set in the SF and fantasy scene of the time, a roman-à-clef , featuring thinly disguised fictional versions of members of the Mañana Literary Society. Jack had appeared in the book as CalTech scientist Hugo Chantrelle. It had conjured much of the wistful optimism of the pre-war science-fiction world. But it was called Rocket to the Morgue , and I remember even then how ominous that sounded to me. Now, of course, I see how accurate a prediction it was of Jack’s death, even of the headline in the LA Times . But then the mid-forties would be the last time that science fiction really had the edge of prophecy. Cleve Cartmill wrote a story for Astounding in 1944 that so accurately described a Uranium 235 atom bomb that he was investigated by the FBI.

And though the summer of 1945 began as a summer of hope — peace in Europe, imminent victory in the Pacific, people coming home — it ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had foreseen it, we had made it possible. So it was hard for us, as science fiction writers, to find any detachment from the horror of these weapons, or to share the numbing sense of disbelief that stunned the average citizen. We were to blame, in our imaginations anyway. And we had to adjust to the reality of the worst of our fantasies. It was a cold world that Larry had come back to.

He was living with his mother once more and supporting them both thanks to the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act — the GI Bill that guaranteed him one year of self-employed income. As a freelance writer he could claim twenty dollars a week for any time he wasn’t earning. But as he admitted to me this well-meaning subsidy acted as a disincentive at a time when he was already so unsure about his work. He went into stasis, overwhelmed with ideas that he could not transmit. Larry and Nemo spent long hours together talking, drinking beer and smoking marijuana. Nemo was very taken by Larry’s tales of the strange objects seen in the skies over the Rhineland. But Larry was genuinely troubled by the ‘foo fighters’ and speculation as to what he might or might not have seen became the basis of much of his later work.

‘Maybe they were just hallucinations,’ he once said to me. ‘But real hallucinations.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I told him.

He tried to explain to me that he had found out there was another possible symptom of his labyrinthitis that could be manifesting itself. It was known as ‘derealisation’, an alteration in the perception of the external world that could be caused by a chronic disorder in the inner ear.

‘I mean, if everything seems unreal,’ he said, ‘how do I know if I’m seeing things or not? How do you know I’m really seeing you?’

I felt an edge to that last comment, a new sharpness in his tone. Whatever problems Larry had with reality, he was certainly more knowing than he had been before the war. I missed that awkward innocence of his. He had grown up the hard way, adjusting to the obvious horrors of war and then to the more subtle terrors of peacetime. But despite any mental anguish he might have been suffering, he seemed more confident physically and emotionally. I gently ribbed him about the many girlfriends he must have had as a glamorous airman, expecting him to go all coy on me. Instead he spoke softly of a dispatch rider called Joyce who he had dated when he was stationed in England and I found myself nursing a pang of jealousy that I had no right to bear. We went to the movies one night and he casually snaked an arm around my shoulder during the second feature. I snuggled up to him, unsure of what this careless intimacy might mean but happy enough for the comfort of it. He drove me back to number 1003 that evening and we dallied on the porch in a moment of charm and uncertainty. I went to kiss him but he drew back and fixed me with a pair of steel-blue eyes.

‘You’re still in love with Jack, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Larry—’

‘Mary-Lou, look, I don’t want to give you a hard time. I care about you. But if you really do love him—’ he shrugged.

‘What?’

‘You can’t just hang around hoping it’s all going to work out somehow. You’ve got to do something about it.’

Larry was right. I knew that things couldn’t carry on as they were. The Lodge, indeed the whole Order, had encouraged the rejection of possessiveness in relationships but the house at number 1003 had become an exhausted burlesque of anxiety and confusion. Individuals were dogged by expectation and disappointment; partnerships were strained by instability and suspicion. Jealousy became all the more potent an enemy because we were supposed to have become immune to its poison. And I was the worst of the lot. I wanted Jack Parsons all to myself.

And I knew I had long felt that this was meant to be. I had become bonded to him: emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and sexually. A casual relationship was not enough. The problem was that Jack had more or less settled down with Betty, his own sister-in-law (his wife Helen had gone off with Wilfred Smith, the former High Priest of the Lodge). Adultery with a hint of incest gave the thrill of trespass to what was essentially a domestic arrangement. Petite and blonde, Betty played this little-girl act that I found nauseating, though it sure as hell worked on most of the male occupants of number 1003. Jack was fixated on her and she knew just how to manipulate him. She was supposed to be taking writing classes at UCLA, but she always seemed to find a reason to skip them. Instead she liked to run the household, collecting rent money and food stamps. But she was so busy ruling the roost she didn’t notice how unhappy Jack had become.

The world had caught up with him. The war had taken all his idealistic dreams of rocketry and burnt them up in its grim purpose. Ballistics became respectable and developed an orthodoxy. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory that he had helped set up had become a fully funded military enterprise more concerned with missiles and weaponry than the exploration of space. There was no room now for the eccentric pioneer whose ideas bordered on the subversive. He became sidelined: never fully accepted at CalTech (he was not a conventionally trained scientist; he didn’t even have a degree) and persuaded to sell his shares in Aerojet, the aeronautical company he had co-founded.