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.