The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  Yet once it had been completed, Speer seldom spent much time within his botanical domain. At exercise time he would walk around it, keeping to the perimeter track, avoiding the forking paths of the enclosure. Like a degenerate angel or forgetful Titan he would absently wander at the edge of his creation. Then he began to imagine journeys and measure their distance as he trod around the yard for hours on end. He first walked to Heidelberg, then on through Europe, eastward in a clockwise loop. Given his nature, it was inevitable that he would conceive a plan to walk the earth. This would be the conquest that could redress the failure of the architect’s most notorious client. To circumnavigate a schematic world with four corners, an oblong Mappa Mundi with its holy subdivisions, its monstrous memories, its hidden Earthly Paradise. He moved through continents at a rate of forty-nine kilometres a week, using guidebooks and friendly guards to provide the details of his journey. By the time of his release in 1966 he had reached Mexico.

  Speer’s great rock garden had seen something of a decline, that was for sure: weeded and overgrown, with some of its tiered masonry displaced. But the architect would approve, Hess mused. Speer, with a pompous aesthetic that yearned to make glorious ruins, had imagined himself as Europe’s last classicist. Hess sighed and his mind muttered: a taste for grandeur was always our weakness.

  ‘These cosmonauts have been in orbit for twenty-four days,’ he had told the American commandant. ‘No one has remained in zero gravity for that long.’

  And yet he had been weightless for decades. Ever since his flight. He had never quite landed, never quite made it back to terra firma. His had been a long, slow orbit, a continuous fall. And just as Speer bestrode the earth, he had continued to look to the heavens. Each person has his journey through life; his was across the sky. And so he had developed this hobby, an obsession with the space race. He had corresponded with NASA and they had even sent him some star charts, maps and photographs of the moon. Of course many of their top scientists were old colleagues really, party members some of them. Oh yes, it was the Germans who had conquered space.

  He had seen the beginnings of it as he had planned his flight, at the Messerschmitt works in Augsburg. After practice sorties he would relax in the canteen with the test pilots, discussing technical points and modifications he might require for his mission. He enjoyed their company, the sense of a shared temperament. He remembered that extraordinary woman flyer, Hannah Reitsch, who had tested dive-bombers, helicopters, the massive transport gliders, even a missile with a cockpit. Yes, it was she who had told him of the rocket launches at Peenemünde.

  Hess had endeavoured to keep up with all the astonishing innovations by scientists working for the Reich. He had set up the Department for Matters of Special Technical Importance. And Willi Messerschmitt, that great inventor, was sympathetic to Hess’s aspirations. Goering had refused to give him a plane but Willi was happy to provide him with one. He showed him the new prototypes at his factory where he had lovingly built sublime vehicles of martial beauty, like the earlier master craftsmen of Augsburg who made the elegantly fluted steel armour for Emperor Maximilian in the imperial workshops there. Willi’s aircraft looked aquiline, fearsome. Hess knew then that he was staring at the future. Such sleek vessels, with turbojets and curious exhaust nozzles, strange fins and gills. Mythical beasts of prey made to soar and swoop. The Me 163 rocket plane with swept-back wings, seeming more like a spacecraft than an aeroplane. The Me 262 jet fighter with its huge turbine engines, its shark-like aspect of rounded nose with flat underside, built for minimum drag and maximum speed. How could they lose with such power?

  And this is what he would tell them on his mission of peace: that their aircraft production was unbeatable. It was this that could give them air supremacy but they were aiming for the stars. They could bring an end to the war in the heavens. Once there was peace in the West the true crusade could begin. And he was nearly ready. There were promising reports from secret meetings in Madrid and Lisbon. There were other portents to consider also. The astrological aspect had to be precise. He was waiting for the correct prediction from a new advisor, a woman named Astrid. In the meantime he had received a single card reading from the Tarot: the Chariot. It indicated the desire to progress but also impetuousness, impulsiveness, anxiety. The problem with any single card is that it can have two separate, and often opposite, readings. The Chariot could mean success, recognised merits, great ambitions, the ability to lead; but it could also mean failure, incorrect judgement, the sudden loss of a sure result.

  He had to make a decision soon. His aircraft was ready. A twin-engined Me 110 fitted with drop tanks for a long-distance flight. A newly assembled machine that had been approved by the inspectorate and issued with a work number and a radio code. Instead of being delivered to an appropriate operational unit, it was at his disposal. It was freshly painted with a grey-green mackereling on its upper surface, pale-blue sky camouflage on its underside. It looked beautiful. He realised then the significance of the Tarot card. This was his Chariot. He sat in the pilot’s seat and checked the controls. He shifted his position to find a comfortable posture for such a long journey.

  ‘Of course, re-entry can be the most dangerous stage in a space mission.’ Hess stood up and began to walk. The American commandant followed him along the central path of the garden. ‘And with long periods of weightlessness the body tends to atrophy, the heart works with less energy, blood does not flow properly. Perhaps it was the sudden changes of pressure and gravity as they came back into the atmosphere that proved fatal. Maybe they needed to adjust much as a deep-sea diver does before he can come to the surface. Or perhaps this zero-gravity degeneration needs to be corrected by artificial means.’

  The American commandant watched the gaunt figure of the solitary prisoner become animated, gesturing with his bony hands as he described his plans for a revolving platform for the interior of a space station.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Hess, folding his hands behind his back and striding forward, ‘why not send into space fanatical scientists who are prepared to give their lives to research? Or people who are ill with cancer who could volunteer what is left of their lives to science and the clarification of what period a man can stay weightless in space? The programme must go on of course. It is absolutely necessary to explore space.’

  Hess nodded up towards Tower No. 3, where a Russian guard had been watching them both.

  ‘After all,’ he went on, ‘the Soviets are ahead of you with this space station. Is it only for scientific purposes? It could be a launch platform for atomic weapons.’

  He stopped and turned to the commandant.

  ‘They’ll never let me go, will they? Like they did with Speer and the others. Tell me the truth, Commandant. I know you had dinner last night with one of their generals. What did he say?’

  ‘He told me that we Americans treat war like a game of cowboys and Indians,’ he replied. ‘He said that his country had lost over twenty million people in the war. He says that you flew to Scotland to make peace with Britain so that you could attack the Soviet Union on a single front.’

  Hess shrugged.

  ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘that’s as may be. But it is you who must conquer space. Not those barbarians. You are the future. This Russian general, he is right in one respect. Americans have a wonderful naivety, this simple and marvellously misguided conception of culture. You somehow imagine it to be concerned with growth rather than decay, which is what we Europeans are condemned to understand.’

  He wandered back through Speer’s garden up to the main cell block.

  ‘This is surely the reason that you should not only inherit the world, but colonise new planets also.’ Hess turned and gave the American commandant a mischievous smile. ‘We have given you the means, after all.’

  Back in his cell he lay on his bunk and scanned the eight square yards of his room. This was his chariot now. His cockpit, his space capsule, with its vaulted white ceiling, its green and cream walls. O God, I cou
ld be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space — he had once learnt this line of Shakespeare — were it not that I have bad dreams.

  Above the bed were the maps and photographs from NASA tacked to the wall. The moon, yes, that had been his that night. A sign from heaven, full and bright as a searchlight. But it had been a lure to trick him. He had been obsessed by the moon, his own space race. Hitler was right to hate it so. It was inconstant, deceitful. Insane. Yes, thought Hess, the moon. That had been the cause of his madness.

  8

  adjustment

  ROCKET SCENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times was stark and strange, like comic book arcana, past prophecies of pulp magazines and science fiction B-movies. Cosmically terse, like a one-line horoscope. I knew at once that it was about Jack. But the real shock was that there was no shock. I’d somehow always known that this was going to happen. I had long since given up on the supernatural but in that instant I knew that I had always had a prescient sense of Jack’s end. And I couldn’t bring myself to read the news. I had to adjust to this moment. So I kept my gaze up and scanned the masthead: Late News, 9 a.m. Final, 18 June 1952: the exact point in time that I was finally free of Jack Parsons.

  I remembered something he had told me about rocket science. When they brought the captured German V2 missiles back to America, they took them apart to see how they worked. They call it ‘reverse engineering’. And I knew that that was what I would have to do. I’d have to take it all apart and put it back together again.

  A photo of Jack by the headline. A blurred headshot: a pattern of dots tracing the perfect curve of his cheekbones, his soul-deep eyes. Even in inky pointillism he looked absurdly handsome. My dark angel. My bright demon. The most beautiful man I ever knew, cursed with a mercurial genius and a sublime gift for enchantment. No one could blame me for falling in love with Jack, for making a fool of myself over him. And no one could blame me for betraying him in the end. Sometimes you have to kill love or it will destroy you.

  When we began our strange affair I thought that I could deal with the fact that he was with somebody else. Jack had so many lovers, it was ludicrous to hope he would be faithful only to me. And for a while I imagined that I was above all the petty jealousies of life. I was on a mystical path, after all, on my way to a higher order of enlightenment, which he had become master of. Sexual freedom was to be a sacrament to this greater love. But I soon learnt that it wasn’t enough. That it wasn’t freedom, rather some kind of enslavement. I felt lost. Life had seemed a series of adjustments I had never been able to keep pace with. But the real problems started in 1945. The war had changed everything. The whole world was readjusting itself. I only really started to notice how different things had become when Larry Zagorski came back from Europe.

  Larry was on terminal leave from the USAAF when he came to visit at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena in the late summer of 1945.

  ‘Wow,’ he murmured as I showed him through the grand hall with its sweeping mahogany staircase. ‘So this is the famous commune.’

  Jack Parsons had leased the mansion in 1942 as a new headquarters for the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and I moved in along with other serious members of the Order. It was to be a ‘Profess House’, a utopian mission where we could live according to the ideals of our new religion, the Church of Thelema. An ideal community where we would realise the dreams of our Hierophant, Aleister Crowley, whose vigilant likeness watched over us from above the stairway. It didn’t quite work out like that. Despite the resolute optimism of our little spiritual collective, so much of our actual communion was taken up with emotional tension and nagging quarrels over practicalities. And there had been endless splits and schisms in the Lodge. Many of the original members left and new people moved in who were not necessarily part of the Order. We even gave up holding a Gnostic Mass on a regular basis. Number 1003 (as the house came to be known) became more of a pragmatic refuge, a boarding-house sanctuary for the weird and wonderful.

  ‘We’ve tried to make it work here,’ I said to Larry as I led him into the kitchen. ‘It hasn’t always been easy.’

  ‘I guess not, Mary-Lou.’

  He still had that goofy grin but his baby-blue eyes now gazed hard and distant. That off-kilter stoop of his had been replaced with a neurotic swagger.

  ‘So, how are you?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m back. At least I think I am.’

  I asked about his experiences but you could tell that he didn’t want to talk about them. He had seen far beyond anything purely rational. He had flown as a radio operator in B-24s over Germany and occupied Europe, and was full of grim tales he had no urge to relive. So he made light of it all. And suspecting that I missed the shy kid full of amazement at the heavens, he picked out the fantastic from the dread horrors he must have witnessed.

  ‘We saw some weird things flying around out there, Mary-Lou. Strange-shaped things that came from nowhere, then — whoosh! They’d shoot off. Lights in the sky, balls of fire that seemed to follow you around.’

  ‘What were they?’

  ‘I don’t know. We called them the “foo fighters”. There were these things that we could never seem to make sense of. Some of them were these new German aircraft. Stuff from the future. Rocket planes and jet fighters. Experimental weapons, prototypes. But there were times when it seemed like…’ Larry shrugged.

  ‘Maybe they were spaceships.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Wouldn’t that be great? But you know, what with altitude sickness, lack of sleep and so on… Remember that labyrinthitis I used to have? It used to give me vertigo and problems with my balance.’

  ‘I remember that.’

  ‘Well, I was clear of it in the air force. Fifty-two missions, never a problem. But maybe it was just that the symptoms changed.’

  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 at
om 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?’