Rocketing To Disaster

The time is shortly after 5:00 p.m. on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 17, 1952. The location is a large and imposing pre-war mansion on South Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena, California. And complete and utter carnage and chaos is currently reigning supreme. Within the deep bowels of the old house, a laboratory packed with all manner of chemicals and scientific gadgetry is enveloped in flames. The Hell-like inferno is borne out of two terrifying explosions, the rumbling and reverberating echoes of which can still be heard at least a mile away, and which cause the neighbors to run screaming onto the streets, petrified that an all-destructive Third World War has just begun.

Lying on the floor of the laboratory is a man whose body has been horribly mutilated as a result of the awesome power of the explosion and the inferno. A sickening, bleak hole dominates what is left of the man’s lower-jaw. The bones of his left arm are violently broken, and both of his legs are completely shattered. Half of his right arm is missing, and the remainder is a tangle of exposed muscle, sinew, and bloodied bone. The man’s life is ebbing away fast – and what is left of his mind knows it, too. A wild and careering ride in an ambulance is undertaken to try and save the man from the icy clutches of that grimmest of all reapers, but it is to no avail. He expires at 5:45 p.m. at Pasadena’s Huntington Memorial Hospital. Continue reading…