The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott Page 0,49

I was happy enough to have become a healthy specimen at last.

And for the most part I could get on with my life and not dwell on Mary-Lou or Jack Parsons. But I couldn’t quite shake them off in the fictional world that I sought refuge in. ‘Greek Fire’, which I sold to Fabulous Tales, features a rocket scientist unsure of whether to use solid or liquid fuel, who travels back in time to the Byzantine Empire to investigate the dual properties of the ancient incendiary weapon of the title. I saw it as a cathartic exercise, especially the final scene with its huge laboratory explosion. And though I managed to avoid running into Mary-Lou in person, I found it impossible not to read her work. Her ‘Zodiac Empire’ series became more and more mystical and obscure, an epic of conflicting planet colonies in the solar system set against alien influences from distant constellations. Mary-Lou had told me that it was to culminate in its transcendent conclusion, ‘The City of the Sun’, but that instalment never appeared.

It had been a year of quantum leaps, of diverging time-lines, alternate futures and crucial moments where things could go either way: ‘jonbar points’ as SF writers had already started to call them after the title of Jack Williamson’s seminal story. So when I heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which shocked the whole nation, I felt hardly surprised by it. In fact, a strange calm descended upon me as for the first time in my life I knew exactly what to do.

On 8 December I joined the USAAF. I didn’t want to wait for the call-up and I had some insane idea that I wanted to fly. It wasn’t so much out of patriotic duty, or a sense of political commitment. It was more a lonely impulse, simply to take action and to be ruled by fate. And I could break free, leave home without any sense of guilt or responsibility. I hadn’t an inkling of what this supposed independence would cost me and Mother was out of her wits with worry. But now we both had something bigger to blame.

I had a drink with Nemo the night before I shipped out. After we had said our farewells I had the sudden urge to say goodbye to Mary-Lou. I think I had this drunken notion of making some sort of noble exit, full of stoicism and fake nonchalance. But when I called by she wasn’t in. The next morning I was on a bus to the West Coast Air Corps Training Center in Santa Ana and I didn’t see her again for four years.

6

the lovers

Wednesday, 26 March 1941

‘Bloomsbury’s blown to bits,’ K blurted out as our train pulled into Paddington. We had been talking of our last sortie to London, at first in a flippant & almost jolly manner, but by the time we had reached the suburbs of the besieged city the mood darkened considerably. K seemed gripped with a dread of arrival and recalled the horrors we had witnessed last September – all the wrecked buildings in West Central & fires everywhere from the incendiaries. But I remember that it had been the time bomb in Mecklenburgh Square that had disturbed K the most. She had fancifully imagined that the Germans had come up with a secret weapon that had some means of exploding time itself. Of course, given the way that she has played with that dimension in her own work, it was hardly surprising that she might conjure up such a curious conceit. I first thought that she was making a joke, but she was genuinely disturbed by the notion & I had to try to explain that it was merely the business of a delayed fuse. The whole area had to be roped off, which was a disaster for the Woolfs Wolves (!) who had only recently set up a new office for the Hogarth Press in the square. Then a month later their house in Tavistock Square took a direct hit. Trust K to come up with a grim formula that trips so lightly: ‘Bloomsbury’s blown to bits.’

It seems odd now but once powered flight had seemed to bring such hope. Like the aeroplane writing in the sky in Mrs Dalloway; the great women pilots Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson. Well, Earhart and Johnson are dead and all around us is the devastation brought by the air raids. Of course it became a symbol