‘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.