Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  But he just shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  Something John W. Campbell had written in that letter had really gotten to Harry—it had cut right to the bone. I don’t think Campbell ever consciously tried to hurt writers whose work he rejected, but he was known to be tough … and now he had gotten tough on Harry.

  Anyway, Harry told me that he wanted to be alone for awhile, so I left his place. I wasn’t really worried. I had confidence that “Enslaved on Venus” would be published somewhere else. But I never saw that story make it into print, and Harry never mentioned it to me again. I think he trashed it along with Campbell’s letter. It wasn’t even found in his files.

  Lawrence Bolger:

  Harry Hapgood became a dinosaur. His literary career died because he couldn’t adapt. The World War II paper shortage killed the pulps, so there went most of his regular markets, and the changes in the genre swept in by John Campbell, H.L. Gold, Frederik Pohl, and other editors made his kind of SF writing unpopular. Raymond Palmer continued to buy his stories for Amazing until Palmer, too, left the field in the late ’40s. By then, science fiction had grown up.

  But Hapgood didn’t grow with the genre. His stories were pure romanticism. He paid no attention to scientific accuracy or character development. He persisted in trying to write Buck Rogers stuff. Other writers learned the new rules, changed their styles to fit the times, but Harry Hapgood wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—change chords. So while Robert Heinlein was creating his “Future History” series and Ted Sturgeon was writing classics like “Baby Makes Three,” Harry was still trying to get away with space heroes and bug-eyed monsters. The more sophisticated SF mags wouldn’t touch that stuff.

  It was sad. He still went to science fiction conventions on the East Coast, but he was no longer surrounded by fans. They just didn’t want to talk to him anymore. The magazine editors tried to tell him where he was going wrong, why they weren’t buying his stories any more. I remember, at one SF convention in Philadelphia, overhearing John W. Campbell patiently trying to explain to Harry that, as long as he persisted in writing stories which claimed that rockets could travel to another solar system in two days or that Jupiter had a surface, he simply could not accept any of Harry’s work.

  Harry never listened. He stubbornly wanted to play by his own rules. Gregory Benford once criticized science fiction which “plays with the net down,” SF stories which ignore basic scientific principles like the theory of relativity. In Harry Hapgood’s case, he was playing on a different court altogether. All he could write were stories in which lizard-men kidnapped beautiful women and the Space Navy always saved the day. But he was playing ping-pong among Wimbledon champs, and he wouldn’t realize that he was in a new game.

  Margo Croft:

  After Rocket Adventures folded, I went down the street to work as an associate editor at Doubleday, helping to edit their mystery line. That was in ’48. I had all but completely withdrawn from the science fiction scene by then, but I still had a few contacts in the field, people with whom I’d touch bases now and then.

  Anyway … one of Doubleday’s whodunnit writers lived in Boston and I occasionally took the train up there to meet with her. On one of those trips I had some time to kill before catching the train back to New York. I had my address book in my purse and Harry’s number was written in it, so I called him up and told him I’d buy him lunch downtown. It was mainly for old time’s sake, but also I wondered if he had recovered from the collapse of the pulp market. By then, I hadn’t seen him in a few years.

  Harry wasn’t looking good. He had lost weight and he had started chain-smoking. He wore a suit which looked as if it had been new in 1939, and I knew it had to be his best suit. The last time he had made an SF magazine sale had been the year before. He wouldn’t admit it, but I knew that he had been trying to pay the bills by writing articles for some furniture trade magazine. It was ironic. Harry, who had practically thrived during the Depression, was on the skids during the postwar boom. Ironic, but not funny.

  It was a painful lunch. He didn’t want to talk much. He knew I was paying, so he ordered the biggest item on the menu. It was probably the best meal he had eaten in months. I told him that I had married—my first husband, Phillip—and though he tried to take it well, I could see that he was disappointed. I suppose he had noticed that girlish crush I had on him ten years before, and was sorry now that he hadn’t done anything about it then. (Shakes her head.) Poor man.

  His personal life was a wreck, so I tried to talk to him about his writing. I told him that Doubleday was starting to publish science fiction and that they were looking for established authors; he should take a crack at it. He didn’t say much, and I got the impression that he had lost interest in SF. Somehow that didn’t make sense. Harry was a science fiction writer top to bottom. He should have jumped at the chance.

  He had stopped at a newsstand before meeting me at the restaurant and he had picked up a handful of magazines. It was his usual reading matter—all the SF magazines—but in the stack was also the first issue of a new magazine which I had heard about through the grapevine. That was Fate, the UFO digest that Ray Palmer started publishing to take advantage of the flying saucer craze after he left Amazing.

  Sure, it was the type of thing which Harry Hapgood would read. Nothing sinister about that. But I remember, over dessert, watching him absently pick it up and thumb through the pages. Then he casually asked me what it would take for him to write a bestseller.

  “I’m talking about a science fiction novel,” he said. “I mean, something that would sell like crazy.”

  Coming from Harry Hapgood, that would have been hysterical if it hadn’t been so sad. I didn’t really think he was capable of writing an SF novel that was even publishable—and it would be years before science fiction scratched the bestseller lists. But I told him that he had answered his own question.

  “Write something that a lot of people will want to read,” I said. The obvious answer, of course. Harry just nodded his head and kept flipping through Fate.

  Joe Mackey:

  I remember Harry’s disappearance very well.

  By then I was working as a draftsman for a refrigerator company in Boston, but I still lived downstairs from Harry, in that triple-decker in Somerville. I had gotten home from work and was settling down on the couch to read. Harry knocked on my door, stuck his head in, and said that he was going out for ice cream. Did I want to come along? I told him, no, thanks anyway, and so he left. I heard the front door downstairs open and close … and that was it. That was the last time I heard from him for five days.

  Next morning I went up to his place for coffee before going to work—something I did every morning—and found his door unlocked. His lights were still on, but he was missing. I was a little worried, but I figured, what the hell. I turned off the lights and went to my job. But when I got home that evening and found that he still hadn’t returned, I called the police.

  Nothing was missing. His suitcase was still in the closet, his toothbrush was still next to the sink in the bathroom, there was even a half-finished furniture article in his typewriter. He had just walked out to get ice cream and … phhtt! Vanished. The cops searched the neighborhood, thinking he had been mugged, maybe killed and left in an alley somewhere, but there was no trace of him. He hadn’t checked into any hospitals and the cab drivers didn’t report picking him up anywhere. The newspapers reported his disappearance the next day, as a minor item buried in the back pages. Nobody seemed to be really concerned, though. Except me. I was worried sick about the whole thing. Y’know, maybe Harry was going to be found floating in the Charles River or something.

  Then … well, you know what happened next. He turned up in the boonies of New Hampshire, saying that he had been kidnapped by a flying saucer.

  A lone pedestrian, found on Route 202 in Hillsboro, was brought to Hillsboro Police Station Tuesday night, after he wandered out of the woods and flagged down a drive
r. The man, identified as a Somerville, Massachusetts, writer, has been sought by Massachusetts police as a missing person since last week.

  Harold LaPierre Hapgood, Jr., 38, of 19 Waterhouse St., Somerville, was found on the roadside near the Antrim town line by the Rev. Lucius Colby, minister of the First Episcopal Church in Henniker. According to Hillsboro Police Chief Cyril G. Slater, Mr. Hapgood stumbled out into the highway in front of the Rev. Colby’s automobile, waving his arms and forcing the driver to halt. The Rev. Colby then drove Mr. Hapgood to the Hillsboro Police Station.

  Chief Slater says that Mr. Hapgood, a magazine writer, has been sought by the Somerville, Boston, and Massachusetts state police departments since Friday, May 7, when he apparently vanished after leaving his residence in Somerville. Chief Slater says that although Mr. Hapgood appears to be in good health, he was delirious when brought to his office. Mr. Hapgood claims that he was kidnapped by a space ship piloted by creatures from another planet …

  —Hillsboro News-Register

  Hillsboro, NH Thursday, May 13, 1948

  Lawrence Bolger:

  Did Harry Hapgood really get kidnapped by a UFO? Not a chance. If he got kidnapped by anything, it was the Trailways bus he caught at the station in Boston.

  When a reporter from one of the Boston papers retraced Hapgood’s trail, he found that the driver remembered someone who looked like Harry getting on in Boston and getting off in Keene, New Hampshire. He used false names when he bought the ticket and when he checked into a hotel in Keene for four days, but his description was matched by the bus driver, the hotel clerk and chambermaids, even the waitress at the diner where he ate breakfast and dinner. The only thing which wasn’t established was how he got from Keene to Hillsboro, so one can only assume that he hitched a ride … and it sure as hell wasn’t in a flying saucer.

  It wasn’t an ironclad story at all. Hell, it was a blatant fraud.

  He didn’t have a shred of evidence to support his claim that he had been teleported off the street in Somerville, taken into space in a UFO, and examined by strange little men for four days.

  On the other hand, he didn’t need any proof. The country was in the midst of its first big flying saucer flap, started by Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of UFOs over Mt. Rainier the year before. There were a lot of true believers like the Fortean Society, and whenever newspapers or the Air Force debunked a sighting or a kidnap story, these people would claim that it was part of a government conspiracy to cover-up the UFO “invasion” or whatever.

  Harry Hapgood knew what he was doing. First, he sold a first-hand account of his experience to Ray Palmer at Fate. After that story was printed and enough newspapers had written about his “ordeal,” he wrote his book and sold it to a minor hardback publisher, changing his byline to H. LaPierre Hapgood so that he wouldn’t get confused with H.L. Hapgood, Jr., the pulp writer.

  (Laughs.) No one noticed the name change, because no one paid any attention to science fiction in those days. The only people who really knew that H. LaPierre Hapgood had started his career as a science fiction hack were SF fans. Since they were considered to be even further out on the fringe than the UFO cultists, no one paid any attention to them.

  And what do you know? It became a runaway bestseller …

  Margo Croft:

  The odd thing about Harry’s first book is, if you take it as science fiction, it’s a pretty good yarn. His narrative skills, developed from all those years of grinding out stories for the pulps, really lent themselves to this sort of thing. It has an almost-convincing sense of realism. I mean, if you checked your skepticism at the door, you could have ended up believing him. And a lot of people did.

  If Harry had applied himself to writing science fiction, he could have re-emerged in the field as one of the major writers of the ’50s. (Shrugs.) But maybe he was fed up with science fiction. I dunno. I guess he was more interested in making money, at that point.

  One of the funnier stories about the hoax was that, after Abducted to Space was published and made it to the bestseller lists, he got invited to be the commencement speaker at graduation ceremonies at some small liberal arts college in Illinois. As academic tradition sometimes has it, for his services he was presented an honorary doctorate in astronomy from the school. It didn’t mean a damn thing, but Harry and his publisher milked it for all it was worth. So Harry overnight became Dr. H. LaPierre Hapgood, the professional astronomer. (Laughs.) He didn’t even graduate from high school!

  When I awoke, I found myself lying in a circular chamber. The walls rose around me as a hemispherical dome, white and featureless except for a pulsing red orb suspended from the apex of the ceiling.

  The room seemed to hum, just above the range of audibility. I was lying on a raised platform which seemed to be made out of metal, except that it was soft where I lay. I attempted to move my arms, then my legs, but discovered to my alarm that I was completely paralyzed. Yet there were no visible restraints on my arms or legs.

  Then, directly in front of me, a section of the wall faded and became a screen. I saw the black expanse of outer space. In the center of the screen hung Earth, and I realized that I was thousands of miles out in space. I was terrified. How did I get here? What would be done to me? Most importantly, would I ever be released?

  A few moments later, a low section of the wall to my right slid upwards, and the first of the Aliens slowly walked into the chamber …

  —H. LaPierre Hapgood

  Abducted to Space

  Joe Mackey:

  Harry moved out of the place in Somerville as soon as he got the advance money for Abducted to Space, but by then he and I weren’t on speaking terms. I was pretty upset with him by that time. I thought we were friends, but he had used me to establish credibility for that cock-and-bull story of his. Hell, when the reporters starting showing up to interview him about his experience, he would send them downstairs to interview me as a “reliable source.” Of course, they never printed my opinion that he was making the whole thing up. Just the part about how I found his place empty one morning.

  So I didn’t really mind when he moved out to one of the ritzier parts of Chestnut Hill, but I did keep up with him, from a distance. I’m sure you know a lot of this already, right? After he and his publisher made a mint from Abducted to Space, he did UFO! which was just a rehash of the first book, except that he embellished the story a little. Seems he “remembered” a lot of details in his dreams, which he claimed were buried in his subconscious by the aliens. That’s a lot of horseshit—excuse my French—because I could see he was just recycling stuff from his old pulp stories. Probably had his copies of Thrilling Wonder and Amazing right there on his desk when he was writing the thing.

  It was after he put out Odd Visitors, the third book, that he really went for the nugget. He started that UFO cult of his—whachacallit, the International Center for Extraterrestrial Studies—and soon had every dingbat in the country sending him donations. Ten dollars got you a mimeographed newsletter every couple of months, and a hundred bucks put you on a list of “honorary contactees.”

  The money was supposedly going for the construction of a “UFO spaceport” on some land he had purchased out in the western part of the state. The line was that, when the space arks arrived, they would land at the spaceport and take aboard human passengers for a voyage to another planet, which Harry called Nirvanos. Complete crap—but, y’know, there’s a lot of mixed-up people out there who’ll buy into just that sort of thing.

  My wife and I drove out there one Sunday to check it out. Found a three-acre plot in Leicester, off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Just a big cleared cow pasture, surrounded by a barbed wire fence with an empty shack in the middle and a big billboard at the end. It had some weird symbols painted on it and was strung with Christmas lights, which some local kid was hired to switch on each night. And that was his spaceport.

  I bet Harry spent no more than five hundred dollars on the thing … and he probably took a milli
on to the bank, in donations from a lot of sick, gullible folks.

  I can’t tell you how much I despised the son of a bitch.

  Margo Croft:

  Harry dropped out of sight for about a dozen years, and while he did the UFO craze of the ’50s ran its course. By the time Alan Shepard went up in space, flying saucers were a joke. The company which put out Harry’s three UFO books went under—I think the publisher went to jail for tax fraud—and no respectable house would touch the ravings of Dr. H. LaPierre Hapgood. He kept his UFO cult going for a little while longer, after he moved it to Mexico to escape the IRS, but eventually it ran out of steam. On occasion I heard scuttlebutt about some millionaire American expatriate who had made his money writing UFO books, now living in a mansion-compound just outside of Mexico City, never seen by outsiders. I knew who he was, and I didn’t give a damn.

  Then it was 1965, and I had left Doubleday and was starting my own literary agency. I wanted to take on some science fiction writers as clients, so I started hitting the major SF conventions, trying to find the next Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. I found myself at an SF convention in the Chicago area, in a private party filled with the hot young writers of the day—Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Larry Niven, some others I can’t recall. The hotel room was crowded and smoke-filled so I went in search of a quiet corner of the room. And when I got there, I found Harry Hapgood.

  He was old, old before his time. I was only a few years younger than him, but he seemed (long pause) so wasted. Used up, like something had been sucking blood out of him for fifteen years. If he were a millionaire, it didn’t show. His clothes looked like they had been bought off the rack at Woolworth’s, and he was so thin, so pale … I might not have recognized him if it hadn’t been for his nametag.

  “H.L. Hapgood, Jr.,” it read. He had gone back to his old byline, but if anyone had recognized his name, they didn’t come to meet him. “Hapgood” was a foul name to conjure in SF circles. Science fiction writers and fans had long been misassociated by the general public with the UFO crazies, just as they’re now lumped in with the New Age crystal freaks. H.L. Hapgood was the name of one of their own, a writer who had turned Quisling and sold out to the lunatic fringe. In a crowded party, he was all alone. I couldn’t believe that he had dared to show his face at an SF convention.