this notion and did nothing to discourage it. It was odd for me, to be with Jack again after all that had happened. It was astonishing really, though I just felt a calm detachment. But he was bitter at the way things had turned out: other people who had worked on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s early rocket tests had also lost jobs in the McCarthy clampdown, while captured Nazi scientists had had their war records laundered and were now in charge of research in the field.
‘You know, when I was a kid I thought that science was going to save the world, that it would give us a universal language, progress, peace,’ he lamented. ‘The military men took it over. Science means one word now: security.’
When he was just a teenage rocket enthusiast in the early 1930s, Jack had written to the German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun and had received a reply. An intermittent correspondence came to an abrupt end once Hitler had come to power. Von Braun was a science fiction fan too. It is said that even during the war he kept up his subscription to Astounding magazine, obtaining copies via a mail drop in neutral Sweden. And he had now become part of the fantasy. Countless space films used stock footage of the testing launches of captured Nazi rockets in White Sands, New Mexico. And the new annual prizes for best SF works and achievements, the Hugo Awards, were presented in the form of a statuette looking disturbingly like a V2.
But Jack Parsons became the forgotten story in the dream of space. It was sadly apt that he should play some part in our movie. I knew he would never suspect me for what had happened to him and I was glad that I could put some work his way. We lowered the plywood spacecraft, and Jack detonated its retro rockets. It looked fantastic. I caught sight of his face in the fierce firelight, alive once more in transcendent wonder.
The film came in on budget and it made a reasonable profit at the box office, going on to become something of a B-movie classic. A spate of flying saucer features followed.
Nemo went back to Cuba in 1951. He’d had enough of the USA. He felt harassed and constantly under surveillance (though he never guessed how close the watchers really were). There was real change happening in Latin America, he told me. That was where the future was.
Larry and Sharleen got married in the fall of that year. I don’t know why I felt so resentful about it but I did. I’d taken him for granted for so long. And he’d stopped loving me just when I could have loved him back. Another adjustment. Who knows what could have been? So I concentrated on work. I had a career now.
Television, that was the new big thing for the 1950s. I got a job with an anthology series called The Scanner: half-hour dramas of fantasy and science fiction. You are now tuned to The Scanner. Your television set is picking up signals from distant worlds, images from other dimensions . . . I was hired to direct twelve of the episodes of the first season. We adapted existing stories by established writers including Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein (as well as Larry Zagorski and Nemo Carvajal). I was even asked if I wanted to write something myself, or have one of my stories used, but I said no. I still loved the genre but now felt too detached about it. I didn’t want to come up with any new ideas, or to end up in that world of fiction where reality and fantasy start to coincide.
Dexter came to see me at the television studio. He took me to lunch and told me that he had a new job as an art dealer, specialising in Abstract Expressionism. He hinted that he had moved on in his secret career as well. I had expected him to ask me to put little touches of his into some of my programmes but when I tentatively mentioned ‘psychological strategy’ he smiled and shook his head.
‘There’s no big conspiracy, Mary-Lou, really there isn’t,’ he insisted. ‘We can let things run by themselves for a while. But you know what’s really interesting? We all live in a science-fiction world now. It’s become part of mass consciousness.’
It reminded me of what Larry had said about the great future being already behind us. Within our