Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

Ron and Sara left The Hilltop in July and returned to California, to a rented trailer on a lot in the
seediest section of North Hollywood, where he began writing the first of the popular 'Ole Doc
Methuselah' stories - rousing yarns about a Soldier of Light and his devoted four-armed slave,
Hippocrates, who travel around the universe in a golden spaceship saving entire civilizations from
death and disease and overthrowing despotic inter-planetary dictators as a sideline.
In August, the month The End Is Not Yet began serialization in Astounding, Ron acquired a literary
agent. Forrest Ackerman was not a big-time Hollywood agent with a fat cigar, but a young man with
thick horn-rimmed spectacles who had been addicted to science fiction ever since he first picked
up a copy of Amazing Stories at the age of nine.
'Forrie' Ackerman would one day be the proud owner of the world's biggest collection of sciencefiction
magazines and would drive around Los Angeles in a red Cadillac with SCI-FI on the licence
plate, but in 1947 he was still struggling to capitalize on his devotion to the genre by persuading
science-fiction writers that he could represent them. Then thirty years old, he had actually met
Hubbard ten years earlier in Shep's Shop, a second-hand bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard
which specialized in science fiction.
'I was browsing in Shep's Shop one night in 1937 when I got into conversation with this young redhaired
man who told me he held a world record in gliding. He said his name was L. Ron Hubbard
and that he had had a lot of adventure stories published in pulp magazines. I asked him if he had
ever tried his hand at science fiction and he said, no, oddly enough, he hadn't. But right there, on
the spot, he began to outline the plot for a science fiction story set in California 25,000 years in the
future, during a second Ice Age. I never saw that story in print, but it seemed to plant a seed in his
mind . . .'
Ackerman liked to believe that their brief encounter in Shep's Shop was the spur that started Ron
Hubbard writing science fiction. His first act on his new client's behalf was to take him to meet G.
Gordon Dewey and Peter Grainger, two Los Angeles businessmen who wanted to diversify into
publishing. The meeting was not a marked success: there was some desultory discussion about
buying rights to some of Hubbard's novels, but nothing was concluded. Afterwards, Ron offered to
drive Forrie back to his apartment in New Hampshire. It was a journey Ackerman would never
forget, for on the way Ron began to tell him the incredible story of how he had died on an operating
table during the war.
'I remember he had an old rattletrap of a car and he was chewing tobacco. As he drove he would
open the door with one hand and squirt tobacco juice out onto the road. When we got to my
apartment we sat outside in the car while he continued with the story. It was after five o'clock in the
morning, and the sun was coming up, before he had finished.
'Basically what he told me was that after he died he rose in spirit form and looked back on the body
he had formerly inhabited. Over yonder he saw a fantastic great gate, elaborately carved like
something you'd see in Baghdad or ancient China. As he wafted towards it, the gate opened and
just beyond he could see a kind of intellectual smorgasbord on which was outlined everything that
had ever puzzled the mind of man. All the questions that had concerned philosophers through the
ages - When did the world begin? Was there a God? Whither goest we? - were there answered. All
this information came flooding into him and while he was absorbing it, there was a sort of
flustering in the air and he felt something like a long umbilical cord pulling him back. He was
saying "No, no, not yet!", but he was pulled back anyway. After the gates had closed he realized he
had re-entered his body.