Strange Angel (35 page)

When the group went swimming at the Pasadena Athletic Club (where Betty's father was a member), many of the male members of 1003 could do little but gawk at her. “I can still describe Betty's swimsuit detail for detail,” recalled Cornog fifty years later. Still only twenty-one years old, she was meant to be taking a writing course at UCLA, but more often than not she skipped her classes and stayed at 1003. Although Parsons owned the house, it was Betty who ran it. “She was pretty skillful at running the household. She was the one that bought the food, we'd give her our stamps, our food stamps and she'd buy the food and cook it and serve it. And she ran the place pretty much with an iron hand,” explained Alice, Robert Cornog's wife. She also took to inviting her friends to stay at the house and to sleep wherever there was room, much to the older OTO members' displeasure, who, when attending the mass, turned their noses up at these “pseudo-bohemians.”

Despite the couple's frequent affairs, Parsons and Betty's relationship seemed to Rogers “permanent and shatterproof.” In Betty, Parsons had a companion who could charm and flirt and also act as his partner in magick rituals. Some members of the OTO began to grow concerned about his fixation on her. There were worries, expressed in the usual flurry of backbiting letter writing, that Parsons was falling, as he had with Smith, under the spell of a dominant personality. But Betty was not a woman who was easily awed. In the past she had written letters to Crowley chastising him for the constant intrusions of Crowley's spy Max Schneider. “Can you imagine a dinner party with scientists from the Institute and Max at the table, pompous little Max, with his complete lack of subtlety and humor,” she had complained.

Fred Gwynn, a new OTO recruit living at 1003, was aghast at the control she had over Parsons and thus the Order itself. “Betty went to almost fantastical lengths to disrupt the meetings that Jack did get together. If she could not break it up by making social engagements with key personnel she, and her gang, would go out to a bar and keep calling in asking for certain people to come to the telephone.” Smith may have had his faults, some began to grumble, but at least the Order had been at the center of his life. They suspected Betty wanted nothing more than to do away with the OTO altogether. Germer labeled her “an ordeal set by the gods” for Parsons. He was not entirely wrong.

At the moment, however, Parsons was concerned about something else: the return of his old mentor, Wilfred Smith. Smith had removed himself, as per Crowley's instructions, to Roy Leffingwell's turkey farm, a hundred miles to the northeast of Pasadena in the desert town of Barstow; but he had not discovered his true divine nature. Now with no money and with fewer prospects, he returned to 1003. Helen was supporting the family as a munitions worker at the Hughes Aircraft Company.

Smith still held an allure for Parsons, who wrote to him, “I shall always honor, revere, and love you as my teacher, my guide,” and continued to give him money. But he also wrote to Crowley, “Smith is a menace.” Parsons worried that since he and Helen were still officially married, he might become responsible for Smith's son, Kwen. Although both Smith and Helen had assured him that this would not be the case, Parsons wanted a formal divorce. Helen was startled by this demand, which she saw as hopelessly bound to “old Aeon” rules, but Parsons insisted. He agreed to recompense her for the money and effort she had devoted to him in his early rocketry days, offering her $500 in cash, 10 percent of any income gained from the Ad Astra Engineering Company, as well as $2,000 if the house on Orange Grove was sold. He also installed her and Smith in 1003's coach house until they could find other lodging.

The lack of rocketry work, the divorce proceedings, and the problems Smith's presence caused between him and Crowley began to undermine Parsons' usual indefatigable confidence. When he visited Jane Wolfe, he was visibly disturbed, hardly the carefree man he had been when he left Aerojet nine months previously. In a letter to Crowley, she wrote, “Last evening, when Jack brought me these various papers to post to you, I saw, for the first time, the small boy, or child. This it is that is bewildered, does not quite know when to take hold in this matter, or where, and is completely bowled over by the ruthlessness of Smith—Smith who has a master hand when it comes to this boy.”

 

Following a close call with a German bomb, Crowley had moved out of London to a boarding house in Hastings called Netherwood, a large Victorian building standing in quiet, wooded grounds. By now illness and addiction had thoroughly emaciated him and his old suits flapped loosely from his gaunt frame. He had lost little of his perspicuity however. When he heard of Smith's reemergence, he was as exasperated as always. “Have I got to explain to everybody all over again, that from the point of view of the Order and of every member of it, Smith is
dead?
The decision is irrevocable.” As for Helen, he declared, “If she intends to stick to Smith, I think she ought to be
suspended from the Order while that condition remains.
“

But Crowley knew that even his most fearsome letters could not prevent Parsons from succumbing to Smith's immediate presence while Smith stayed at 1003. “Jack is a bit like a marshmallow sundae,” he wrote rather confusingly to Jane Wolfe. “He does what the last person to talk to him tells him ... He is, moreover, too ready to emphasise the sexual side of life ... Science, art, philosophy and the like are our prime care ... We must intensify, concentrate, exalt this side of our nature.
Do
get Jack to see this! He has so much A.1. in him.”

Crowley wished he could persuade Parsons to visit England, “for six months—even three, with a hustle—to train in Will, in discipline.” But already he was shifting his attentions to another disciple, Parsons' protégé and friend, Grady McMurtry, who because of his military service in Europe had been able to visit Crowley in London and now in Netherwood. He played chess with the Great Beast and learned magick from the very fount of arcane knowledge. If Parsons could not tear himself away from Smith and Betty, and restore order to the OTO in California, then McMurtry was shaping up to be an ideal replacement.

 

On July 16, 1945, at 5:30
A.M.
in the desert of New Mexico, the first atomic bomb test—named Trinity—took place. A bulging boil of fire exploded outwards with the force of some 18,600 tons of TNT before swelling into an imperious mushroom cloud. It melted the desert sand into a glassy olive-green substance in which the scientist was seen transformed from a man of learning into a jadelike god of destruction. Quoting Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer declared his apotheosis, “Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” On August 6, less than one month later, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

In Parsons' circle reactions were varied. Crowley wrote excitedly to one of his disciples, explaining that
The Book of the Law
had foretold the bomb in its verses, “I will give you a war-engine / With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you.” The science fiction fans were stunned by, and almost perversely proud of, the prescience of their beloved stories. As John W. Campbell wrote in that month's editorial in
Astounding Science Fiction,
“The science-fictioneers were suddenly recognized by their neighbors as not quite such wild-eyed dreamers as they had been thought, and in many soul-satisfying cases became the neighborhood experts.” It was left to the scientist Malina, still working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to express pessimism and confusion, writing, “Atomic energy is here and no one knows for sure what it means, except that another war might be worse than the last one—if that is possible.”

Two months after the blast, Malina had the chance to fly over the Trinity test site. He found it “a very disturbing sight, especially for us who were involved in the development of long-range rocket missiles.” But his concerns were set to one side as he was traveling to New Mexico in order to make his own mark in history. On October 11, 1945, the WAC Corporal, a sixteen-foot-tall rocket, little more than a foot in diameter and weighing 655 pounds, was launched into the desert skies. Powered by both solid- and liquid-fuels made at Aerojet, it was a sounding rocket, intended not for military purposes but for gaining meteorological information about the upper atmosphere. The WAC Corporal thus fulfilled Parsons, Forman, and Malina's original Caltech proposal, begun some ten years earlier. Roaring into the blue, it reached a height of seventy kilometers (forty-three miles) and was airborne for some seven and a half minutes. It was the first American rocket to reach such heights. For Malina the launch was both a great and sobering achievement. “I was the sole member of the original GALCIT Rocket Research Group of 1936 to experience the culmination of its hopes after the many vicissitudes in rocket development over the ensuing period of 10 years,” he wrote. “It is difficult to describe my feelings as I watched the sounding rocket soar upwards. One can think of many things in a few minutes. One of my thoughts was that I could now turn my mind to other goals in a world full of both fascinating technological possibilities and of desperate social problems.”

Within less than one year Malina would leave the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the last of the Suicide Squad to do so. But the Squad's influence, however unheralded, would resound through the years. They had established a firm theoretical and experimental ground for rocketry and had helped make it a valuable science in the eyes of the government and the military. They had prompted Caltech to offer the nation's first academic course in rocketry, and they had created the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the institution that was to become America's first center for long-range missile development and space research, producing, among many other spacecraft,
Mariner 2,
the first craft to orbit another planet, in 1962, and
Viking 1,
the first craft to land on Mars, in 1976. In short, the Suicide Squad's romantic idealism ushered in a revolution. They opened a window of opportunity for future scientists, triggering a movement that would propel the United States into space and towards the moon.

In 1949 the JPL mounted a WAC Corporal onto the nose of a captured V-2 missile. The combination, known as the Bumper-WAC, was symbolic of the mix of homegrown and foreign know-how that would fuel the United States' space program for the next half-century. When the V-2 reached its maximum altitude, the WAC Corporal's engine was ignited, allowing it to reach a height of 244 miles (393 kilometers). The launch was man's first step into space. A new age was born.

I shall attempt to evoke the true image of one who assumed
with plausibility in an age of science the long-discarded robes of prophecy.

 

—E
DMOND AND
J
ULES DE
G
ONCOURT
,
Journal

 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of
passionate intensity.

 

—W. B. Y
EATS
, “The Second Coming”

 

At the end of the war, many of Parsons' friends and colleagues returned to California and Pasadena from their military postings. The nuclear physicist Robert Cornog now moved into the house full time with his young family, and Robert Heinlein, recently returned from his engineering work in Philadelphia, would stop by occasionally to visit his friend. Anthony Boucher, Edmond Hamilton, and Jack Williamson all stopped by for short visits, too, creating a state of almost religious ecstasy among the LASFS contingent living there. Thus, no one was surprised when Lieutenant L. Ron Hubbard, another fantasy writer of great renown, announced his plans to move into 1003.

Three years older than Parsons, Hubbard had red hair, a wide mouth, and a plump face, lent definition by horn-rimmed glasses. At the behest of LASFS member Lou Goldstone, Hubbard had made a brief visit to 1003 earlier in the year, and Parsons had extended an open invitation to return. Hubbard had burst onto the science fiction scene in 1938, having previously written westerns and sea stories. His tales, which appeared in
Unknown
magazine, became particular favorites of Parsons over the years. They often attributed exceptional powers to the mind, envisioning the power to heal or kill by thought alone. Before the war, Hubbard had been an occasional visitor to Robert Heinlein's Mañana Literary Society, and it is possible that he first met Parsons there. Even if they did not meet in fact, they definitely met in fiction, for Hubbard also appeared, thinly disguised, in Anthony Boucher's
Rocket to the Morgue.
As Jack Williamson noted in his memoirs, Hubbard was the model for the charismatic seducer and prime murder suspect, Vance D. Wimpole.

From the interviews and memoirs of the other residents at 1003, it seems clear that Hubbard had a personality that either charmed or repulsed immediately. Born in 1911, he had managed to fit a lifetime's worth of adventure into the intervening years. The breadth of his accomplishments seemed to rival those of the other polymath in Parsons' life, Aleister Crowley. Upon his arrival at 1003, Hubbard dominated conversations with his anecdotes and wit. When he spoke at the communal supper table, no one could steal the floor from him. He claimed to have been involved in counterintelligence during the war and told of escaping from Japanese-occupied Java on a raft with bullet wounds and broken feet. He said he had gone on to command an antisubmarine escort vessel in the Atlantic, although not with great success, for it had been sunk four times. However, once reassigned to the Pacific, his depth charges sank two Japanese submarines. He had managed to embroil himself in adventure even while patrolling the frozen Aleutians, lassoing a polar bear on an ice floe, which in turn climbed aboard the boat and chased the crew, and him, off it.