Astounding

by Alec Nevala-Lee

  Years later, Campbell remarkably stated, “It was, as a matter of fact, I, not Ron, who originally suggested that it should be dropped as a psychotherapy, and reconstituted as a religion. Because only religions are permitted to be amateurs.” This claim—a mirror image of Hubbard’s assertion that he had introduced real characters to science fiction, with each man taking credit for the other’s innovations—is impossible to verify, although the editor had pitched the notion of a cult of scientists in stories ranging from Sixth Column to the Foundation series itself.

  The decision to franchise paid off almost immediately. Scientology benefited from the same cultural forces that drew people to such controversial movements as Transcendental Meditation and the Unification Church, and as its membership continued to grow, a tenth of all revenue was channeled to Hubbard. He was also furiously producing new books, including All About Radiation, in which he concluded, like Campbell, that the prevention of nuclear war lay in “better controls” and a “change of status of man and his national governments.”

  With his newfound wealth, Hubbard purchased Saint Hill Manor, the former estate of the Maharajah of Jaipur in Sussex, England, where he took up residence in 1959. By all indications, he believed in his work. In his study, Hubbard and Mary Sue—with whom he had four children—held sessions for hours every day, in a version of the research group that Campbell had always wanted. The resulting theories appealed to the writer William S. Burroughs, who told Allen Ginsberg, “Of course Scientology attracts all the creeps of the cosmos. You see it works.”

  At times, Hubbard seemed paranoid. All staff members had to be checked with the E-meter, and at worst, an offender could be declared a Suppressive Person. In August 1962, Hubbard wrote to President Kennedy offering to train astronauts using the principles of Scientology, and he came to believe that the letter inspired a raid on the church the following year. He indicated that he was willing to meet the president about the situation, with one provision: “If President Kennedy did grant me an audience to discuss this matter that is so embarrassing to the government at home and abroad, I would have to have some guarantee of safety of person.”

  In his more generous moods, he thought about his former collaborators. On October 29, 1964, Hubbard wrote to Campbell, saying that he had seen the editor’s picture in an advertisement in Analog. After asking him to say hello to Tarrant, he concluded, “Things go well. We keep winning.” Campbell himself saw Scientology as “intellectual garbage,” and criticism of the church was growing. In 1965, the Australian Board of Inquiry called it “evil,” stating in its report, “Some of [Hubbard’s] claims are that . . . he has been up in the Van Allen Belt, that he has been on the planet Venus where he inspected an implant station, and that he has been to Heaven.”

  Hubbard was thinking about pulling up stakes. After a failed attempt to gain influence in Rhodesia—he believed that he had been Cecil Rhodes in a previous life—his thoughts turned to the sea, which had always been his first love. Rumors circulated of a mysterious Sea Project, and in September 1966, he clarified his plans. Resigning publicly from the church, which he continued to control in secret, Hubbard announced that he was becoming an explorer again, buying a ketch, the Enchanter, that was followed by a trawler and a motor yacht.

  He flew to Morocco, with a crew of nineteen sailing after him early in 1967. Hubbard was drinking heavily, taking pills, and working on the most audacious—and lucrative—story of his career. It became known as OT III, for Operating Thetan, or “The Wall of Fire,” the writing of which had been so dangerous, Hubbard said, that he had broken his knee, leg, and back: “It is carefully arranged to kill anyone if he discovers the exact truth of it. . . . I am very sure that I was the first one that ever did live through any attempt to attain that material.”

  The handwritten pages, which remained a closely guarded secret, revolved around the figure of Xenu, the tyrannical dictator of the Galactic Confederation. Millions of years ago, Xenu, faced with an overpopulation crisis, took hordes of his own people, injected them with a mixture of alcohol and glycol, and shipped them to Earth, which was then known as Teegeeack. After throwing them into volcanoes, he blew them up with atomic bombs, leaving them in the form of disembodied thetans that cling to the present day to unsuspecting humans.

  Between two lines in the manuscript, squeezed in like an afterthought, Hubbard added his own comment on what he had written: “Very space opera.” It was startlingly unlike his published fiction. In his old stories, galactic empires had rarely played any significant role, except as a kind of painted backdrop. Now he was embracing these images wholeheartedly, in a logical culmination of the cycle of influence that had arisen from his circle of followers. If they wanted science fiction, Hubbard was typically determined to outshine them all.

  For now, the contents of the OT III documents remained confidential, although members of the church—including William S. Burroughs—would pay dearly for decades to learn their secrets. Yet they rippled outward in visible ways. As he sailed around the Canaries on the Enchanter, Hubbard regaled his crew members—who had signed contracts of a billion years for what became known as the Sea Org—with tales of his past existence driving race cars in the Marcab civilization, a society exactly like that of America in the fifties.

  Hubbard, who called himself the Commodore, had achieved his dream of captaining his own fleet, but science fiction refused to let him go. The crew went in search of treasure that he had buried in his previous lives, although none was ever found, and there were rumors of a hidden space station in the mountains in Corsica. In practice, Hubbard was growing increasingly abusive—offenders as young as five were punished by being sent belowdecks to the chain locker, while other wrongdoers were “overboarded” into the water, where some nearly drowned.

  His search for a safe harbor, which had been his original mission, turned into an aimless voyage that would last for years. The Sea Org became a way of life, but on land, his fantasies assumed a more lasting form. At the Los Angeles headquarters of the Church of Scientology, staff members dressed in white uniforms with silver boots, in imitation of Xenu’s Galactic Patrol, and gathered on the roof every night to look for enemy ships. They were watching the skies. As Bolitho had said of religious adventurers: “They have lived on this little earth like an island, and made up their night fires to scare away the noises of the interstellar dark.”

  ON JUNE 17, 1952, JACK PARSONS HAD RECEIVED AN ORDER FOR A BATCH OF AN EXPLOSIVE FROM a pyrotechnics company that provided special effects for the movies. While working in the coach house that he used as a lab, he dropped a coffee can in which he was mixing chemicals, and the explosion shattered his legs and tore off his right arm. Hours after he was declared dead, his mother, Ruth, committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sedatives. Parsons was thirty-seven years old.

  Heinlein heard the news from a mutual friend. The following year, he attended a party hosted by Ron Howes, the man whom Perry Chapdelaine had hailed as the world’s first clear. Howes—who made his greatest mark, years later, as the inventor of the Easy-Bake Oven—had established a group called the Institute of Humanics in Colorado Springs, and he spent the evening auditing his guests. Also present was van Vogt, who had distanced himself from Hubbard, but was still interested in dianetics. Heinlein noted that this was a pattern among the people he met that night: “Ron is a jerk, Ron is a nut—but nevertheless he is the prophet of the One True Faith.”

  He was feeling detached from the science fiction community, in part because of geographical distance. Aside from occasional visits from their friends—including George O. and Doña Smith—he and Ginny were largely on their own in Colorado. In 1953, they left on a trip around the world, proceeding from South America to Africa, with a stop at the isolated island of Tristan da Cunha, where Heinlein sent a letter to Hubbard for the sake of the unusual postmark. They continued on to Singapore, Jakarta, Sydney, and New Zealand, the socialist economy of which Heinlein dismissed as “a fake utopia.” In a world de
fined by the Cold War, he was losing patience with the economic ideals to which he had devoted himself as a young man.

  The trip also insulated him from the worst of McCarthyism, which he absorbed from newspaper accounts overseas. Like Asimov and Campbell, Heinlein had no sympathy for Joe McCarthy, whom he called “a revolting son of a bitch,” but he felt that the outrage on the left was overblown, given the treatment of dissidents in other nations: “I thank heaven that I live in a country so free that the worst an innocent man has to fear is slander, bad publicity, tarnished reputation and, under some circumstances, possible loss of employment through taking refuge in the Fifth Amendment.”

  Elsewhere, he referred to the witnesses who had exercised their right against self-incrimination as “traitors” and “custard heads.” It was a strangely unfeeling response, especially since the victims of the Red Scare included Irving Pichel, the director of Destination Moon; Dalton Trumbo, who had gone uncredited for the script for Rocketship X-M; the science fiction writer Chan Davis; and Bernhard J. Stern, whose work had inspired Asimov’s “Trends.” After his return, Heinlein withdrew from friends, including Anthony Boucher, whose politics were to the left of his own.

  On May 26, 1954, he had his confrontation in Mountainside with Campbell. After the argument, the editor sent him a peace offering—a record by Tom Lehrer—but they would never fully reconcile. Heinlein was also annoyed by Alice Dalgliesh at Scribner, who had asked for revisions to his juveniles. Lurton Blassingame, his agent, pointed out that she was just trying to publish books that would be acceptable to schools and libraries, but Heinlein had trouble making this distinction. It made for a notable contrast to Asimov, who was informed by his own editor: “Isaac, your books are so proper that librarians are confident enough to buy them without reading them, and we don’t want to do anything to upset them.”

  Asimov accepted this logic, while Heinlein hoped one day to ignore editors altogether, even as they provided a measure of control that he badly needed. Yet he kept writing juveniles, including Tunnel in the Sky, perhaps the best of his novels for young readers, about a school trip to another planet that becomes an ordeal of survival. Campbell turned it down, but he bought Double Star, a slight but engaging serial that won a Hugo Award. When the Heinleins spent a week in New York, however, the two men failed to meet up, and the author was tired of Campbell’s provocations: “Half the time at least, I don’t know what the argument is all about.”

  He was also distracted by his former wife, who was sending what he saw as “poison pen” missives to their friends. After moving to Stockton, California, with her new husband, Leslyn had suffered a series of strokes that confined her to a wheelchair. Her most virulent letters—including several to Doña—all dated from this time, which meant that she would be judged by posterity for the worst period of her life. Heinlein was more concerned for his own safety: “The only thing that really worries me—and this scares the hell out of me—is that someday she might get out of bed, hop a bus, and show up here.”

  In 1956, Heinlein wrote The Door into Summer, an adult novel about time travel that ranked with his best work, and Citizen of the Galaxy, a juvenile about a young slave who becomes a spy. Campbell rejected the former, but bought the latter, taking the opportunity to share a few thoughts on the institution of slavery itself. Dalgliesh, in turn, worried that its treatment of religion would pose problems for book publication, causing Heinlein to recoil more than usual: “Two changes, admittedly easy and unimportant, threw me into [a] spin and lost me ten days’ working time.”

  In fact, it was Heinlein who was changing. He felt that the juveniles were his most important work, a sense that was underlined by Sputnik, which left him “very shook up.” His concerns for the future resulted in the lovely Have Space Suit—Will Travel, in which a boy represents humanity in an interstellar court. It was as strange and moving a novel as he ever wrote, and Campbell was tantalized by it, but passed. When Dalgliesh asked Heinlein to tone down its violence, his response indicated how his feelings had evolved: “I do not think we have better than an even chance of living, as a nation, through the next five years. . . . I don’t ever want to pull my punches again.”

  His resolve was about to be tested. On April 5, 1958, Heinlein was shaken awake by Ginny, who showed him a newspaper advertisement calling for a unilateral halt to nuclear testing. Heinlein saw it as an act of spineless capitulation to the Soviets, and he wrote his own ad in response, “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?,” in which he implied that the ban’s proponents, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the psychiatrist Erich Fromm, were instruments of communist propaganda: “Consciously or unconsciously they prefer enslavement to death.”

  Ginny warned him, “You do realize, if we run this ad, we’re going to lose half our friends in town?” Heinlein sent copies to everyone he knew, but the response was lukewarm. Campbell was skeptical of the whole approach, while Asimov was in favor of the ban. One of his articles had influenced a paper by Linus Pauling that later contributed to the suspension of atmospheric nuclear testing, prompting Asimov to write, “I therefore played a very small part in bringing about the nuclear test ban—and I’m delighted.” He never discussed the issue with Heinlein, whose campaign succeeded only in putting a few hundred signatures on Eisenhower’s desk.

  Yet it marked a change in his outlook. Heinlein quickly wrote up the time travel story “—All You Zombies—,” but his thoughts were elsewhere. Brooding over the liberal resistance to his efforts, he conceived of a novel in which military service was a condition for full citizenship. It inspired some of his best work—the sections on boot camp were the strongest sustained sequences he would ever write—but the argument was also deliberately slanted. The enemies were alien bugs, and if they had been human, with less of an absolute sense of good and evil, the impact of Starship Troopers would have been very different.

  But it was meant to get a rise out of readers, and Heinlein had a good idea of what the reaction would be, although he may have underestimated its fury. Scribner rejected it, while Campbell objected less to the thesis than to its presentation. Writing for once with unusual prescience, he told Lurton Blassingame, “I fear Bob’s going to induce considerable anti-patriotism in a lot of readers by telling a story from the viewpoint of a hundred-percent dedicated patriot.”

  Starship Troopers was published by Putnam shortly after the death of Heinlein’s father, and it divided readers as none of his previous novels ever had. Heinlein wasn’t surprised, saying that “the pious critic will allow any speculation at all, on any subject—as long as it conforms to the unwritten assumptions of the new orthodoxy.” Deep down, however, he felt that the response proved that other writers secretly hated him—but it also won him a second Hugo Award.

  The controversy freed up something inside him. He returned to his Martian Mowgli story, which he had repeatedly failed to finish over the last decade, despite the fact that it was “the best setup for a novel I ever had in my life.” Heinlein filled it with his advice on how to live, “ignoring length [and] taboos,” with a picture of a religious movement that reflected the watchful eye that he was keeping on Hubbard. It came as close as any science fiction novel ever would to awakening real possibilities in the lives of its readers, and when Stranger in a Strange Land won the Hugo the following year, Heinlein was greeted at the ceremony with thunderous applause.

  Although he insisted that he was only trying to raise questions, his fiction was growing undeniably more didactic. His next effort, Podkayne of Mars, was only superficially a juvenile—it was really a message to parents, culminating in the heroine’s death, although he grudgingly revised it to save her life. He was less inclined to compromise with Glory Road, a deconstruction of Hubbard’s yarns about an ordinary man in a world of fantasy, as if Heinlein were determined to show once and for all how it was done. Campbell felt that it broke its contract with the reader: “I thought I was getting a saga—and I got a sermon. Nuts.” Heinlein believed that he knew better, and
the disagreement led to a long gap in their correspondence.

  At the beginning of his career, Heinlein had been attracted to science fiction as a vehicle for his politics, and now this impulse returned to the forefront. Farnham’s Freehold was conceived in part as a response to Campbell’s opinions on slavery, while his libertarian views, combined with the gravity gauge from Hubbard’s “Fortress in the Sky,” resulted in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which introduced a catchphrase into the wider culture: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” It was an exciting story, but Campbell felt that it was too long for a serial, and in his last known letter to Heinlein, he reluctantly rejected it. The novel won a record fourth Hugo, cementing its author’s status as the most acclaimed science fiction writer alive.

  As far as his political convictions were concerned, Heinlein liked Barry Goldwater, whom he saw as a liberal who had evolved: “The central problem of today is no longer individual exploitation but national survival . . . and I don’t think we will solve it by increasing the minimum wage.” He claimed that his views had remained consistent, while the rest of the country had moved to the left, but this was disingenuous at best—his priorities had indeed changed, and in the absence of other strong personalities, as Asimov noted, his beliefs became more like those of his wife.

  Heinlein was also willing to overlook problematic positions—such as Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act—if they were packaged with the security policies that he favored. He was guardedly sympathetic toward the John Birch Society, which picketed a talk by Linus Pauling that Asimov had attended: “I think Bob Welch’s methods are puerile and I do not find it worthwhile to support him. But if I am ever forced to a choice between the John Birch Society and its enemies, I know which side of the barricades I belong on. I’ll be on the same side the John Birch Society is on—because my enemies are on the other side.”