Astounding Page 4

  His next effort, “Piracy Preferred,” marked the debut of Arcot, Morey, and Wade, a trio of adventurers who deliver huge blocks of exposition while puffing on pipes. None of them had anything resembling an inner life, including Arcot, who otherwise might have seemed like a wishful portrait of the author—he was six feet tall and the son of a famous scientist. Yet there were hints of developments to come. One character says in an aside, “You’ve grown up in a world where the psychomedical techniques really work. When I was growing up, psychomedical techniques were strictly rule of thumb—and the doctors were all thumbs.”

  Campbell pressed on with “The Voice of the Void,” which he wrote in a single afternoon, and the Arcot stories “Islands of Space,” “The Black Star Passes,” and “Solarite,” which expanded outward from the solar system to encompass the entire galaxy. His aliens were often more interesting than his men. An extraterrestrial could be flawed, while his human protagonists were all generic heroes—invariably tall and strong—who represented the kind of genius inventor he wanted to be. The results read, accurately, like the work of a bright, lonely kid who knew everything about chemistry and nothing about people. And there were no women in sight.

  Before long, Campbell became second in popularity only to “Doc” Smith, whom he challenged directly in the letters column of Amazing, pointing out errors in his rival’s stories while daring all comers to do the same to him: “I’m waiting anxiously for all comments, from anyone, and in particular Dr. Smith.” Yet it never seems to have occurred to him to submit to the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which had appeared on newsstands at the end of 1929.

  His professors were skeptical. One told him that he was prostituting his talents, while his freshman English teacher, William Chace Greene, Jr., disliked science fiction, giving him a poor grade for a story that stated that light had mass. Campbell responded with a signed note from the physics department, but Greene flunked him anyway. The only professor who ever helped him was Norbert Wiener, who advised him on “Islands of Space.” As for his father, he had merely remarked, after hearing of his first acceptance by Amazing, “It isn’t The Saturday Evening Post.”

  But Campbell had bought his car. It was a Model A Ford Coupe that he rebuilt from the ground up, like one of his heroes constructing a spaceship. Driving from his mother’s house in Orange to Cambridge, he spent eight hours on twisty roads, taking pride in going as fast as he could without killing himself. He had passed every test that he had been given, and he seemed on the verge of achieving the ideals of his fiction in real life—until, inexplicably, he failed.

  His grades had been good but unexceptional, with high marks in physics and chemistry and fair ones in calculus, although he was “constitutionally opposed to math.” He was also required to learn German, the language of international research, which he failed to pass after three tries. Campbell evidently blamed this later on the repressed memory of the doctor at his birth, who had shouted in a German accent, but at the time, he only found it hard to care about something so trivial as declining nouns: “If das Haus means ‘the house,’ why isn’t that good enough for anybody?”

  None of it mattered. After spending the first half of his junior year as an unclassified student at MIT, he was asked to leave. His last day was February 7, 1931. At the age of twenty, Campbell had seemingly proven his father’s accusation that he was unable to see anything through to the end, and his dreams of finding a place where he belonged lay in ruins. Worst of all, he had been let down by his mind. It was the one game that he had been unable to solve, and as he slunk back to his mother’s house in New Jersey, he had no real idea of what his future might hold.

  2.

  Three Against the Gods

  1907–1935

  The adventurer is an outlaw. Adventure must start with running away from home.

  —WILLIAM BOLITHO, TWELVE AGAINST THE GODS

  In 1931, shortly after his demoralizing departure from MIT, Campbell boarded a ship to Europe, where he traveled alone for two months. It was an act that was deliberately out of character. Campbell’s fiction ranged across the universe, but he was not a natural wanderer. His father’s relative affluence granted him physical, if not emotional, security, and for most of his life, he was rarely more than a day’s drive from where he had been born and raised.

  His three most important collaborators, by contrast, all ended up far from home. From an early age, they had invented identities for themselves, out of choice or necessity, and they were profoundly marked by their travels. One wandered as a pragmatic solution to his problems; another, in pursuit of his dreams; and the last, an immigrant who went the farthest, left when he was only a child.

  ONE DAY IN 1912, ROBERT A. HEINLEIN LIKED TO RECALL, A YOUNG COUPLE WAS WALKING THROUGH Swope Park in Kansas City, Missouri. They were crossing the railroad tracks when the wife caught her heel in a switch—the pair of tapering rails that guided the cars—as a train’s whistle sounded its approach. A passerby, identified in press accounts as a tramp, stopped to help, but the men were unable to free her before the engine struck them all. The woman and the stranger were killed at once.

  Heinlein, who was only five at the time, remembered being in the park that day with his family. The incident became one of his earliest memories, and he never got over it. What obsessed him the most was the second man, who could have saved himself at the last moment but died instead. It informed Heinlein’s ongoing effort to find meaning in a world defined by death, as embodied by the message of the tramp on the tracks: “This is how a man lives. And this is how a man dies.”

  Or so he claimed. In reality, the incident didn’t occur when he was five, but twelve, and it took place over four hundred miles away, in Winnetka, Illinois. On September 1, 1919, William Tanner was killed while trying to save his wife from an oncoming train, while a flagman—not a tramp—named John Miller lost a leg in the rescue attempt but survived. Heinlein had listened intently as his father read the coverage aloud from the Kansas City Star, and the fact that he quietly assimilated it into his own biography was revealing in itself.

  Robert Anson Heinlein was born on July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, eighty miles southeast of Kansas City. His parents, Rex Ivar Heinlein and Bam Lyle, had been sweethearts in high school, and Rex, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, worked for his family’s agricultural tools company and as a cashier for International Harvester. Heinlein was the third of seven children. He stammered, but he was an excellent student, and as a child, he had mystical experiences, including memories of past lives. At school, he found himself looking at another boy—a bully—and feeling overwhelmed by the certainty that they were different aspects of the same person.

  He never shared these convictions with his parents, who had more pressing worries. They were always poor—there were simply too many kids—and they once survived on potato soup for three months. In their crowded house, Heinlein slept on a mattress on the floor, and on summer nights, he snuck out to the park to play naked as Tarzan. He earned pocket money by selling The Saturday Evening Post, reading his homework on the streetcar, while such writers as Edward Bellamy, H. G. Wells, and Will Durant turned him into a budding socialist.

  At night, under the bedcovers, he studied pages by candlelight—Kipling, Burroughs, the Tom Swift series, Horatio Alger, and the Gernsback science fiction magazines. They filled him with a resolve to conquer his limitations, and he took forensics to overcome his stammer. During a high school debate on shipping regulations, he quoted the annual reports of the British Colonial Shipping Board to support his argument. A week later, the students on the opposing team realized that the organization didn’t exist—but Heinlein had already won. At night, he studied the stars from the top of a billboard, and he contemplated a career as an astronomer.

  His family was more focused on this world. The Heinleins had a strong military tradition—their ancestors had supposedly fought in every American war—and his father had used a patronage job to secure a place for
Heinlein’s older brother at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. When Heinlein was old enough to follow suit, his father didn’t offer to do the same. Heinlein took matters into his own hands, writing dozens of letters until he landed an appointment, and he prepared himself by strengthening his eyes, which had always been weak, using the Bates Method, a system of exercises intended to improve his vision.

  On June 16, 1925, he was sworn in as a midshipman at Annapolis. During his plebe year, he was hazed by upperclassmen, who forced him to answer questions in the mess hall. Heinlein, who was six feet tall and painfully skinny, lost ten pounds, and he had nightmares about the beatings for decades. He was drawn to aviation, thinking that he might become a pilot, and he took up fencing and dancing, seeing them as ways in which the mind and body could be harmonized. The academy’s structure seemed to offer a corrective to personality flaws—his impulsiveness, his temper, his impatience with others—that he would always struggle to overcome.

  In May 1926, his favorite sister, Rose Elizabeth, died at the age of seven, after falling out of the family car. His father, who had been driving, never forgave himself. Heinlein was heartbroken, but he had to return to the academy, where he hoped to join the aviation squad. Even after his eye exercises, however, his stereoscopic vision was terrible, and he failed the qualifying exam. He turned to engineering instead, and although he remained fascinated by planes, he would never fly.

  The following year, he sailed on a practice cruise to the Panama Canal on the USS Oklahoma. Heinlein was a dreamer, but he knew that the details were what counted, and he crawled over the battleship with his sketchbook, taking pleasure in memorizing its systems. Yet life continued to present him with devastating surprises. While on leave, he had dated Alice McBee, one of his high school classmates, and he had been planning to ask her to marry him. In 1928, he learned that she had died from appendicitis, and after hearing the news, he felt suicidal.

  Heinlein was commissioned as an ensign on June 6, 1929, but he skipped his graduation. On the train home, he met and slept with a woman named Mary Briggs, who was on her way to see her fiancé in St. Louis. When he climbed into her berth, he wasn’t entirely inexperienced—he had lost his virginity to “a grandmother” five years earlier—but it was his first fulfilling sexual encounter, and it led to an awareness of sex as another interface between the body and the mind. Decades later, he wrote to Briggs, “Had you not been engaged when I met you, I suspect that we would have married within weeks or even days.”

  Robert A. Heinlein at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, 1929.

  Courtesy of Geo Rule

  Like Campbell, he had been impressed by the story The Skylark of Space, but his interests ran equally toward the spiritual side. A classmate named Cal Laning had taught him hypnosis, and they joined a third friend in a project called the Quest—if one of them died, he promised to contact the others from beyond the grave, and they conducted experiments in telepathy, following the instructions in a book by the socialist writer Upton Sinclair. Heinlein was searching for approaches to mysticism, and he even considered joining the Freemasons.

  Instead, the revelation of the girl on the train led him to take an uncharacteristic risk. In Kansas City, he reunited with another high school friend, Elinor Curry, whom he married without telling his parents. Elinor was “sexually adventurous,” and the impulsive act was driven by a desire to further explore sex—but he was disturbed when she slept with another man on their honeymoon. Heinlein had done much the same with Mary Briggs, who was engaged to someone else, but was evidently unprepared when it didn’t occur on his terms.

  The marriage also required a sacrifice. Earlier that year, Heinlein had asked to be considered for a Rhodes Scholarship. It was a long shot—his grades were only fair—but it seemed like a plausible path to astronomy. Rhodes Scholars had to be single, however, so he withdrew his application, giving it up in exchange for a sex life. Within a year, their marriage was over, and Elinor, whom he called “poisonous, like mistletoe,” filed for divorce in 1930.

  Heinlein was serving on the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier based in San Pedro, California. In 1932, he reconnected with Cal Laning, who had become infatuated with a woman named Leslyn MacDonald. Leslyn, who was born in Boston on August 29, 1904, had been raised in the Los Angeles area by a mother devoted to Theosophy—an occult philosophy that Heinlein also studied—and worked in the music department at Columbia Pictures after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was three years older than Heinlein, just over five feet tall, and undeniably striking.

  Although he knew that Laning was in love with Leslyn, Heinlein, who had felt so betrayed by Elinor under similar circumstances, slept with her on the night that they met. The following morning, he startled all three of them by proposing. It was the second time that Heinlein, who was otherwise so disciplined, had rushed headlong toward marriage—but Leslyn was a far more promising partner. She was more than his match intellectually, shared his interest in mysticism, and hinted that she would be receptive to an open relationship.

  Leslyn MacDonald in 1926.

  Special Collections, UCLA Library

  On March 28, 1932, Heinlein, wearing his dress uniform and carrying his saber, married Leslyn, who wore a borrowed gown. The groom was slim and handsome, with an air of studied sophistication. Laning, who had turned out to be a remarkably good sport, attended the ceremony. A few months later, Heinlein was promoted to lieutenant, junior grade. His life seemed to be coming together, and he had no way of knowing that it was about to fall apart.

  That summer, he was transferred to the USS Roper, a destroyer on which he was slated to serve as a gunnery officer. It was smaller than the other ships to which he had been assigned, and its motion made him desperately seasick. After losing weight and suffering stomach pains, he checked into the naval hospital in San Diego. For years, he had endured minor ailments—his eyes, his wrist, attacks of urethritis that would disrupt his sexual relations with Leslyn—and now he was at open war with his body. The diagnosis was tuberculosis.

  At first, he recovered quickly, but after his transfer to a hospital in Denver, where the quality of care was far worse, Heinlein developed bedsores—inspiring him to work up an early design for a waterbed—and an infection that went misdiagnosed. He was facing an involuntary retirement, and with his lungs damaged, he would never serve at sea again. Looking for a new career, he put up the exploration money for a silver mine in Colorado, only to lose everything when his backer turned out to be a gangster who was shot to death before the deal closed.

  On August 1, 1934, he was found “totally and permanently disabled.” At the age of twenty-seven, his career was over. Heinlein had hoped to honor his family’s tradition in the Navy, but although he had done everything right, he had failed. His body, which he had spent most of his life trying to control, had betrayed him, and now he had to find answers somewhere else.

  WHEN HE WAS JUST A BOY, L. RON HUBBARD OFTEN SAID, HE MET A MEDICINE MAN NAMED OLD Tom Madfeathers. Old Tom lived with a small group of Blackfoot Indians in a camp on the outskirts of Helena, Montana, not far from where Hubbard’s grandfather owned a gigantic cattle ranch, and could jump fifteen feet from the ground while seated to the top of his tent—a lesson, it seemed, in how reality could be far stranger than anything one might imagine.

  According to Hubbard’s account, the Blackfeet saw him as a kindred spirit. As a toddler, he had charmed them by forcing his way into their tribal dance, during which the braves threatened his father with tomahawks when he tried to take him away. Hubbard boasted that he learned to ride before he could walk, that he was breaking horses at three and a half, and that the Blackfeet made him a blood brother—a custom that is otherwise unattested—when he was six years old.

  All these stories are almost certainly false. Hubbard’s grandfather didn’t own a ranch, but a farm of a few hundred acres where horses were raised for parades, and it was miles from the nearest reservation. If Hubbard ev
er encountered the Blackfeet, he would have seen himself in them, and not the other way around. For most of his life, he idealized the freedom that they seemed to represent, and the dream of being a blood brother was a variation on an idea to which he repeatedly returned—an initiation in which an ordinary man could become something more.

  Hubbard’s embellishments were often based on a grain of truth, but in the long run, their only effect was to trivialize what had been an indisputably colorful boyhood. His mother, Leodora May Waterbury, was born in 1885 in Tilden, Nebraska. She was an intelligent woman who studied to become a teacher in Omaha, marrying a naval recruiter, Harry Ross Hubbard, who was one year her junior. After she became pregnant, May returned with her husband to her hometown, where their son Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born on March 13, 1911.

  The boy had orange hair, gray eyes, and immense charm. He loved to tell stories and invent games, and after moving to Helena, he was so spoiled by his relatives that he came to expect the same treatment from everyone. Hubbard attended grade school within sight of the Cathedral of Saint Helena, walking nearly every day past its Gothic spires. During World War I, his father returned to the Navy, where he served as an assistant paymaster, and he was ultimately posted to the USS Oklahoma, on which Heinlein later took a practice cruise.

  When his father was reassigned to Washington, D.C., Hubbard and his mother joined him by ship. On the voyage, Hubbard met Joseph C. “Snake” Thompson, an eccentric herpetologist, psychoanalyst, and former spy. Hubbard credited Thompson with introducing him to the principles of psychology, and he was undoubtedly fascinated by him. After arriving in Washington, Hubbard, at thirteen, allegedly became the youngest Eagle Scout in the country. In reality, no such age records were kept, but he had clearly advanced very quickly.