Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

by Roald Dahl

  'What makes you say that?'

  'Because at least three of them are in nightshirts!'

  'Don't be a fool, Shuckworth!' snapped Ground Control. 'Pull yourself together, man! This is serious!'

  'I swear it!' cried poor Shuckworth. 'There's three of them in nightshirts! Two old women and one old man! I can see them clearly! I can even see their faces! Jeepers, they're older than Moses! They're about ninety years old!'

  'You've gone mad, Shuckworth!' shouted Ground Control. 'You're fired! Give me Shanks!'

  'Shanks speaking,' said Shanks. 'Now listen here, Houston. There's these three old birds in nightshirts floating around in this crazy glass box and there's a funny little guy with a pointed beard wearing a black top-hat and a plum-coloured velvet tail-coat and bottle-green trousers...'

  'Stop!' screamed Ground Control.

  'That's not all,' said Shanks. 'There's also a little boy about ten years old...'

  'That's no boy, you idiot!' shouted Ground Control. 'That's an astronaut in disguise! It's a midget astronaut dressed up as a little boy! Those old people are astronauts too! They're all in disguise!'

  'But who are they?' cried Shanks.

  'How the heck would I know?' said Ground Control. 'Are they heading for our Space Hotel?'

  'That's exactly where they are heading!' cried Shanks. T can see the Space Hotel now about a mile ahead.'

  'They're going to blow it up!' yelled Ground Control. 'This is desperate! This is...' Suddenly his voice was cut off and Shanks heard another quite different voice in his earphones. It was deep and rasping.

  'I'll take charge of this,' said the deep rasping voice. 'Are you there, Shanks?'

  'Of course I'm here,' said Shanks. 'But how dare you butt in. Keep your big nose out of this. Who are you anyway?'

  'This is the President of the United States,' said the voice.

  'And this is the Wizard of Oz,' said Shanks. 'Who are you kidding?'

  'Cut the piffle, Shanks,' snapped the President. 'This is a national emergency!'

  'Good grief!' said Shanks, turning to Shuckworth and Showier. 'It really is the President. It's President Gilligrass himself... Well, hello there, Mr President, sir. How are you today?'

  'How many people are there in that glass capsule?' rasped the President.

  'Eight,' said Shanks. 'All floating.'

  'Floating?'

  'We're outside the pull of gravity up here, Mr President. Everything floats. We'd be floating ourselves if we weren't strapped down. Didn't you know that?'

  'Of course I knew it,' said the President. 'What else can you tell me about that glass capsule?'

  'There's a bed in it,' said Shanks. 'A big double bed and that's floating too.'

  'A bed!' barked the President. 'Whoever heard of a bed in a spacecraft!'

  'I swear it's a bed,' said Shanks.

  'You must be loopy, Shanks,' declared the President. 'You're dotty as a doughnut! Let me talk to Showier!'

  'Showier here, Mr President,' said Showier, taking the mike from Shanks. 'It is a great honour to talk to you, Mr President, sir.'

  'Oh, shut up!' said the President. 'Just tell me what you see.'

  'It's a bed all right, Mr President. I can see it through my telescope. It's got sheets and blankets and a mattress...'

  'That's not a bed, you drivelling thickwit!' yelled the President. 'Can't you understand it's a trick! It's a bomb. It's a bomb disguised as a bed!

  They're going to blow up our magnificent Space Hotel!'

  'Who's they, Mr President, sir?' said Showier.

  'Don't talk so much and let me think,' said the President.

  There were a few moments of silence. Showier waited tensely. So did Shanks and Shuckworth. So did the managers and assistant managers and desk-clerks and waitresses and bell-boys and chambermaids and pastry chefs and hall porters. And down in the huge Control Room at Houston, one hundred controllers sat motionless in front of their dials and monitors, waiting to see what orders the President would give next to the astronauts.

  'I've just thought of something,' said the President. 'Don't you have a television camera up there on the front of your spacecraft, Showier?'

  'Sure do, Mr President.'

  'Then switch it on, you nit, and let all of us down here get a look at this object!'

  'I never thought of that,' said Showier. 'No wonder you're the President. Here goes...' He reached out and switched on the TV camera in the nose of the spacecraft, and at that moment, five hundred million people all over the world who had been listening in on their radios rushed to their television sets.

  On their screens they saw exactly what Shuckworth and Shanks and Showier were seeing - a weird glass box in splendid orbit around the earth, and inside the box, seen not too clearly but seen none the less, were seven grown-ups and one small boy and a big double bed, all floating. Three of the grown-ups were barelegged and wearing nightshirts. And far off in the distance, beyond the glass box, the TV watchers could see the enormous, glistening, silvery shape of Space Hotel 'U.S.A.'

  But it was the sinister glass box itself that everyone was staring at, and the cargo of sinister creatures inside it - eight astronauts so tough and strong they didn't even bother to wear space-suits. Who were these people and where did they come from? And what in heaven's name was that big evil-looking thing disguised as a double bed? The President had said it was a bomb and he was probably right. But what were they going to do with it? All across America and Canada and Russia and Japan and India and China and Africa and England and France and Germany and everywhere else in the world a kind of panic began to take hold of the television watchers.

  'Keep well clear of them, Showier!' ordered the President over the radio link.

  'Sure will, Mr President!' Showier answered. 'I sure will?

  3

  The Link-Up

  Inside the Great Glass Elevator there was also a good deal of excitement. Charlie and Mr Wonka and all the others could see clearly the huge silvery shape of Space Hotel 'U.S.A.' about a mile ahead of them. And behind them was the smaller (but still pretty enormous) Transport Capsule. The Great Glass Elevator (not looking at all great now beside these two monsters) was in the middle. And of course everybody, even Grandma Josephine, knew very well what was going on. They even knew that the three astronauts in charge of the Transport Capsule were called Shuckworth, Shanks and Showier. The whole world knew about these things. Newspapers and television had been shouting about almost nothing else for the past six months. Operation Space Hotel was the event of the century.

  'What a load of luck!' cried Mr Wonka. 'We've landed ourselves slap in the middle of the biggest space operation of all time!'

  'We've landed ourselves in the middle of a nasty mess,' said Grandma Josephine. 'Turn back at once!'

  'No, Grandma,' said Charlie. 'We've got to watch it now. We must see the Transport Capsule linking up with the Space Hotel.'

  Mr Wonka floated right up close to Charlie. 'Let's beat them to it, Charlie,' he whispered. 'Let's get there first and go aboard the Space Hotel ourselves!'

  Charlie gaped. Then he gulped. Then he said softly, 'It's impossible. You've got to have all sorts of special gadgets to link up with another spacecraft, Mr Wonka.'

  'My Elevator could link up with a crocodile if it had to,' said Mr Wonka. 'Just leave it to me, my boy!'

  'Grandpa Joe!' cried Charlie. 'Did you hear that? We're going to link up with the Space Hotel and go on board!'

  'Yippeeeeee!' shouted Grandpa Joe. 'What a brilliant thought, sir! What a staggering idea!' He grabbed Mr Wonka's hand and started shaking it like a thermometer.

  'Be quiet, you balmy old bat!' said Grandma Josephine. 'We're in a hot enough stew already. I want to go home.'

  'Me, too!' said Grandma Georgina.

  'What if they come after us?' said Mr Bucket, speaking for the first time.

  'What if they capture us?' said Mrs Bucket.

  'What if they shoot us?' said Grandma Georgina.
r />   'What if my beard were made of green spinach?' cried Mr Wonka. 'Bunkum and tummyrot! You'll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he'd said "What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?" He wouldn't even have started. We want no what-iffers around here, right, Charlie? Off we go, then. But wait... this is a very tricky manoeuvre and I'm going to need help. There are three lots of buttons we have to press all in different parts of the Elevator. I shall take those two over there, the white and the black.' Mr Wonka made a funny blowing noise with his mouth and glided effortlessly, like a huge bird, across the Elevator to the white and black buttons, and there he hovered. 'Grandpa Joe, sir, kindly station yourself beside that silver button there... yes, that's the one... And you, Charlie, go up and stay floating beside that little golden button near the ceiling. I must tell you that each of these buttons fires booster rockets from different places outside the Elevator. That's how we change direction. Grandpa Joe's rockets turn us to starboard, to the right. Charlie's turn us to port, to the left. Mine make us go higher or lower or faster or slower. All ready?'

  'No! Wait!' cried Charlie, who was floating exactly midway between the floor and the ceiling. 'How do I get up? I can't get up to the ceiling!' He was thrashing his arms and legs violently, like a drowning swimmer, but getting nowhere.

  'My dear boy,' said Mr Wonka. 'You can't swim in this stuff. It isn't water, you know. It's air and very thin air at that. There's nothing to push against. So you have to use jet propulsion. Watch me. First, you take a deep breath, then you make a small round hole with your mouth and you blow as hard as you can. If you blow downward, you jet-propel yourself up. If you blow to the left, you shoot off to the right and so on. You manoeuvre yourself like a spacecraft, but using your mouth as a booster rocket.'

  Suddenly everyone began practising this business of flying about, and the whole Elevator was filled with the blowings and snortings of the passengers. Grandma Georgina, in her red flannel nightgown with two skinny bare legs sticking out of the bottom, was trumpeting and spitting like a rhinoceros and flying from one side of the Elevator to the other, shouting 'Out of my way! Out of my way!' and crashing into poor Mr and Mrs Bucket with terrible speed. Grandpa George and Grandma Josephine were doing the same. And well may you wonder what the millions of people down on earth were thinking as they watched these crazy happenings on their television screens. You must realize they couldn't see things very clearly. The Great Glass Elevator was only about the size of a grapefruit on their screens, and the people inside, slightly blurred through the glass, were no bigger than the pips of the grapefruit. Even so, the watchers below could see them buzzing about wildly like insects in a glass box.

  'What in the world are they doing?' shouted the President of the United States, staring at the screen.

  'Looks like some kind of a wardance, Mr President,' answered astronaut Showier over the radio.

  'You mean they're Red Indians!' said the President.

  'I didn't say that, sir.'

  'Oh, yes you did, Showier.'

  'Oh, no I didn't, Mr President.'

  'Silence!' said the President. 'You're muddling me up.'

  Back in the Elevator, Mr Wonka was saying, 'Please! Please! Do stop flying about! Keep still everybody so we can get on with the docking!'

  'You miserable old mackerel!' said Grandma Georgina, sailing past him. 'Just when we start having a bit of fun, you want to stop it!'

  'Look at me, everybody!' shouted Grandma Josephine. 'I'm flying! I'm a golden eagle!'

  'I can fly faster than any of you!' cried Grandpa George, whizzing round and round, his nightgown billowing out behind him like the tail of a parrot.

  'Grandpa George!' cried Charlie. 'Do please calm down. If we don't hurry, those astronauts will get there before us. Don't you want to see inside the Space Hotel, any of you?'

  'Out of my way!' shouted Grandma Georgina, blowing herself back and forth. 'I'm a jumbo jet!'

  'You're a balmy old bat!' said Mr Wonka.

  In the end, the old people grew tired and out of breath, and everyone settled quietly into a floating position.

  'All set, Charlie and Grandpa Joe, sir?' said Mr Wonka.

  'All set, Mr Wonka,' Charlie answered, hovering near the ceiling.

  'I'll give the orders,' said Mr Wonka. 'I'm the pilot. Don't fire your rockets until I tell you. And don't forget who is who. Charlie, you're port. Grandpa Joe, you're starboard.' Mr Wonka pressed one of his own two buttons and immediately booster rockets began firing underneath the Great Glass Elevator. The Elevator leaped forward, but swerved violently to the right. 'Hard a-port!' yelled Mr Wonka. Charlie pressed his button. His rockets fired. The Elevator swung back into line. 'Steady as you go!' cried Mr Wonka. 'Starboard ten degrees!... Steady!... Steady!... Keep her there!...'

  Soon they were hovering directly underneath the tail of the enormous silvery Space Hotel. 'You see that little square door with the bolts on it?' said Mr Wonka. 'That's the docking entrance. It won't be long now... Port a fraction!... Steady!... Starboard a bit!... Good... Good... Easy does it... we're nearly there...'

  To Charlie, it felt rather as though he were in a tiny row-boat underneath the stern of the biggest ship in the world. The Space Hotel towered over them. It was enormous. 'I can't wait,' thought Charlie, 'to get inside and see what it's like.'

  4

  The President

  Half a mile back, Shuckworth, Shanks and Showier were keeping the television camera aimed all the time at the Glass Elevator. And across the world, millions and millions of people were clustered around their TV screens, watching tensely the drama being acted out two hundred and forty miles above the earth. In his study in the White House sat Lancelot R. Gilligrass, President of the United States of America, the most powerful man on Earth. In this moment of crisis, all his most important advisers had been summoned urgently to his presence, and there they all were now, following closely on the giant television screen every move made by this dangerous-looking glass capsule and its eight desperate-looking astronauts. The entire Cabinet was present. The Chief of the Army was there, together with four other generals. There was the Chief of the Navy and the Chief of the Air Force and a sword-swallower from Afghanistan, who was the President's best friend. There was the President's Chief Financial Adviser, who was standing in the middle of the room trying to balance the budget on top of his head, but it kept falling off. Standing nearest of all to the President was the Vice-President, a huge lady of eighty-nine with a whiskery chin. She had been the President's nurse when he was a baby and her name was Miss Tibbs. Miss Tibbs was the power behind the throne. She stood no nonsense from anyone. Some people said she was as strict with the President now as when he was a little boy. She was the terror of the White House and even the Head of the Secret Service broke into a sweat when summoned to her presence. Only the President was allowed to call her Nanny. The President's famous cat, Mrs Taubsypuss, was also in the room.

  There was absolute silence now in the Presidential study. All eyes were riveted on the TV screen as the small glass object, with its booster-rockets firing, slid smoothly up behind the giant Space Hotel.

  'They're going to link up!' shouted the President. 'They're going on board our Space Hotel!'

  'They're going to blow it up!' cried the Chief of the Army. 'Let's blow them up first, crash bang wallop bang-bang-bang-bang.' The Chief of the Army was wearing so many medal-ribbons they covered the entire front of his tunic on both sides and spread down on to his trousers as well. 'Come on, Mr P.,' he said. 'Let's have some really super-duper explosions!'

  'Silence, you silly boy!' said Miss Tibbs, and the Chief of the Army slunk into a corner.

  'Listen,' said the President. 'The point is this. Who are they? And where do they come from? Where's my Chief Spy?'

  'Here, sir, Mr President, sir!' said the Chief Spy.

  He had a false moustache, a false beard, false eyelashes, false te
eth and a falsetto voice.

  'Knock-Knock,' said the President.

  'Who's there?' said the Chief Spy.

  'Courteney.'

  'Courteney who?'

  'Courteney one yet?' said the President.

  There was a brief silence. 'The President asked you a question,' said Miss Tibbs in an icy voice. 'Have you Courteney one yet?'

  'No, ma'am, not yet,' said the Chief Spy, beginning to twitch.

  'Well, here's your chance,' snarled Miss Tibbs.

  'Quite right,' said the President. 'Tell me immediately who those people are in that glass capsule!'

  'Ah-ha,' said the Chief Spy, twirling his false moustache. 'That is a very difficult question.'

  'You mean you don't know?'

  'I mean I do know, Mr President. At least I think I know. Listen. We have just launched the finest hotel in the world. Right?'

  'Right!'

  'And who is so madly jealous of this wonderful hotel of ours that he wants to blow it up?'

  'Miss Tibbs,' said the President.

  'Wrong,' said the Chief Spy. 'Try again.'

  'Well,' said the President, thinking deeply. 'In that case, could it not perhaps be some other hotel owner who is envious of our lovely hotel?'

  'Brilliant!' cried the Chief Spy. 'Go on, sir! You're getting warm!'

  'It's Mr Savoy!' said the President.

  'Warmer and warmer, Mr President!'

  'Mr Ritz!'

  'You're hot, sir! You're boiling hot! Go on!'

  'I've got it!' cried the President. 'It's Mr Hilton!'

  'Well done, sir!' said the Chief Spy.

  'Are you sure it's him?'

  'Not sure, but it's certainly a warm possibility, Mr President. After all, Mr Hilton's got hotels in just about every country in the world but he hasn't got one in space. And we have. He must be madder than a maggot!'

  'By gum, we'll soon fix this!' snapped the President, grabbing one of the eleven telephones on his desk. 'Hello!' he said into the phone. 'Hello hello hello! Where's the operator?' He jiggled furiously on the little thing you jiggle when you want the operator. 'Operator, where are you?'

  'They won't answer you now,' said Miss Tibbs. 'They're all watching television.'

  'Well, this one'll answer!' said the President, snatching up a bright red telephone. This was the hot line direct to the Premier of Soviet Russia in Moscow. It was always open and only used in terrible emergencies. 'It's just as likely to be the Russians as Mr Hilton,' the President went on. 'Don't you agree, Nanny?'