Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

'Too late!' cried Mr Wonka. 'Oh, my goodness me, we're cooked!' As he spoke, the bed with the three old ones in it and Mr Wonka on top lifted gently off the floor and hung suspended in mid-air. Charlie and Grandpa Joe and Mr and Mrs Bucket also floated upwards so that in a twink the entire company, as well as the bed, were floating around like balloons inside the Great Glass Elevator.
'Now look what you've done!' said Mr Wonka, floating about.
'What happened?' Grandma Josephine called out. She had floated clear of the bed and was hovering near the ceiling in her nightshirt.
'Did we go too far?' Charlie asked.
'Too far?' cried Mr Wonka. 'Of course we went too far! You know where we've gone, my friends? We've gone into orbit!'
They gaped, they gasped, they stared. They were too flabbergasted to speak.
'We are now rushing around the Earth at seventeen thousand miles an hour,' Mr Wonka said. 'How does that grab you?'
'I'm choking!' gasped Grandma Georgina. 'I can't breathe!'
'Of course you can't,' said Mr Wonka. 'There's no air up here.' He sort of swam across under the ceiling to a button marked OXYGEN. He pressed it. 'You'll be all right now,' he said. 'Breathe away.'
'This is the queerest feeling,' Charlie said, swimming about. 'I feel like a bubble.' 'It's great,' said Grandpa Joe. 'It feels as though I don't weigh anything at all.' 'You don't,' said Mr Wonka. 'None of us weighs anything – not even one ounce.'
'What piffle!' said Grandma Georgina. 'I weigh one hundred and thirty-seven pounds exactly.'
'Not now you don't,' said Mr Wonka. 'You are completely weightless.'
The three old ones, Grandpa George, Grandma Georgina and Grandma Josephine, were trying frantically to get back into bed, but without success. The bed was floating about in mid-air. They, of course, were also floating, and every time they got above the bed and tried to lie down, they simply floated up out of it. Charlie and Grandpa Joe were hooting with laughter. 'What's so funny?' said Grandma Josephine.
'We've got you out of bed at last,' said Grandpa Joe. 'Shut up and help us back!' snapped Grandma Josephine.
'Forget it,' said Mr Wonka. 'You'll never stay down. Just keep floating around and be happy.'
'The man's a madman!' cried Grandma Georgina. 'Watch out, I say, or he'll lixivate the lot of us!'
 
2
Space Hotel 'U.S.A.'
Mr Wonka's Great Glass Elevator was not the only thing orbiting the Earth at that
particular time. Two days before, the United States of America had successfully launched
its first Space Hotel, a gigantic sausage-shaped capsule no less than one thousand feet long.
It was called Space Hotel 'U.S.A.' and it was the marvel of the space age. It had inside it a
tennis-court, a swimming pool, a gymnasium, a children's playroom and five hundred
luxury bedrooms, each with a private bath. It was fully air-conditioned. It was also
equipped with a gravity-making machine so that you didn't float about inside it. You
walked normally.
This extraordinary object was now speeding round and round the earth at a height of 240 miles. Guests were to be taken up and down by a taxi-service of small capsules blasting off from Cape Kennedy every hour on the hour, Mondays to Fridays. But as yet there was nobody on board at all, not even an astronaut. The reason for this was that no one had really believed such an enormous thing would ever get off the ground without blowing up.
But the launching had been a great success and now that the Space Hotel was safely in orbit, there was a tremendous hustle and bustle to send up the first guests. It was rumoured that the President of the United States himself was going to be among the first to stay in the hotel, and of course there was a mad rush by all sorts of other people across the world to book rooms. Several kings and queens had cabled the White House in Washington for reservations, and a Texas millionaire called Orson Cart, who was about to marry a Hollywood starlet called Helen Highwater, was offering one hundred thousand dollars a day for the honeymoon suite.
But you cannot send guests to an hotel unless there are lots of people there to look after them, and that explains why there was yet another interesting object orbiting the earth at that moment. This was the large Transport Capsule containing the entire staff for Space Hotel 'U.S.A.' There were managers, assistant managers, desk-clerks, waitresses, bell-boys, chambermaids, pastry chefs and hall porters. The capsule they were travelling in was manned by the three famous astronauts, Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler, all of them handsome, clever and brave.
'In exactly one hour,' said Shuckworth, speaking to the passengers over the loudspeaker, 'we shall link up with Space Hotel "U.S.A.", your happy home for the next ten years. And any moment now, if you look straight ahead, you should catch your first glimpse of this magnificent space-ship. Ah-ha! I see something there! That must be it, folks! There's definitely something up there ahead of us!'
Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler, as well as the managers, assistant managers, desk-clerks, waitresses, bell-boys, chambermaids, pastry chefs and hall porters, all stared excitedly through the windows. Shuckworth fired a couple of small rockets to make the capsule go faster, and they began to catch up very quickly.
'Hey!' yelled Showler. 'That isn't our space hotel!'
'Holy rats!' cried Shanks. 'What in the name of Nebuchadnezzar is it!'
'Quick! Give me the telescope!' yelled Shuckworth. With one hand he focused the telescope and with the other he flipped the switch connecting him to Ground Control.
'Hello, Houston!' he cried into the mike. 'There's something crazy going on up here! There's a thing orbiting ahead of us and it's not like any space-ship I've ever seen, that's for sure!'
'Describe it at once,' ordered Ground Control in Houston.
'It's … it's all made of glass and it's kind of square and it's got lots of people inside it! They're all floating about like fish in a tank!'
'How many astronauts on board?'
'None,' said Shuckworth. 'They can't possibly be astronauts.'
'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. 'I 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?'