of anyone else’s. And that got me thinking. What if the Nazis conquer space?’
‘Yeah, terrifying thought,’ she muttered. ‘They say he’s into black magic, you know.’
‘What?’
‘Jack Parsons.’
Parsons was something of a legend even then: tall, dark, strikingly handsome, a brilliant scientist who dabbled in the occult, like some fully formed figure from fantasy fiction. I was hardly surprised that he intrigued Mary-Lou, but I had no idea then that her flippant comments were my own warning from the future.
And looking back now I can see something else I didn’t know at the time: Parsons was an acolyte of a notorious English occultist who became linked with the Hess case.
I felt just about bold enough to offer Mary-Lou a lift home to her boarding house in West Hollywood. She invited me up to her room for a nightcap where she produced the remains of a bottle of kosher slivovitz. As we sipped plum brandy she asked me about quantum mechanics.
‘Cause and effect start to get weird on an atomic level,’ I tried to explain, wrestling with ideas I didn’t really understand. ‘You know, with Newtonian physics it’s like pool. The cue ball hits a colour, that hits the eight-ball and so on. In quantum theory one particle can influence another without the need for intermediate agents joining the two objects in space.’
She frowned and I struggled on, speaking of wave and particle duality, geodesics and the Uncertainty Principle.
‘It hardly makes any sense to me,’ she complained.
‘Well, that’s okay, Mary-Lou. They say that anyone who isn’t confused by quantum mechanics doesn’t understand it.’
‘Oh, Zagorski, I just knew you’d come out with something like that!’
‘Why?’
She smiled and poured me another slug of liquor.
‘Because it’s just the sort of dumb thing you would say.’
‘Gee, Mary-Lou, I really don’t understand it. Most of what I learnt about it I got from Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time. That was the first time I’d heard that time and space can be warped. You remember the story? Astounding ran it a couple of years ago. There are two possible futures: one like an ideal society, the other a horrific dictatorship. The hero is contacted by each of them because his actions will determine which one comes to pass.’
‘Oh yeah, I read it. He’s visited by a winsome girl from utopia, and an evil vamp from dystopia.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Hmm, that figures. Don’t they choose him because his actions will determine whether some kid becomes a scientist or not?’
‘John Barr, yes; his ideas will go to create the perfect city of Jonbar. But only if he picks up the right object one day when he’s a child. If he chooses a magnet, he becomes interested in science and goes on to discover new theories that make this bright future possible. If he picks up the stone next to it for his slingshot, we’re headed for this totalitarian nightmare.’
‘What’s this got to do with quantum mechanics?’
‘Well, it’s as much to do with the Uncertainty Principle. By observing something you can change it, so the measurement of the position of a particle alters its trajectory.’
‘But it’s a political conundrum too, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is. Like you said, a warning from the future. That’s what we should be writing, don’t you think?’
‘Er, yeah.’
Along with everything else, I was politically naive at that point in my life. I had worked out that Mary-Lou was left wing and that somehow this did not necessarily mean she was pro-Soviet Russia, but beyond that I was liable to get confused. I wanted to show willing because of the way I felt about her but I was never sure I was doing the right thing. Lords of the Black Sun was meant to be anti-fascist but the illustrator had made the Nazi spaceship look so impressive that the cover issue became a favourite with the German–American Bund.
‘We’ve got to fight for the future, Mary-Lou!’ I declared, emboldened by the second glass of slivovitz.
‘That’s right, Larry. And it’s finely balanced. Just like in The Legion of Time, it could go either way. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. In the whole world!’
We were staring into each other’s eyes and it seemed to me like a portentous moment of epiphany, as though we shared the destiny of planet earth and the vast dominions of space beyond. I made a silent promise that I would learn more about politics and philosophy, that I would try to understand science properly so that I could share this precious wisdom with Mary-Lou