After leaving the Pasadena Public Library, I drove to Orange Grove Blvd. and then down into the Arroyo Seco near the Colorado overpass. I circled the Rose Bowl then exited on the Arroyo's far side. I continued to Oak Grove Park and parked by the equestrian trail.
I walked down the trail, the sandy soil clinging to my Adidas running shoes. I reached the edge of Devil's Gate Dam and stood looking out over the Arroyo's bed, which was formed of a lumpy mixture of sand and small brush. I listened for the explosions, the test firings of Parsons' small rockets. I sat on a large rock, the breeze blowing in my face, and thought of the apartment on the other side of the canyon, down a couple of miles on South Orange Grove, where Parsons had lain with his limbs shattered, methodically directing his rescuers.
I drove on up Foothill through La Crescenta to the Glendale freeway, and headed south to Glendale. On Glendate Avenue I passed a sign that read "Virgils Glendale Hardware--Eggs 99 cents a dozen." I turned right on Chevy Chase and came back up Brand past the Alex Theater. There I discovered a private office whose business was supplying postal lock boxes.
The office catered to people and organizations who wished to receive mail under another name, or who wished to keep their real locations private.
Organizations like the Jack Parsons Memorial Society. I rechecked the address on the flier I had gotten from Professor David Wilson. I was at the right spot alright. Nowhere.
I suddenly felt tired. I drove back to Pasadena and the Hilton. In my room, I turned on the TV, on my usual theory that you've never visited a place unless you've sampled the same electromagnetic noise the locals experience. Then I stepped into the shower.
When I got out of the shower, a poignant image on the screen caused me to turn up the TV volume. It was an aerial view of a vast triangular plain.
"The Plain of Esdraelon," explained the voice, "the Greek name for the biblical Valley of Jezreel, which means `God sows'. This was the most famous battlefield in ancient Israel. Here Thutmose III of Egypt fought the Canaanites. Here Gideon, who you can read about in the Old Testament Book of Judges, defeated the Midianites, as did Deborah and Barak the Canaanites. And Saul, the first king of Israel, battled here with the Philistines.
"More recently, in 1917, the British army under General Allenby faced the Turks in this same valley."
You might have thought it was a military documentary, but I recognized the voice as that of Oral Jerry Swagger, the evangelist.
The voice continued: "The principal North-South route through this plain goes through the pass of Megiddo, named after the ancient city. From Mount Megiddo, or `Har Megiddo' in the Hebrew, we get the name Armageddon.
"The Bible tells us this valley will be the scene of the final apocalyptic battle between the Armies of Man and the Armies of God, between Christ and Antichrist. In the Book of Revelation, chapter 16, verse 16, you read, `And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon.' Here occurs the seventh vial of the seventh trump. Here the `Kings of the East', as it explains earlier in chapter 16, will be gathered with their armies. East of Israel are the great oriental hordes--the Chinese, probably assisted by Japanese technology, and allied with their Communist cohorts the Russians. The latter are the Gog and Magog we read about in Ezekiel 38. Verse 1 in Ezekiel 38 tells us Gog was the chief prince of Meschech. Historically, the Assyrians called the children of Meschech `muska,' which is similar to `Moskva,' the Russian name for Moscow. In addition, `chief' is Hebrew `rosh,' and Rosh is an ancient name for Russia.
"These Communist forces from the east will join together with the Beast Power, which is the union of ten European nations allied under a common political leader that the Bible calls `the beast,' and a religious leader that the Bible calls the `false prophet,' or the Antichrist. See Revelation, chapters 13 and 17. This European combine will be a revival of the ancient Roman Empire, and--like the ancient Roman Empire--will be under the spiritual leadership of a church called the `great whore' in Revelation, chapter 17.
"These two great contenders for world power, armed with the latest in atomic weapons, will, under the guidance of the Antichrist and assisted by Satan and his demons, join forces against Jerusalem and the invaders from space. What invaders from space? The returning Jesus Christ and all his angelic hosts, when he returns to reign on this earth for a thousand years, a millennium of peace, happiness and prosperity. The world government of God, which will eliminate war, sickness, and crime. But first must take place the slaughter of Armageddon, where the blood will rise up to the horses' bridles. It says in Zechariah, chapter 14, verse 12, that a soldier's flesh will rot off his body, and his eyes will be eaten out of their sockets. This will happen when Jesus turns atomic and biological weapons back against the armies that use them.
"It will be a terrible, terrible time.
"But I'm not alarmed. You know why?"
Oral Jerry Swagger looked me right in the eye through the TV screen. "Why?" I asked.
"Because I'm not going to be here," he smiled.
No, I thought. You wouldn't be here, because every atom in your body will be ten feet removed from its neighbor. I turned off the TV.
Oral Jerry was obviously a pre-tribber. Like other pre-tribs, he expected all good Christians to be raptured out of harm's way before the arrival of tribulation events like nuclear war. By contrast, post-tribbers like Pat Robertson thought Christians would have to live through seven years of trial. They would be protected by God, of course, but they had to do their part too. Many of the post- tribs, fully expecting nuclear war, were stocking up on food, studying survival tactics, even forming paramilitary armies. For some of them the millennium would arrive once Christians had infiltrated and seized control of the U.S. government.
I was more familiar with the post-tribbers because they wrote financial newsletters, expounding theories of end-time economics. Post-tribs thought pre- tribs like Oral Jerry Swagger were copout wimps.
* * *
Some of the drivers were razzing him because his was the only white limo in the line of blacks parked alongside the Four Seasons.
"You sure you can handle that thing all by yourself?" one of the drivers taunted again.
Hell, he muttered, stepping inside and starting the engine. He pulled hard to the left, out of the line and across the narrow street, halting on-coming traffic. He reversed direction in a Y, pulled forward, and then deftly reinserted the limo into the middle of the line. Backwards.
The other drivers were still cheering when OJ came out of the hotel. Oral Jerry Swagger was known as OJ to his friends and OJS to his subordinates. He looked at the backwardly parked limo in puzzlement, but didn't say anything as the driver stepped out to open the door.
Today OJ was more than a little excited. It had been Larry Meier who had called him with the invitation--a luncheon in honor of the sister cities of Philadelphia, Florence, and Tel Aviv. And it had been Meier who had given him the inside story.
To those really in the know, Meier's credentials were of the highest order. Larry Meier, it was said, had been the young Irgun member who actually planted the bomb which destroyed a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. The explosion had taken out a piece of the British military headquarters and left a hundred bodies in its wake.
OJ told the driver to head for the airport. Then he settled back in the limo, opened the bar, and helped himself to a club soda.
It was time to sweep the deck for the Third Temple, Meier had emphasized as they worked their way through the prosciutto.
OJ clicked them off in his mind. The First Temple was the ancient Temple of Solomon, destroyed in the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem more than two and a-half millennia ago. The Second Temple was begun after the return of the Jews from Babylon. It had started out small with the inferior construction of Zerubbabel, but several hundred years later--just prior to the birth of Jesus--it was magnificently rebuilt by Herod. Herod's Temple was demolished by the Romans in 70 A.D. Now there would be a Third Temple, erected by a second Solomon or a new Herod, and located on the same site on Mount Moriah.
Meier had been unusually frank. The society was fragmenting and the survival of Israel depended on a new symbol of national unity. He had talked about the high crime levels which caused overcrowding in Israeli jails. About the peace demonstrations mounted in the streets by traitors and whores. About excessively devout Orthodox types, exempt from military service, who hurled rocks at secular Jews driving cars on the Sabbath. Meier referred to the epidemic of hashish, brought home by soldiers returning from the occupation of Lebanon, and the cocaine from Iran that circulated among the society's upper crust. While the young sought escape in drugs and disco frenzy, the rest spent like there was no tomorrow.
The kibbutzim and moshavim, which had made the desert bloom through the miracle of borrowed money, were in virtual bankruptcy. The country's high standard of living and high level of military expenditures had long depended on contributions from American Jews, reparations from Germany, and military aid from the U.S. But the inflow of foreign cash seemed to be drying up.
Some of the largest industrial groups, Meier had confided, were well behind in payments to foreign banks.
The Israeli economy, set in motion by the fiery socialist David Ben-Gurion, was a mess. Ben-Gurion had saddled Israel with an inefficient government bureaucracy and the socialistic union movement, the Histadrut. Inflation was stuck at the double digit levels dictated by the government's continued resort to the printing press to finance a chronic budget deficit. There was a large black market in goods priced and traded in U.S. dollars, because no one trusted the shekel, which had been intended as a new symbol of national pride when it replaced the Israeli pound.
Then there was the population problem. Sixty percent of the Jewish population was Oriental, and the Oriental Jews, with differing cultural traditions, were growing much faster than European Jews. The government was attempting to rectify the balance by encouraging more European immigration. It had even tried to get the U.S. to refuse admission to Soviet Jewish refugees, and hence to force them to emigrate to Israel, but the U.S. didn't appear cooperative.
Finally, there were the Palestinians. In another decade they would outnumber Jews in Greater Israel, which was the combined areas of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. You needed a few Palestinians, Meier said. Someone had to collect the garbage and do the menial chores which Jews didn't want to do anymore. But more than that, Palestinians were a security threat. Ben- Gurion had known this from the beginning of Israel.
Despite his economic short-comings, David Ben-Gurion had been an astute political strategist. As a temporary tactical maneuver Ben-Gurion had accepted the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947, which would have created Jewish and Palestinian states, because he had already worked out a secret agreement with Abdullah of Transjordan whereby Abdullah would annex the territory allocated to the Palestinians. Abdullah had had plans for a "Greater Syria" under the Hashemites, and Ben-Gurion had agreed to support his goals in return for Abdullah's acceptance of Ben-Gurion's. Then, during the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion had engaged in wholesale destruction of Arab towns and villages in his own allocated area, and had expelled the inhabitants from the country. But the process had not been complete, and now the more recent acquisition of the West Bank complicated matters. There would be no security in modern Israel, Meier had indicated, unless the remaining Palestinians were also expelled from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.
Well, OJ reflected, you couldn't say Oral Jerry hadn't done his part. OJ's support for Israel was unqualified: God had said he would bless those who blessed Abraham's seed, and curse the rest. And anyway, OJ knew, Israel was the only real friend America had in the Middle East. So did OJ's followers, especially those privileged to take one of his sponsored scenic tours of the Holy Land. Tourism was the largest industry in Israel, and it was mostly Christians--not Jews and not Moslems-- who provided the tourist dollars. But Christian aid wasn't just a simple matter of credit cards and traveller's checks. During the tour each group member had the opportunity to hear discussions of Israeli military strategy and to receive explanations why Israel needed more American weapons. Tour members returning from the Holy Land were urged to write their congressmen and senators, and to demand American support for Israel.
The limo headed south on the 76 Expressway and OJ looked out the tinted windows at the passing scenery. It wasn't a pretty sight. An urban version of gehenna, he reflected. Greater Philadelphia was a stench in the nostrils of God. Nothing anyone would really miss when the bombs of the Beast Power began their work of urban renewal.
To Christians like himself, the planned construction of the Third Temple meant the End was near. OJ knew that Bible prophecy indicated Jesus would not return until the Jews had rebuilt the Temple and reinstated animal sacrifices. It had been foretold. God wouldn't have preordained something that wasn't his will.
And it was God's will the Temple rise again. But first there was the little matter of the ungodly Moslem structures on the site. Every picture you see of Jerusalem, Meier had reminded him, is dominated by the Dome of the Rock. It was like a tumor growing unchecked in the heart of Judaism. When pressed for details, Meier had been vague, but OJ knew Meier could see what was needed. The Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque would have to be razed. So be it. God had made a covenant with his chosen people. He had given them the land of Palestine. To the Jews, not the pagan Arabs who were trying to steal Jacob's birthright. Satan's monuments must give way to the House of God.
The plans for the Temple had been drawn up, Meier had confided. Most of the stones had already been cut and stored away in hidden places. Dozens of craftsmen were at work molding the temple artifacts and weaving the priestly garments. In a few select religious schools, students were being trained to perform animal sacrifices as carefully prescribed in the book of Leviticus.
Fresh blood would once again be dashed at the base of the altar. Why not? OJ thought. Life is in the blood. And without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin. But the oblations wouldn't be just lambs and oxen. Not this time. Not when the armies of man gathered around Jerusalem like vultures around a carcass.
The Lord had long delayed his coming. But now, perhaps, the Apocalypse was truly at hand. Likewise the day of the Rapture, when true Christians would rise to meet their Lord. A time of rejoicing whose proximity would be signalled by the building of the Third Temple.
OJ comforted himself with that thought the rest of the way to the airport.
* * *
When he had founded Trans-Global Consultants, Edward M. Lodge had selected Philadelphia for his base of operations. It was centrally located, only an hour away from New York by the Amtrak Metroliner, and two-and-a-half hours from Washington, D.C. Office space was cheap, and there was privacy of a sort unobtainable in either of the other two cities, where many of the better restaurants had been bugged for years.
Trans-Global had since provided services to both private and governmental organizations, including Lodge's former employer, the CIA. Given the leaky sieve of Congressional oversight committees, which were manned by rival political factions fighting over control of the intelligence bureaucracy, many of the latter projects took the form of private consultations to private individuals, some of whom happened to be intelligence officers. The funding also came from private sources, usually from companies who could recoup by overcharging on on-going government contracts. This arrangement gave both Trans-Global and Trans-Global's clients a good deal of flexibility.
The upsurge of fundamentalism at the beginning of the 1970s had brought a potent new force into American politics, and a decade later Trans-Global had been retained to monitor political attitudes and activities. Lodge had developed a network of informants in all the major fundamentalist and evangelical groups. Literature and media output was scanned for political content, and this was summarized and filed for reference. Careful notes were also kept on the major players, men like Oral Jerry Swagger, and their contacts and habits and personal sexual peccadillos. On occasion these files were selectively leaked to bring about a leadership change, or to exert subtle pressure on a group in a direction desired by a Trans-Global client.
For reasons known only to himself, Lodge had assigned the operation the codename PIGEON. Some thought the name derived from the ditty he occasionally recited while going over reports:
We place no reliance
On virgin or pigeon;
Our Method is Science,
The Target is Religion.
Others thought it referred to the traditional esteem Columba livia bestowed on public monuments.
Shortly after initiating PIGEON, Lodge had made all his employees watch the French documentary Idi Amin Dada. He never explained why, but many of them had been struck with the Ugandan president's revelation he obtained instructions on government decisions through voices and dreams. Amin was a traditional tribal leader who swaggered and boasted, who ate the hearts of his enemies to acquire their courage, and who had fathered more than a hundred children upon his stable of wives. At least some of the employees saw that Amin's worldview was a vision easily manipulated.
Amin had confessed to the camera that he had been able to obtain "secret" Israeli documents containing Israel's plans for world conquest. Israel would be very upset if they knew he had them, Amin said. The Ugandan leader had then produced an old hard-bound copy of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the classic work on the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy, fabricated in 1903 by the Czarist secret police from a French satire, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, by Maurice Joly. Amin apparently had no conception of the incongruity of Israel's "secret" documents available from a book publisher, and printed long before the founding of the state. Such a man was ripe for psychological manipulation by the right operative, like the one who had provided him with the book in question.
Although he never said so to his employees, Lodge viewed fundamentalist Christians in pretty much the same light as he viewed Amin. A dumb SOB born in, say, 1955 is positive that the selective interpretation of a compilation of writings arrived at through a complex and obscure political process, about which he knows little or nothing, is "God's Truth" just because a publisher serves it up with "Holy Bible" printed on the cover, and another dumb SOB reads it from the pulpit. The same suckers were likely to revere King James English as the language spoken by Jesus and the Apostles.
The most difficult aspect to PIGEON was finding good informers and analysts. He had tried some academic sociologist types as researchers, but they seemed to be more interested in methodology and theories than in careful investigation, and they often placed an excessive reliance on printed literature. Lodge himself firmly believed in the OSS principle that you only put into a file what you wanted to be found later. And, for the same reason, he knew you couldn't understand a group just by analyzing its publications or reading stolen memos. Truth is not to be found in paper documents.
Ex-fundamentalists who had held influential posts were often more sensitive to the impact that personalities, organizational structure, and subtle doctrinal points could have on political orientation. But most of that lot were still crusaders of a sort, or else were so mentally fucked-up he wouldn't have hired them to sharpen pencils, much less do analysis.
Informants were a different matter. Here you couldn't be too picky: you had to take whomever you could get. But then all you needed was someone with inside information. You didn't care about his or her motivation for supplying it, just as long as the information itself was reliable.
It was a West German source, curiously, and not his man in Pasadena who had told him about Homer Nilmot. Homer was reputed to be a bright young chap who had once worked for Oral Jerry Swagger--with whom he was disillusioned-- as an analyst of other, competing fundamentalist and evangelical groups.
The recruitment of Homer--first as informer, then as employee--had been easy. Lodge had said he wanted Homer to help monitor the secular activities of American millennialists. He made the pitch--it was more than a pitch, he thought --that their apocalyptic political orientation was dangerous because it promoted military confrontation in the Middle East and was conducive to nuclear brinkmanship. Homer would have the chance to help prevent nuclear war.
Lodge knew that Homer, like other followers of the Oral Jerry Swagger, believed he had a unique handle on the "truth". Homer's views had undoutedly varied over time, given his disillusionment with Oral Jerry Swagger, but in his new job, as in his previous one, Homer would continue to view other groups as "false Christians" in some sense. Homer would interpret his religious background as "preparation" for his new role. And there were powerful economic incentives: Religious Analyst was one of the few occupations Homer was really trained for.
Lodge had figured Homer would find the job offer irresistible. And he had been right. The hire had been fortuitous. For it was only a few months afterward that Trans-Global received its contract on Oral Jerry Swagger. And Lodge had lept to the task at hand with an enthusiasm he hadn't felt for years. Homer's help made it all the more delicious.
* * *
I had naively expected to show up at the door to the Jack Parsons Memorial Society, seek out the Society historian, and find The Answer in a leather-bound folio. Instead I had reached a dead end at a postal box.
But the key to doing research is to renew the search. Eventually the universe conspires to deliver what you're looking for. That's what happened in the case of Jack Parsons.
The day started slowly. I had breakfast in the Cafe Madagascar at the Pasadena Hilton. The huevos verdes and coffee.
Then I drove up California Blvd. to Cal Tech and parked by a sign that said 30 minutes parking at all times. I went into the Robert Andrews Millikan Memorial Library but didn't find anything helpful. Afterward I passed by the Karman Laboratory of Fluid Mechanics & Jet Propulsion on my way to the Aeronautics Library in the Guggenheim building.
In the January 1938 issue of Astronautics: The Journal of the American Rocket Society, I found this note:
"Latest of educational institutions to join the rocket research profession is California Institute of Technology.
"Frank J. Malina of the Daniel Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of California Institute, in collaboration with Mr. Jack Parsons of the Halifax Powder Company, and others, has begun experimental rocket motor studies. Preliminary tests have already been run with motors burning gaseous oxygen and methyl alcohol on a simple proving stand equipped with a thrust-recording drum. Plans are underway for a complete testing laboratory."
An article by Jack Parsons and Ed Forman appeared in the August 1939 issue. They had used the law of the conservation of momentum to measure the thermal efficiency of various rocket fuel powders.
The scientific approach of Parsons and Forman contrasted with research being conducted elsewhere. In the April 1940 journal I read a letter from the Philatelic Club of Cuba Rocket-Postal Commission. The Postal Commission had experimentally launched a few pounds of mail for a short distance in an overgrown 4th of July rocket.
I had often suspected some of my own mail was delivered in a similar manner.
The July 1940 issue of the journal reported an interesting item from the June 26 New York Times:
"Pasadena, California.
"A discussion of the use of rocket motors for propelling airplanes, set for today's session of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, was cancelled on recommendation of the Army. The cancellation was made without explanation."
The date was well before Pearl Harbor, but the Army had already gone into action, classifying GALCIT's war-related research. It gave you the idea they had already decided to get into the war.
I had xeroxed the article by Parsons and Forman, as well as a later one on GALCIT. The copies were laying on the table in front of me, and caught the eye of a grad student sharing the same table.
"Doing a history of JPL?" he asked casually.
"Actually I'm doing research on one of JPL's founders, a fellow named Jack Parsons," I said.
He looked me over carefully. "What do you want to know about Jack Parsons?"
"How he lived. What he did. How he died. Basic stuff like that."
"Jack Parsons was always trying to get off," the student mused.
"So I heard." Possibly he was referring to Parsons' sex magic.
He continued: "Parsons' work in rocketry lead him to correspond with Igor Sikorsky, the pioneer Russian helicopter designer. Parsons read Sikorsky's autobiography The Story of the Winged-S when it was published in 1938. When Igor Sikorsky was eleven he had a dream of walking along a luxurious passageway, with carpet on the floor and walnut doors on either side. A spherical electric light on the ceiling gave out a bluish glow. Sikorsky felt a vibration under his feet, and was not surprised it differed from a train or a steamer, because he knew he was on a large flying ship in the air.
"Thirty-one years later, in 1931, his company Sikorsky Aircraft delivered the S-40 to Pan American Airways. The S-40 was a four-engine plane christened `the American Clipper'. After it had been outfitted with interior furnishings, Sikorsky took a flight in it as a passenger with the Pan American Board of Directors and, noting the furnishings in surprise, found himself standing in the corridor of his dream. Much of Sikorsky's life had been programmed by a childhood vision of his future self flying.
"Jack Parsons had also heard from Arthur Young, who was then designing the Bell Model 47, which was awarded the world's first commercial helicopter license. Young had come to believe that he was really working on a `psychopter', a vehicle for the winged self, for which the helicopter was only the outer form.
"Parsons was tremendously excited by the examples of Sikorsky and Young because their search, like his, was the product of a deeply-felt internal, one might say mystical, vision.
" `We're all prisoners at the bottom of a 4000-foot gravity well,' Jack used to say. `We'll never be free until gravity's tyranny is toppled.' "
"Gravity's tyranny?" I repeated.
"Parsons believed man's evolution to this point had been largely controlled by Ialdabaoth, the God of Genesis in Gnostic tradition, a basically earthbound presence whose intention was to hold man in slavery through ignorance. Ialdabaoth was one sense man's creator, but was also an evil tyrant who wanted his creation to obey him and believe everything he said with no questions asked. He would go into a rage at the first sign of individual initiative or independence of thought, like the experimental process of eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The latter was `original sin'."
I didn't say anything. I just listened.
"Not a nice guy, Ialdabaoth. He existed on a regular diet of human- provided sacrificial blood, for example. He was pleased with Abel, the shepherd, because Abel made animal offerings out of the flocks he tended. But Cain, the farmer, was rejected because he could only offer fruits and vegetables from the field.
"Ialdabaoth's control somehow depended on man remaining a terrestrial creature. By contrast to Ialdabaoth, there was Lucifer, the light-bringer, the Serpent, or Prometheus, who wished to release mankind from the bonds of ignorance, and, by analogy, from his earthly prison. Lucifer's sin was the attempt to ascend into the heavens, so the legend of Lucifer cast down to earth symbolizes man's imprisonment in, among other things, Ialdabaoth's gravitational gridlock."
"You seem to be awfully well-informed about Jack Parsons," I said. I emphasized "awfully" to see what reaction it would provoke.
He grinned. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Srinivasa Muthuswamy, Secretary-Treasurer of the Jack Parsons Memorial Society. Just call me Renny."
Renny.
"What kind of people join the Jack Parsons Memorial Society, Renny?"
"Oh, we're mostly a group of space freaks, longevity researchers, nanotechnology enthusiasts, acid heads, ceremonial magicians, upwinger futurists, cyberpunkers, scifi afficionados. Largely libertarians, believers in free markets and free minds, although we tolerate most anyone who has an interest in Jack Parsons--like a few Randroid Objectivists who are still explaining the rational criteria that make Rachmaninoff a greater composer than Bach."
"Rachmaninoff was a greater composer than Bach," I said.
Renny nodded thoughtfully, then grinned.
"And Jack Parsons built better rockets than Isaac Newton," he replied.
"So getting outside gravity's stranglehold was all part of Parsons' search for liberation?"
"That's right," Renny said. "Parsons was always talking about a `Rocket to Amargi.' "