Strange Angel (32 page)

Aerojet worked at dizzying speed on both research and production. “Everything is going so fast around me that it is bewildering,” wrote Malina. “The company will either be a wonderful success or a glorious flop, there won't be any in between. Practically all the old gang is working from 10 to 12 hours daily.” When the army air corps asked for 2,000 JATOs by the end of 1943, all hands were called to help. Aerojet by now had some one hundred employees, but even Andrew “God” Haley could be found in his overalls, working late into the night, rolling JATOs across the floor so that the order could be finished in time. The company managed to complete it in the early hours of the New Year.

Because of Aerojet's proximity to Caltech, Kármán's affiliation, and its undeniable success, many of the professors and mechanics at the Institute were now keen to be taken on as consultants. Fritz Zwicky, who six years before had dismissed the Rocket Research Group out of hand, was brought in as head of the company's Research Department. Even Clark Millikan pleaded with Kármán to let him in on the company. The GALCIT operation was supposed to concern itself with the research and development of rockets, and Aerojet was meant to concentrate on the manufacture and sale of JATOs. In actuality it was hard to differentiate between the two operations; the work overlapped so much that Parsons, Forman, Malina, and Summerfield moved freely between them.

Like Aerojet, the GALCIT project kept expanding, even if one still had to drive across the dry bed of the Arroyo to find it. The style of the buildings at the Arroyo had not changed, but each week it seemed as if another building popped up from the dirt. For visitors, walking past these rickety shacks, knowing that a particularly hazardous experiment was going on, was one of the most frightening experiences of their lives. The air force wanted to develop missiles that could be launched from a plane and propelled at high speed underwater—hydrobombs—so a towing channel 500 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 16 feet deep was also under construction. The rockets tested in the channel would be the largest yet fired by Parsons' asphalt fuel. Malina wrote back home of the changes. “There is one new aspect to the situation—whereas not long ago a handful of us worried about
all
the problems, now each problem has a handful to worry about
it.
That, I suppose, represents some progress.”

Malina ran operations at GALCIT in the Arroyo. He shared an eight-foot-by-ten-foot office with his secretary, Dorothy Lewis, and his technical aide, Gene Pierce. “We had two desks, I had a chair,” remembered Pierce. “I could use the desk when Frank was out. If we had a visitor I would get up and go out.” Working conditions were so impractical that most decisions were made, as Martin Summerfield recalled, underneath a nearby tree. The test pits were adjacent to the buildings, so when a rocket was fired, as happened every few minutes, all conversations had to stop. When the roar subsided, it was replaced by the intense buzzing of the building's switchboard, as residents along the Arroyo furiously phoned in their latest noise complaint. For a few minutes after the firing many of the secretaries refused to go outside; the toxic fumes from the liquid-propellant rockets had a nasty habit of melting their nylon tights.

Despite the high security that now surrounded it, the GALCIT project still preserved the familiar chaotic mood of the old Suicide Squad. Dorothy Lewis remembered a hardworking but relaxed family atmosphere. “Jack Parsons was the clown of the group. He loved to play jokes.” As in Parsons' youth, these jokes consisted mostly of strategically placed explosives. A safety engineer, a large retired army man, was one of the more obnoxious new recruits to the GALCIT project, forever questioning Parsons and the others about the safety of their operations. The rocketeers decided that he should really be given something to worry about. They hid smoke bombs in particularly hazardous testing pits, and then, when everybody was eating lunch, detonated them one after the other. The shocked security engineer rushed frantically out of the canteen into a vast cloud of smoke from what seemed like an array of exploding test cells. Of course, the pranks, like the rockets, would sometimes backfire. When firecrackers were placed in a tin near some test pits holding highly explosive liquid propellant, the blast didn't just fool the reviled safety engineer. Many of the mechanics working on the engine feared that months of research had been destroyed. They weren't pleased to find out it had just been a joke. And when he wasn't sabotaging the test pits on the GALCIT project, Parsons could be found peering into the offices, looking for pretty young secretaries who were doing their war duty at Caltech and who might be enticed back to the delights of 1003.

The hours darken and the years
Grow black with evil things
And mad machines spawn monstrous fears
That follow sleep with sombre wings.

 

—J
OHN
W
HITESIDE
P
ARSONS

 

Outside the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the desert was once again being stretched out for use as a scientific canvas. Since 1942 a burgeoning construction facility had been stationed here, its aim the creation of a bomb of unprecedented power. Under the charismatic leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an extraordinary group of American and European refugee scientists had been gathered to work on what was known as the Manhattan Project. An impenetrable cloak of secrecy surrounded the project, or so the Los Alamos authorities thought. They were disconcerted when they were handed the March 1944 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine.

Between stories of parallel worlds and galactic battles appeared a story called “Deadline,” written by Cleve Cartmill, an LASFS member and occasional visitor to OTO ceremonies. Set on an earthlike planet, the story described the adventures of a commando, albeit one with a prehensile tail, assigned to destroy a uranium-fueled bomb held by a Nazilike power before it could be used in war. The description of the fuel was curiously prophetic. “U-235 has been separated in quantity sufficient for preliminary atomic-power research and the like. They get it out of uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods; they now have quantities measured in pounds ... They could end the war overnight with controlled U-235 bombs.”

Cartmill's story was packed full of technical data, which the authorities presumed could only have come from a leak at the Manhattan Project itself. It was not long before military intelligence came to question Cartmill and his editor, John W. Campbell. Campbell—the story had been his idea—assured them that all the details were readily available in the public domain and that he had woven them together with his own scientific imagination; like most science fiction editors and writers of the time, he had a degree in science—from MIT no less—and he was well aware of Otto Hahn's and Fritz Strassman's discovery of nuclear fission in 1938. While the eventual revelation of the atomic bomb in 1945 would astound the world, in Campbell's eyes it would vindicate science fiction's role as prophetic literature.

As the worlds of science and science fiction continued to coalesce, so Parsons himself was spending more time in the company of professional science fiction writers. He had become a regular guest of the Mañana Literary Society, a group of authors who met at the Laurel Canyon home of the writer Robert Heinlein. Lean and intelligent, with a pencil-thin moustache and a penchant for ascots, Heinlein was swiftly winning fame as the preeminent writer in science fiction. When Parsons first met him in 1942, he was thirty-five years old, having begun his career late as a science fiction writer. He had spent some time in the navy before being invalided out of the service, and he had gone on to a brief career in politics, which culminated in a run for the California State Assembly as a member of Upton Sinclair's left-wing EPIC (End Poverty in California) movement. Beaten by the Republican incumbent, he turned to the pulps for quick money and now, along with Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp, was rewriting the rules of the traditional science fiction story, crafting realistic characters and beautifully wrought depictions of the future. His stories of lone geniuses as proficient with their fists as with their slide rules proved remarkably popular in the pages of the pulps, and his fame would only increase in the postwar years when he published such best-selling novels as
Starship Troopers
and
Stranger in a Strange Land.

Heinlein met Parsons at a meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society. As one of the earliest members of the American Interplanetary Society, the first rocket society in America, he was impressed by the freethinking rocket scientist and invited him to the Mañana society, so named “for all the stories that would be written tomorrow.” Here some of the finest science fiction pulp writers of the time met to drink cheap sherry and talk over new stories.

Those present included William White, also known by the name Anthony Boucher and a hundred other pseudonyms, whose murder mystery stories were infused with Catholic iconography. Cleve Cartmill, a beat reporter crippled from polio, whose atomic bomb story would so alarm the Manhattan Project, had already met Parsons and visited the OTO on Winona Boulevard. Jack Williamson, who also knew Parsons, could be found in a corner of the room, mulling over stories that mixed parallel time streams with Amazonian dominatrices from the future. Visiting guests from outside Los Angeles would also appear at the society's meetings: L. Ron Hubbard, who could type 2,000 words an hour without revisions and who seemed like a character in one of his dizzying tales of psychic powers and strong-jawed supermen; the film director Fritz Lang, whose early German pictures
Die Frau im Monde
and
Metropolis
had been two of the earliest science fiction films; and Lang's fellow German ex-patriot Willy Ley, who was now doing his best to popularize the idea of space travel through his factual science articles in the pulps
Astounding Science Fiction
and
Amazing
Stories.
Into this eclectic group came Parsons, with his talk of rocketry and magick.

Heinlein's interest in Parsons might have influenced two of his stories from this period, “Magic Inc.” (originally published as the Crowleyesque “The Devil Makes the Law”) and “Waldo.” Both drew heavily on
The Golden Bough,
and both spoke of a future in which magic had become just another branch of the sciences, a common tool like electricity. Parsons' influence at the Mañana meetings is even more evident in Anthony Boucher's novel
Rocket to the Morgue,
which took the society as its subject.

Rather like Parsons' and Malina's own prewar román á clef, in which the Suicide Squad appeared as fictional rocket scientists, the members of the Mañana society appear in Boucher's book as science fiction writers. Parsons (or rather a composite of Parsons and Edward Pendray, the head of the American Rocket Society) becomes, in the novel, Hugo Chantrelle, an “eccentric” Caltech scientist whose interests include “those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purist damns as mumbo-jumbo, those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.” Boucher's portrait of Chantrelle suggests that the symbiotic relationship Parsons enjoyed with the science fiction writers was more gratifying for him than his relationship to Caltech. He writes, “They [the science fiction writers] received his heterodox views on the borderlands of science far more courteously than did his laboratory associates.” In the novel, the thinly disguised characters lurch through a plot in which bombs are mailed, people are stabbed, and a crime-solving nun flutters around the crime scenes. Chantrelle/Parsons' rocket appears at the book's end as the final and most gruesome murder weapon.

The Mañana group did not last long. By the middle of 1943, the authors had been drafted, not for their writing or fighting skills but for their scientific pedigrees. In its dissolution the group provided one more good story. When word got out that Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and L. Sprague de Camp had all been sent to work at a research laboratory at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, rumors spread like wildfire among science fiction fans that they had been ordered by the Navy Research Board to create a think tank, heading a project that aimed to make their own futuristic inventions, “super-weapons and atom-powered space ships,” into realities. The truth was a little more prosaic; the three had been called up by the Materials Laboratory in Philadelphia but in order to investigate, among other things, hydraulic valves for naval aircraft, “exercises in monotony,” as de Camp called them. Science fiction fans faced other disappointments as the war continued. In New York, at the site of the 1939 World's Fair, the 4,000 tons of steel used to construct the Trylon and Perisphere were pulled down and transferred to military factories for scrap metal. Even futurist dreams were being bent to the war effort.

 

As the prophets of the future were compelled to devote themselves to the problems of the present, so the GALCIT project was also undergoing major changes at the military's insistence. British Intelligence had recently discovered a V-2 missile construction plant at Peenemunde, Germany. Hitler had become convinced that the V-2 would be the decisive factor in Germany's winning the war. His belief was understandable. Thanks to the efforts of Wernher von Braun, the remnants of the VfR, and huge military backing, the V-2 was the most advanced rocket ever constructed. The height of a four-story building, the V-2 was a liquid-fuel rocket, powered by ten tons of liquid oxygen and ethyl alcohol, its huge engine consuming this vast amount in little more than a minute. By that time, however, the rocket had reached an altitude of 17.4 miles (28 kilometers) and was traveling at a speed of 3,500 miles per hour (5,630 kilometers per hour). The V-2 was designed to carry one ton of explosives over a distance of more than 200 kilometers. Beginning in the autumn of 1944, over four thousand were fired at London and Antwerp. The British Intelligence reports were sent to California for Kármán to review with the assistance of Malina and, thanks to Kármán's influence, a happily returned Tsien. They concluded that the United States should begin immediate research into the possibility of making similar missiles.