Date: 2011-10-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Short Stories; Fiction; Humor; Space; Classics; Fantasy
Description: In this short science fiction story by the acclaimed author of Fahrenheit 451, an elderly woman in search of enlightenment buys a ticket on a rocket. "A Little Journey" (August 1951) marks Bradbury's final contribution to the editorial decade of Horace Gold, the editor of Galaxy magazine. Like The Martian Chronicles and "The Fireman," the story demonstrates Bradbury's characteristic blending so early in his career of the sentimental and the transcendent, the homely and the mystical. Bradbury's old women in space and their strange outcome are reminiscent of his more famous story "Kaleidoscope"
Publisher: RosettaBooks

A Little Journey

The Galaxy Project

Ray Bradbury

Series Editor Barry N. Malzberg

Copyright

A Little Journey
Copyright © 1951 by World Editions, Inc., renewed 1979 by Ray Bradbury
eForeword
Copyright © 2011 by Barry N. Malzberg

Jacket illustration copyright © 1953 by the Estate of Ed Emshwiller
Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

Special materials copyright © 2011 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Electronic edition published 2011 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795321177

Contents

About Galaxy Magazine

About Science Fiction Novelettes and Novellas

About the Author

About the Author of the eForeword

About the Jacket
eForeword

A Little Journey

ABOUT GALAXY MAGAZINE

The first issue of Galaxy, dated October 1950, already heralded to the highest standards of the field. The authors it published regularly contributed to the leading magazine Astounding, writing a kind of elegant and humanistic science fiction which although not previously unknown had always been anomalous. Its founding editor, H. L. Gold (1914–1996), was a science fiction writer of some prominence whose editorial background had been in pulp magazines and comic books; however, his ambitions were distinctly literary, and he was deliberately searching for an audience much wider and more eclectic than the perceived audience of science fiction. His goal, he stated, was a magazine whose fiction “Would read like the table of contents of a literary magazine or The Saturday Evening Post of the 21st century, dealing with extrapolation as if it were contemporary.” The magazine, although plagued by distribution difficulties and an Italian-based publisher (World Editions), was an immediate artistic success, and when its ownership was transferred with the issue of August 1951 to its printer Robert M. Guinn, it achieved financial stability for the remainder of the decade.

Galaxy published every notable science fiction writer of its first decade and found in many writers who would become central figures: Robert Sheckley, James E. Gunn, Wyman Guin, and F. L. Wallace, among others. Galaxy revivified older writers such as Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester (whose first novel, The Demolished Man, was commissioned and directed page by page by Gold). John Campbell fought with Astounding and remained an important editor, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (inaugurated a year before Galaxy) held to high standards of literary quality while spreading its contents over two fields, but Galaxy was incontestably the 1950s’ flagship magazine for the acidly satiric, sometimes profoundly comic aspect of its best contributions. Galaxy had a lasting effect not only upon science fiction but upon literature itself. J.G. Ballard stated that he had been deeply affected by Galaxy. Alan Arkin, an actor who became a star after 1960 and won an Oscar in the new millennium, contributed two stories in the mid-fifties.

At this point Gold was succumbing to agoraphobia, physical ills, and overall exhaustion (some of this perhaps attributable to his active service during WWII) against which he had struggled from the outset. (There is creditable evidence that Frederik Pohl was the de facto editor during Gold’s last years.) Gold would return some submissions with notes like: “Garbage,” “Absolute Crap.” Isaac Asimov noted in his memoir “Anthony Boucher wrote rejection slips which read like acceptances. And Horace wrote notes of acceptance which felt like rejections.” Despite this, the magazine retained most of its high standard and also some of its regular contributors (William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Pohl himself). Others could no longer bear Gold’s imperiousness and abusiveness.

ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION NOVELETTES AND NOVELLAS

In the view of James E. Gunn, science fiction as a genre finds its peak in the novella (17,500–40,000 words) and novelette (7,500–17,500 words). Both forms have the length to develop ideas and characters fully but do not suffer from padding or the hortatory aspect present in most modern science fiction novels. The longer story-form has existed since science fictions inception with the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, but Galaxy developed the form to a consistent level of sophistication and efficiency and published more notable stories of sub-novel length than any other magazine during the 50s…and probably in any decade.

The novella and novelette as forms make technical and conceptual demands greater, perhaps even greater than the novel, and Galaxy writers, under founding editor H. L. Gold’s direction, consistently excelled in these lengths. Gold’s most memorable story, “A Matter of Form” (1938) was a long novelette, and he brought practical as well as theoretical lessons to his writers, who he unleashed to develop these ideas. (John Campbell of course, had also done this in the 40s and continued in the 50s to be a directive editor.) It is not inconceivable that many or even most of the contents of the 1950’s Galaxy were based on ideas originated by Gold: golden technology becomes brass and jails its human victims when it runs amok—is certainly one of his most characteristic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ray Bradbury (b. 1920) first published a short story as a teenager in Amazing Stories in collaboration with Henry Haase. He was a founding member of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society, the oldest fan organization and one still in existence. Ten years later he had become perhaps the most prominent science fiction author as well as the first science fiction author who had made a significant impact in the mainstream. His short stories, appearing in Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and literary quarterlies, were taken up in the late 1940s by both the Foley and O. Henry Best Short Story annuals, and with The Martian Chronicles, a collection disguised as a novel and published by Doubleday in 1950, he became famous. Two years later, Ballantine published Fahrenheit 451 (an extension of his Galaxy novella “The Fireman”) which has sold millions of copies and is part of most high schools’ curricula. Francois Truffaut adopted it for a famous film fifteen years later. The collections The Illustrated Man and A Medicine Melancholy appeared later in the decade and extended his reputation. Bradbury received the National Medal in Literature from President Bush in the early new millennium and was shortly thereafter given a special award by the Pulitzer Prize Committee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE eFOREWORD

Barry N. Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo was in 1973 the winner of the first John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year; he twice won the LOCUS Award for nonfiction books of critical history and commentary on science fiction. Several short works have been final-listed for the Nebula and Hugo and Engines of the Night and Breakfast in the Ruins, the nonfiction works, were on the Hugo final ballot for Best Related Nonfiction as is his collaborative book with Mike Resnick, The Business of Science Fiction.

ABOUT THE JACKET

COVER IMAGE: “Plotting Room of Earth Center” by Ed Emshwiller

Ed Emshwiller (1925–1990) was Galaxy’s dominant artist through the 1950s. His quirky images, perspective, and off-center humor provide perhaps the best realization of the magazine’s iconoclastic, satirical vision. Emshwiller was—matched with Kelly Freas—science fiction’s signature artist through the decade and a half initiated by this color illustration. He and Carol Emshwiller, the celebrated science fiction writer, lived in Long Island during the period of his prominence in science fiction. (Nonstop Press published Emshwiller: Infinity X Two: The Art & Life of Ed and Carol Emshwiller, a joint biography and collection of their work in visual and literary medium, in 2007.) In the early 70s, Emshwiller became passionately interested in avant-garde filmmaking, and that passion led him to California, where he spent his last decades deeply involved in the medium of independent film and its community. He abandoned illustration: in Carol’s words “When Ed was through with something he was really through with it.” He died of cancer in 1990. His son, Peter Emshwiller, published a fair amount of science fiction in the 80s and 90s.

eForeword

This short story, Bradbury’s second and final contribution to Horace Gold’s Galaxy, appeared in the issue of August 1951, an issue which was crucial to the history of the magazine in two other ways:

a) Galaxy’s founding publisher, World Editions, a corporation based in Italy and from the start out of touch with the nature of our domestic magazine distribution, gave up the magazine suddenly and with relief shortly before this issue was to be distributed. Whatever the Italians had thought the magazine would yield economically (Horace must have sold them a partridge and a pear tree), it certainly did not in its earliest issues, and they panicked, as publishers, those creatures of earthly delight, so often do. It appeared for a few days that the magazine would collapse, but its domestic printer, Robert Guinn, stepped into the breach and assumed for close to the next twenty years the responsibilities of a publisher. Guinn had his own rocky times toward the end of the decade as the magazine and science fiction markets collapsed, but he paid his bills and always got through, taking in a partner, Sol Cohen, for a short period in 1964, and then eventually selling the magazine in the Spring of 1969 to the Universal Publishing & Distributing Corporation which made very short work of it. Galaxy entered a slow and then rapid decline and was gone by 1980. In the confusion of changing publishers and missed signals by the distributor, the magazine was on sale only spottily, and copies were not replenished after the first batch was sold. This was probably the poorest selling issue through Gold’s reign.

b) Regardless, and with the kind of irony to which Horace was so exquisitely attuned, this issue might have been the most crucial, the most important to date, what Malcolm Gladwell a half century later decided while considering the world in more general terms to call a “tipping point.” “A Little Journey” was little remarked upon at the time or later, but the August 1951 issue contained Wyman Guin’s sterling lead novella “Beyond Bedlam,” which was a story of the societal institutionalization of mental illness which would have been inconceivable in a science fiction market prior to its appearance (and for many years thereafter). Guin (1915–1989), a pharmaceutical executive, produced a work of bleak and stunning extrapolation: bipolar patients were compartmentalized, their dual personalities had separate lives and society was organized on craziness. There still has been nothing like this novella. In 2006 Keith Ferrell, Omni’s retired editor, a novelist and science fiction writer himself, said to me, “That guy got Prozac cold.” (Although in The Demolished Man not so many months later, Alfred Bester had his own novelistic exploration of institutionalized madness. The proximity of the two works leads to a conclusion not needing an Edmund Wilson to deduce: Gold was almost certainly the originating force for both works. Galaxy, the Journal of Psychiatry, they called it.) “Beyond Bedlam” had an explosive impact; it was perhaps the very first work which clearly would not have existed outside of the magazine. Guin never got near it again; the rest of his career in science fiction consisted of six short stories (all but one published in Galaxy) and a murky novel, The Standing Joy, which came and went overnight in 1969. The novella was the first work published under his name; the pseudonymous Norman Menasco had published a short story, “Trigger Tide,” in the November 1950 Astounding. (David Drake, a co-introducer, thinks highly of that story. At the ages of 12, 40, and 62 I found it unreadable every time.) Horace devoted most of his editorial in that August 1951 issue to the author’s and his own struggles with this story; it went through innumerable drafts before it came out at a level, Gold promised the reader, which blazed the page.

“A Little Journey” and the other writers in that issue (Frank Robinson, Katherine MacLean, Lester del Rey, Sylvia Jacobs) would necessarily have been diminished by the lead story, but at the time, the Bradbury story was a coup, and it is still something of a surprise to this series, 60 years later. It is one of the least known of the stories coming from Bradbury’s major period (1946–1953) and in its audacity and focused religiosity (disguised as sentimentality but this is not a sentimental story) it is in a quiet way flabbergasting. Bradbury was at or near his peak in 1951. The Martian Chronicles had been published to enormous mainstream attention the previous year, and his work was appearing regularly in Martha Foley’s Year’s Best Short Stories and Doubleday’s O. Henry Prize Stories edited by Herschell Brickell. The stories reprinted in these anthologies had originated in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar or Redbook, but they were nonetheless (like the famous stories of that period by Truman Capote) lyrical borderline fantasy, and Bradbury was the first writer with unambiguous credentials from science fiction to break through to these literary markets. He was regarded at that time as the field’s first true emissary to the fictional mainstream, and it was many years before he had any company. (Judith Merril in 1955 and Theodore Sturgeon in 1961 had stories from Fantasy and Science Fiction in the Foley volume.)

Horace’s Bradbury coup had, of course, occurred six months earlier; the short version of Fahrenheit 451 appeared in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy. More compact (obviously!), focused, and dreadful in its intensity, this 25,000 word version of the incendiary and illiterate future (a landscape not dissimilar to that of Kornbluth’s “The Marching Morons”) might have been more effective than the novel, and it drew a great deal of divided and angry attention. Some thought that Bradbury’s future book burners and idiots involved scare tactics; others were certain that his walking libraries preserving Dickens or Balzac by memory around campfires in blasted cities were an unbearable and salient metaphor. Bradbury doubled the length of the novel using, he said in an interview over 50 years later, a ten cent per half hour public typewriter in the local library, and the book (and Truffaut’s film adaptation in the 60s) went on to unyielding fame in a small and eternally durable category occupied otherwise by Orwell’s 1984.

“A Little Journey” seems banal and improbable early on but—like many of Bradbury’s early short stories—it opens, it flowers into a terrific and loving significance. Its conclusion is very much like that of his very well known short story of that period “Kaliedoscope,” redemption exploding across the limitless sky. It also reminds me of Jack Kerouac being interviewed (contemptuously) on television in 1957:

Interviewer: So what do you beatniks want? What exactly are you seeking?

Kerouac: Oh, I don’t know, man. (long pause) Maybe we’re looking to see God.

This is why “A Little Journey” opens like a rose; this is why it bridges the decades to make possible its one stunning leap. Bradbury could do that kind of thing then. That Million Year Picnic. The faces of the Martians, reflected in the shining lake.

—Barry N. Malzberg

A Little Journey

There were two important things—one, that she was very old; two, that Mr. Thirkell was taking her to God. For hadn’t he patted her hand and said: “Mrs. Bellowes, we’ll take off into space in my rocket, and go to find Him together”?

And that was how it was going to be. Oh, this wasn’t like any other group Mrs. Bellowes had ever joined. In her fervor to light a path for her delicate, tottering feet, she had struck matches down dark alleys, and found her way to Hindu mystics who floated their flickering, starry eyelashes over crystal balls. She had walked on the meadow paths with ascetic Indian philosophers imported by daughters-in-spirit of Madame Blavatsky. She had made pilgrimages to California’s stucco jungles to hunt the astrological seer in his natural habitat. She had even consented to signing away the rights to one of her homes in order to be taken into the shouting order of a temple of amazing evangelists who had promised her golden smoke, crystal fire, and the great soft hand of God coming to bear her home.

None of these people had ever shaken Mrs. Bellowes’ faith, even when she saw them sirened away in a black wagon in the night, or discovered their pictures, bleak and unromantic, in the morning tabloids. The world had roughed them up and locked them away because they knew too much, that was all.

And then, two weeks ago, she had seen Mr. Thirkell’s advertisement in New York City:

COME TO MARS!

Stay at the Thirkell Restorium for one week. And then, on into space on the greatest adventure life can offer!

Send for Free Pamphlet: “Nearer My God To Thee.”

Excursion rates. R o u n d trip slightly lower.

“Round trip,” Mrs. Bellowes had thought. “But who would come back after seeing Him?”

And so she had bought a ticket and flown off to Mars and spent seven mild days at Mr. Thirkell’s Restorium, the building with the sign on it which flashed: THIRKELL’S ROCKET TO HEAVEN! She had spent the week bathing in limpid waters and erasing the care from her tiny bones, and now she was fidgeting, ready to be loaded into Mr. Thirkell’s own special private rocket, like a bullet, to be fired on out into space beyond Jupiter and Saturn and Pluto. And thus—who could deny it?—you would be getting nearer and nearer to the Lord. How wonderful! Couldn’t you just feel Him drawing near? Couldn’t you just sense His breath, His scrutiny, His Presence?

“Here I am,” said Mrs. Bellowes, “an ancient rickety elevator, ready to go up the shaft. God need only press the button.”

Now, on the seventh day, as she minced up the steps of the Restorium, a number of small doubts assailed her.

“For one thing,” she said aloud to no one, “it isn’t quite the land of milk and honey here on Mars that they said it would be. My room is like a cell, the swimming pool is really quite inadequate, and, besides, how many widows who look like mushrooms or skeletons want to swim? And, finally, the whole Restorium smells of boiled cabbage and tennis shoes!”

She opened the front door and let it slam, somewhat irritably.

She was amazed at the other women in the auditorium. It was like wandering in a carnival mirror-maze, coming again and again upon yourself—the same floury face, the same chicken hands, and jingling bracelets. One after another of the images of herself floated before her. She put out her hand, but it wasn’t a mirror; it was another lady shaking her fingers and saying:

“We’re waiting for Mr. Thirkell. Sh!”

“Ah,” whispered everyone.

The velvet curtains parted.

Mr. Thirkell appeared, fantastically serene, his Egyptian eyes upon everyone. But there was something, nevertheless, in his appearance which made one expect him to call “Hi!” while fuzzy dogs jumped over his legs, through his hooped arms, and over his back. Then, dogs and all, he should dance with a dazzling piano-keyboard smile off into the wings.

Mrs. Bellowes, with a secret part of her mind which she constantly had to grip tightly, expected to hear a cheap Chinese gong sound when Mr. Thirkell entered. His large liquid dark eyes were so improbable that one of the old ladies had facetiously claimed she saw a mosquito cloud hovering over them as they did around summer rain-barrels. And Mrs. Bellowes sometimes caught the scent of the theatrical mothball and the smell of calliope steam on his sharply pressed suit.

But with the same savage rationalization that had greeted all other disappointments in her rickety life, she bit at the suspicion and whispered, “This time it’s real. This time it’ll work. Haven’t we got a rocket?”

Mr. Thirkell bowed. He smiled a sudden Comedy Mask smile. The old ladies looked in at his epiglottis and sensed chaos there.

Before he even began to speak, Mrs. Bellowes saw him picking up each of his words, oiling it, making sure it ran smooth on its rails. Her heart squeezed in like a tiny fist, and she gritted her porcelain teeth.

“Friends,” said Mr. Thirkell, and you could hear the frost snap in the hearts of the entire assemblage.

“No!” said Mrs. Bellowes ahead of time. She could hear the bad news rushing at her, and herself tied to the track while the immense black wheels threatened and the whistle screamed, helpless.

“There will be a slight delay,” said Mr. Thirkell.

In the next instant, Mr. Thirkell might have cried, or been tempted to cry, “Ladies, be seated!” in minstrel-fashion, for the ladies had come up at him from their chairs, protesting and trembling.

“Not a very long delay.” Mr. Thirkell put up his hands to pat the air.

“How long?”

“Only a week.”

“A week!”

“Yes. You can stay here at the Restorium for seven more days, can’t you? A little delay won’t matter, will it, in the end? You’ve waited a lifetime. Only a few more days.”

At twenty dollars a day, thought Mrs. Bellowes, coldly.

“What’s the trouble?” a woman cried.

“A legal difficulty,” said Mr. Thirkell.

“We’ve a rocket, haven’t we?”

“Well, ye-ess.”

“But I’ve been here a whole month, waiting,” said one old lady. “Delays, “delays!”

“That’s right,” said everyone.

“Ladies, ladies,” murmured Mr. Thirkell, smiling serenely.

“We want to see the rocket!” It was Mrs. Bellowes forging ahead, alone, brandishing her fist like a toy hammer.

Mr. Thirkell looked into the old ladies’ eyes, a missionary among albino cannibals.

“Well, now,” he said.

“Yes, now!” cried Mrs. Bellowes.

“I’m afraid—” he began.

“So am I!” she said. “That’s why we want to see the ship!”

“No, no, now, Mrs.—” He snapped his fingers for her name.

“Bellowes!” she cried. She was a small container, but now all the seething pressures that had been built up over long years came steaming through the delicate vents of her body. Her cheeks became incandescent. With a wail that was like a melancholy factory whistle. Mrs. Bellowes ran forward and hung to him, almost by her teeth, like a summer-maddened Spitz. She would not and never could let go until he died, and the other women followed, jumping and yapping like a pound let loose on its trainer, the same one who had petted them and to whom they had squirmed and whined joyfully an hour before, now milling about him, creasing his sleeves and frightening the Egyptian serenity from his gaze.

“This way!” cried Mrs. Bellowes, feeling like Madame Lafarge. “Through the back! We’ve waited long enough to see the ship. Every day he’s put us off, every day we’ve waited, now let’s see.”

“No, no, ladies!” cried Mr. Thirkell, leaping about.

They burst through the back of the stage and out a door, like a flood, bearing the poor man with them into a shed, and then out, quite suddenly, into an abandoned gymnasium.

“There it is!” said someone. “The rocket.”

And then a silence fell that was terrible to entertain.

There was the rocket.

Mrs. Bellowes looked at it and her hands sagged away from Mr. Thirkell’s collar.

The rocket was something like a battered copper pot. There were a thousand bulges and rents and rusty pipes and dirty vents on and in it. The ports were clouded over with dust, resembling the eyes of a blind hog.

Everyone wailed a little sighing wail.

“Is that the rocket ship Glory Be to the Highest?” cried Mrs. Bellowes, appalled.

Mr. Thirkell nodded and looked at his feet.

“For which we paid out our one thousand dollars apiece and came all the way to Mars to get on board with you and go off to find Him?” asked Mrs. Bellowes.

“Why, that isn’t worth a sack of dried peas,” said Mrs. Bellowes.

“It’s nothing but junk!”

Junk, whispered everyone, getting hysterical.

“Don’t let him get away!”

Mr. Thirkell tried to break and run, but a thousand possum traps closed on him from every side. He withered.

Everybody walked around in circles like blind mice. There was a confusion and a weeping that lasted for five minutes as they went over and touched the Rocket, the Dented Kettle, the Rusty Container for God’s Children.

“Well,” said Mrs. Bellowes. She stepped up into the askew doorway of the rocket and faced everyone. “It looks as if a terrible thing has been done to us,” she said. “I haven’t any money to go back home to Earth and I’ve too much pride to go to the Government and tell them a common man like this has fooled us out of our life’s savings. I don’t know how you feel about it, all of you, but the reason all of us came is because I’m eighty-five, and you’re eighty-nine, and you’re seventy-eight, and all of us are nudging on toward a hundred, and there’s nothing on Earth for us, and it doesn’t appear there’s anything on Mars either. We all expected not to breathe much more air or crochet many more doilies or we’d never have come here. So what I have to propose is a simple thing—to take a chance.”

She reached out and touched the rusted hulk of the rocket.

“This is our rocket. We paid for our trip. And we’re going to take our trip!”

Everyone rustled and stood on tiptoes and opened an astonished mouth.

Mr. Thirkell began to cry. He did it quite easily and very effectively.

“We’re going to get in this ship,” said Mrs. Bellowes, ignoring him. “And we’re going to take off to where we were going.”

Mr. Thirkell stopped crying long enough to say, “But it was all a fake. I don’t know anything about space. He’s not out there, anyway. I lied. I don’t know where He is, and I couldn’t find Him if I wanted to. And you were fools to ever take my word on it.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bellowes, “we were fools. I’ll go along on that. But you can’t blame us, for we’re old, and it was a lovely, good and fine idea, one of the loveliest ideas in the world. Oh, we didn’t really fool ourselves that we could get nearer to Him physically. It was the gentle, mad dream of old people, the kind of thing you hold onto for a few minutes a day, even though you know it’s not true. So, all of you who want to go, you follow me in the ship.”

“But you can’t go!” said Mr. Thirkell. “You haven’t got a navigator. And that ship’s a ruin!”

“You,” said Mrs. Bellowes, “will be the navigator.”

She stepped into the ship, and after a moment, the other old ladies pressed forward. Mr. Thirkell, windmilling his arms frantically, was nevertheless pressed through the port, and in a minute the door slammed shut. Mr. Thirkell was strapped into the navigator’s seat, with everyone talking at once and holding him down. The special helmets were issued to be fitted over every gray or white head to supply extra oxygen in case of a leakage in the ship’s hull, and at long last the hour had come and Mrs. Bellowes stood behind Mr. Thirkell and said, “We’re ready, sir.”

He said nothing. He pleaded with them silently, using his great, dark, wet eyes, but Mrs. Bellowes shook her head and pointed to the control.

“Takeoff,” agreed Mr. Thirkell morosely, and pulled a switch.

Everybody fell. The rocket went up from the planet Mars in a great fiery glide, with the noise of an entire kitchen thrown down an elevator shaft, with a sound of pots and pans and kettles and fires boiling and stews bubbling, with a smell of burned incense and rubber and sulphur, with a color of yellow fire, and a ribbon of red stretching below them, and all the old women singing and holding to each other, and Mrs. Bellowes crawling upright in the sighing, straining, trembling ship.

“Head for space, Mr. Thirkell.”

“It can’t last,” said Mr. Thirkell, sadly. “This ship can’t last. It will—”

It did.

The rocket exploded.

Mrs. Bellowes felt herself lifted and thrown about dizzily, like a doll. She heard the great screamings and saw the flashes of bodies sailing by her in fragments of metal and powdery light.

“Help, help!” cried Mr. Thirkell, far away, on a small radio beam.

The ship disintegrated into a million parts, and the old ladies, all one hundred of them, were flung straight on ahead with the same velocity as the ship.

As for Mr. Thirkell, for some reason of trajectory, perhaps, he had been blown out the other side of the ship. Mrs. Bellowes saw him falling separate and away from them, screaming, screaming.

There goes Mr. Thirkell, thought Mrs. Bellowes.

And she knew where he was going. He was going to be burned and roasted and broiled good, but very good.

Mr. Thirkell was falling down into the Sun.

And here we are, thought Mrs. Bellowes. Here we are, going on out, and out, and out.

There was hardly a sense of motion at all, but she knew that she was traveling at fifty thousand miles an hour and would continue to travel at that speed for an eternity, until…

She saw the other women swinging all about her in their own trajectories, a few minutes of oxygen left to each of them in their helmets, and each was looking up to where they were going.

Of course, thought Mrs. Bellowes. Out into space. Out and out, and the darkness like a great church, and the stars like candles, and in spite of everything, Mr. Thirkell, the rocket, and the dishonesty, we are going toward the Lord.

And there, yes, there, as she fell on and on, coming toward her, she could almost discern the outline now, coming toward her was His mighty golden hand, reaching down to hold her and comfort her like a frightened sparrow…

“I’m Mrs. Amelia Bellowes,” she said quietly, in her best company voice. “I’m from the planet Earth.”