“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 sulfur, 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.”
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine
Imagine a summer that would never end.
Nineteen twenty-nine.
Imagine a boy who would never grow up.
Me.
Imagine a barber who was never young.
Mr. Wyneski.
Imagine a dog that would live forever.
Mine.
Imagine a small town, the kind that isn’t lived in anymore.
Ready? Begin . . .
Green Town, Illinois . . . Late June.
Dog barking outside a one-chair barbershop.
Inside, Mr. Wyneski, circling his victim, a customer snoozing in the steambath drowse of noon.
Inside, me, Ralph Spaulding, a boy of some twelve years, standing still as an iron Civil War statue, listening to the hot wind, feeling all that hot summer dust out there, a bakery world where nobody could be bad or good, boys just lay gummed to dogs, dogs used boys for pillows under trees that lazed with leaves which whispered in despair: Nothing Will Ever Happen Again.
The only motion anywhere was the cool water dripping from the huge coffin-sized ice block in the hardware store window.
The only cool person in miles was Miss Frostbite, the traveling magician’s assistant, tucked into that lady-shaped long cavity hollowed in the ice block displayed for three days now without, they said, her breathing, eating, or talking. That last, I thought, must have been terrible hard on a woman.
Nothing moved in the street but the barbershop striped pole which turned slowly to show its red, white, and then red again, slid up out of nowhere to vanish nowhere, a motion between two mysteries.
“. . . hey . . .”
I pricked my ears.
“. . . something’s coming . . .”
“Only the noon train, Ralph.” Mr. Wyneski snicked his jackdaw scissors, peering in his customer’s ear. “Only the train that comes at noon.”
“No . . .” I gasped, eyes shut, leaning. “Something’s really coming . . .”
I heard the far whistle wail, lonesome, sad, enough to pull your soul out of your body.
“You feel it, don’t you, Dog?”
Dog barked.
Mr. Wyneski sniffed. “What can a dog feel?”
“Big things. Important things. Circumstantial coincidences. Collisions you can’t escape. Dog says. I say. We say.”
“That makes four of you. Some team.” Mr. Wyneski turned from the summer-dead man in the white porcelain chair. “Now, Ralph, my problem is hair. Sweep.”
I swept a ton of hair. “Gosh, you’d think this stuff just grew up out of the floor.”
Mr. Wyneski watched my broom. “Right! I didn’t cut all that. Darn stuff just grows, I swear, lying there. Leave it a week, come back, and you need hip boots to trod a path.” He pointed with his scissors. “Look. You ever see so many shades, hues, and tints of forelocks and chin fuzz? There’s Mr. Tompkins’s receding hairline. There’s Charlie Smith’s topknot. And here, here’s all that’s left of Mr. Harry Joe Flynn.”
I stared at Mr. Wyneski as if he had just read from Revelation. “Gosh, Mr. Wyneski, I guess you know everything in the world!”
“Just about.”
“I—I’m going to grow up and be—a barber!”
Mr. Wyneski, to hide his pleasure, got busy.
“Then watch this hedgehog, Ralph, peel an eye. Elbows thus, wrists so! Make the scissors talk! Customers appreciate. Sound twice as busy as you are. Snickety-snick, boy, snickety-snick. Learned this from the French! Oh, yes, the French! They do prowl about the chair light on their toes, and the sharp scissors whispering and nibbling, Ralph, nibbling and whispering, you hear!”
“Boy!” I said, at his elbow, right in with the whispers and nibbles, then stopped: for the wind blew a wail way off in summer country, so sad, so strange.
“There it is again. The train. And something on the train . . .”
“Noon train don’t stop here.”
“But I got this feeling—”
“The hair’s going to grab me, Ralph . . .”
I swept hair.
After a long while I said, “I’m thinking of changing my name.”
Mr.
