Strange Angel (18 page)

Just as Professional Unit 122 had been drawn together by the charisma of Sidney Weinbaum, so LASFL was run by an equally fascinating figure. Forrest Ackerman had happened across the first issue of
Amazing Stories
at the age of nine, and he had been reading and collecting science fiction ever since. Born in 1916 he had lived most of his life in Los Angeles. He had spent a year at the University of California at Berkeley, but disappointed at the lack of journalism courses there, he had returned to Los Angeles to look for work. Now twenty-two years old, he worked for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, editing the
Players Directory,
a casting catalogue of actors and extras provided for the Hollywood film industry. His knowledge of film was unparalleled and he was often asked to introduce features at the academy's theater. He took advantage of these invitations to ingratiate himself into the confidence of many of the actors and directors who came to watch.

As the self-proclaimed Number One Fan of science fiction, Ackerman felt obliged to know more about science fiction than anyone else. He was famed for watching 365 films in one year, and for corresponding in 115 simultaneous letter exchanges with other science fiction fans throughout the world. He edited fanzines, was fluent in Esperanto, and had created a new language called “Ackermanese,” consisting mainly of abbreviated words and puns. His interests were so diverse that he would soon start a business called “Assorted Services,” which offered to do anything for anyone, from walking the dog, through gardening, to returning library books. However, at the center of his frenetic life was one constant—science fiction, or as he described it, “my god and my religion.”

With his many correspondences, Ackerman had his finger on the rapid pulse of the science fiction world. He attracted many seminal speakers to the chapter, most of whom were delighted to talk to an audience enchanted by their every word. Eric Temple Bell, professor of mathematics at Caltech, tried out on the group his latest stories of rapid and uncontrolled evolution. The astronomer Robert S. Richardson lectured to a rapt audience on his specialty, Mars, the muse of so many science fiction stories. (He would later write science fiction under the pseudonym Philip Latham.) The psychiatrist David Keller, a world authority on shell shock, read his grimly pessimistic tales of the end of civilization. LASFL members who worked at the aviation companies surrounding Los Angeles managed to persuade engineers and technicians to speak about the latest developments in flight technology.

Full-time pulp writers also came to give talks. E. E. “Doc” Smith (who had gained his learned nickname through working as a food chemist specializing in doughnut mixes) spoke about his famed
Skylark
“space opera” series, and a young L. Ron Hubbard—years from founding the religion of Scientology but already a pulp writer of some note—spun tall tales about how he had lassoed polar bears in Alaska and gave awe-inspiring examples of his skills at hypnotism.

Following an Ackerman-organized LASFL field trip to Caltech, during which the young members must have stopped by the GALCIT test shack, Parsons was enticed to speak at the meeting held on May 1, 1938. He cut quite a figure when he arrived, immaculate as ever in suit and tie. “My impression of him was like a young Howard Hughes,” remembered Ackerman. He talked about the latest developments in rocketry at Caltech, about his group's successes and failures, and about the future and the moon. He roused his audience, especially one of its junior members, a young Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury was an eighteen-year-old newspaper boy at the time, still living with his parents in Los Angeles. He had a great interest in science fiction and had found out about LASFL through the letters page of the pulps—the great forum of debate for science fiction fans. He had always wanted to be a fantasy writer, and LASFL provided him with a community which shared his enthusiasms and understood his ambitions. When Parsons finished speaking, Bradbury asked him a barrage of questions. Many years later Bradbury remembered the incident well. “A young man, some six or seven years older than myself, was there, talking about Rockets and the Future,” he recalled. “He was wonderful. I chatted with him, after, but was afraid of him because I was an uneducated non-student, a newsboy ... and with no way of joining the rocket society the gentleman spoke of.” Little did Bradbury realize how lacking in credentials Parsons was himself.

Though he eschewed membership in LASFL just as he had in the Communist Party, Parsons visited the group on occasion. He even invited a few of the members out into the desert to watch him and Forman set off some of their homemade black powder rockets. It must have been heartening for Parsons to be among real enthusiasts. Soon, however, the Suicide Squad's fan base was to get significantly larger.

 

On July 14, 1938, the millionaire sportsman and heartthrob Howard Hughes, accompanied by four copilots, landed in New York. He had traveled around the world in three days, nineteen hours, fourteen minutes, and ten seconds. It was the fastest circumnavigation of the globe to date, and 30,000 people showed up to cheer him home. Hughes, gaunt and weary to the point of exhaustion, declared, “All I can say is that this crowd is more frightening than anything else that has happened the past three days.” Papers bragged it was the “greatest flight of all time.”

Sharing the West Coast newspapers with Hughes on the day of his return were the prophets of a new flight technology—Parsons and Forman. In the
Los Angeles Examiner,
under the headline
SAVANTS TEST “MACHINE GUN” MODEL,
the exquisitely well-groomed Parsons and Forman were pictured firing a black powder rocket of their own construction.
PASADENA MEN AIM AT ROCKET ALTITUDE MARK
, read the
Pasadena Post.
They had been working on an impulse rocket, which could, as Parsons told the newspaper, “reload and fire between 100 and 200 gunpowder cartridges [when it was airborne] at the rate of ten explosions per second.” He went on, “We plan to...[fire] the rocket from a ground mortar to give it initial ground clearance before the rocket motor starts functioning.” In essence the model was very similar to that described by Cyrano de Bergerac in his tale “L'Autre Monde,” written almost three hundred years before.

The newspapers, who had always found that rockets made good copy regardless of the accuracy of their reports—witness Robert Goddard's suffering at their hands—had begun to take to the Caltech group. In June 1938, Malina had had lunch with the chief science writer for the Associated Press, who was making a cross-country trip “looking for the spectacular.” Now reporters came daily to the GALCIT test shed, trying to get the rocketeers' prediction for the date of a moon landing. Throughout that summer articles appeared in the Pasadena and Los Angeles papers and were in turn reprinted by national technical magazines like
Popular Science.
The more conservative Malina was abashed at the sensational interpretations he read, complaining that “the reporters seem to have better imaginations than we do.” Even a radio station approached the group, wanting to record the sound of one of their rockets for broadcast.

In response to all the press, crank letters flooded in. Some people offered their services as astronauts on the first rocket into space, while others offered secret designs that would help the Suicide Squad solve all their problems—for just 5 percent of future sales. One letter came from a circus daredevil. “Since about 40 years I am in the Sports and Show Business, and understanding I will have to retire soon, I will be very happy to honor one last time, my old name and reputation, giving to the crowd, the biggest Dare Devil Acrobatic sensation of all times: ‘The Human Rocket'.” Some persistent teenagers were actually granted an audience with the rocketeers. After all, it was not so long ago that they themselves had been teenagers and had had similar dreams. A few of the adolescents were kept on as helpers throughout the summer holidays.

The event perhaps most important in changing the professional perception of rocketry in the United States was Malina's appearance at the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences (IAS) in New York. The IAS had been founded in 1932 out of the rising success of aviation. In was intended as a forum for the aeronautical sciences and technologies, and Orville Wright was its first honorary fellow and Theodore von Kármán one of its founding fathers. Now at Kármán's instigation Malina traveled to the East Coast to give the first paper ever presented to the institute on rocket flight. The presentation was a significant step toward the rocketeers' recognition by their scientific peers.

Still, industry and the government were not convinced to take the rocketeers seriously. Their only financial support was Weld Arnold's mysterious one thousand dollars. They had hoped that Kármán's influence in Washington, D.C.—he had strong links with the army air corps—would help them gain official (and certain) rather than providential funding. But when Kármán invited a “big shot” from the army ordnance to visit Caltech, the big shot declared that rockets, as far as he was concerned, stood no chance of being used for any military purpose.

Malina, for one, was relieved by this. “My enthusiasm vanishes when I am forced to develop better munitions,” he wrote. Parsons, however, was dreadfully disappointed. Although he was hardly a rampant militarist, rocketry was still his one and only dream. While others could fall back on their Caltech degrees as a safety net, Parsons and Forman were working for nothing but their own enthusiasm. The Weld Arnold fund could not last forever, and a military contract, while morally questionable, would at least allow Parsons to follow through on the years he had dedicated to rocketry so far. It would also assure him and Helen of a regular income.

Parsons' work on the “machine gun” type of rocket was stalling. If ten explosions were to happen a second, literally punching the rocket through the air, an incredibly fast reloading mechanism was needed, and Parsons and Forman had found no practical solution for making one. “Parsons is spending most of his time on the powder rocket,” wrote a resigned Malina to his parents. “He is beginning to run short of money, so may have to take a job for a while again.”

A general malaise hung over the Suicide Squad's research work through the autumn. On September 26, 1938, Frank Malina and his fiancée Liljan Darcourt were married, and Malina took a job with the Department of Agriculture, studying dust storms. Tsien was completing his doctorate and had no time for experiments, while Apollo Smith, unable to keep working for no money, left the Suicide Squad for an engineering job at Douglas Aircraft. Parsons and Forman picked up their old jobs at the Halifax Powder Company. In a final grim omen Weld Arnold, their mysterious patron, left Caltech and “completely vanished” from sight, never to be seen by the rocketeers again.

No one was more despondent than Parsons. Rockets were his life and the Suicide Squad had been his family. Getting to the moon was his one wish. His enthusiasm was childlike in its directness. Even as the rest of the Suicide Squad drifted away, he continued to mix powders and plan new rockets after he came home from work. The others' lack of enthusiasm, no matter how reasonable, must have been galling for him. Writing home to his parents, Malina admitted guiltily that “rockets have been having another sleep ... Parsons is doing some experimenting with powder and is disgusted with me for not putting in more time to the research.”

Parsons held a Halloween party that fall, on the same night Orson Welles gave his nationwide broadcast of H. G. Wells'
The War of the Worlds.
Perhaps he and his friends listened as Welles told in stentorian tones how “across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” For the next hour, in a series of realistic-sounding news announcements, the nation was informed of gas eruptions taking place on Mars and astronomers' confusion at what they might portend, of the arrival in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, of a thirty-yard-long cylinder that hissed through the sky like a “Fourth of July Rocket.” The invasion of the earth by Martians had begun. The public reaction, especially on the East Coast where the alien landings supposedly occurred, was one of mass hysteria; hundreds telephoned the police and fled their homes. One unfortunate resident of the actual town of Grovers Mill committed suicide rather than suffer a fate worse than death at Martian hands. If Parsons was indeed listening, he must have worn a rueful smile. For if hundreds of thousands of people could believe men from Mars had arrived by rocket to attack the earth, why would no one have faith in the rocketeers' modest attempts at getting to the moon? Why at a time when space travel and rocketry, including Parsons' own experiments, were making news, was the Suicide Squad on the brink of dissolution?

It was a taxing time for Parsons. The Suicide Squad had offered both comradeship and intellectual stimulus. Where could he find such solace again?

It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that
all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it
ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer
be magic but science.

 

—S
IR
J
AMES
G
EORGE
F
RAZER
,
The Golden Bough

 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic

 

—S
IR
A
RTHUR
C. C
LARKE

 

A gong sounded. “We're all going upstairs,” someone said. This was how it usually began. Conversations drew to a close, and Parsons followed the group that had been milling around the living room out of the door. There were about fifteen men and women, some as young as Parsons, a few others much older. An air of excitement hung over the small group, like that of a theater audience anxiously heading towards their seats before curtain. The group's members seemed to be a mixture of actors, German and Russian immigrants, and young bohemians. They made their way up a large swooping staircase to the third floor, where a single precipitous set of steps led through a trapdoor into the attic. The attic room was small, rectangular, and dark, illuminated by a single dim globe. The air was close with pungent incense that came fuming from a brazen pot on the floor.