THE BIG TRIP UP YONDER By KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Illustrated by KOSSIN _If it was good enough for your grandfather, forget it . .. It is much too good for anyone else!_ Gramps Ford, his chin resting on his hands, his hands on the crook ofhis cane, was staring irascibly at the five-foot television screen thatdominated the room. On the screen, a news commentator was summarizingthe day's happenings. Every thirty seconds or so, Gramps would jab thefloor with his cane-tip and shout, "Hell, we did that a hundred yearsago!" Emerald and Lou, coming in from the balcony, where they had been seekingthat 2185 A. D. Rarity--privacy--were obliged to take seats in the backrow, behind Lou's father and mother, brother and sister-in-law, son anddaughter-in-law, grandson and wife, granddaughter and husband, great-grandson and wife, nephew and wife, grandnephew and wife, great-grandniece and husband, great-grandnephew and wife--and, ofcourse, Gramps, who was in front of everybody. All save Gramps, who wassomewhat withered and bent, seemed, by pre-anti-gerasone standards, tobe about the same age--somewhere in their late twenties or earlythirties. Gramps looked older because he had already reached 70 whenanti-gerasone was invented. He had not aged in the 102 years since. "Meanwhile, " the commentator was saying, "Council Bluffs, Iowa, wasstill threatened by stark tragedy. But 200 weary rescue workers haverefused to give up hope, and continue to dig in an effort to save ElbertHaggedorn, 183, who has been wedged for two days in a . .. " "I wish he'd get something more cheerful, " Emerald whispered to Lou. * * * * * "Silence!" cried Gramps. "Next one shoots off his big bazoo while theTV's on is gonna find hisself cut off without a dollar--" his voicesuddenly softened and sweetened--"when they wave that checkered flag atthe Indianapolis Speedway, and old Gramps gets ready for the Big Trip UpYonder. " He sniffed sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately onnot making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of theprospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having beenmentioned by Gramps about once a day for fifty years. "Dr. Brainard Keyes Bullard, " continued the commentator, "President ofWyandotte College, said in an address tonight that most of the world'sills can be traced to the fact that Man's knowledge of himself has notkept pace with his knowledge of the physical world. " "_Hell!_" snorted Gramps. "We said _that_ a hundred years ago!" "In Chicago tonight, " the commentator went on, "a special celebration istaking place in the Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The guest of honoris Lowell W. Hitz, age zero. Hitz, born this morning, is thetwenty-five-millionth child to be born in the hospital. " The commentatorfaded, and was replaced on the screen by young Hitz, who squalledfuriously. "Hell!" whispered Lou to Emerald. "We said that a hundred years ago. " "I heard that!" shouted Gramps. He snapped off the television set andhis petrified descendants stared silently at the screen. "You, there, boy--" "I didn't mean anything by it, sir, " said Lou, aged 103. "Get me my will. You know where it is. You kids _all_ know where it is. Fetch, boy!" Gramps snapped his gnarled fingers sharply. Lou nodded dully and found himself going down the hall, picking his wayover bedding to Gramps' room, the only private room in the Fordapartment. The other rooms were the bathroom, the living room and thewide windowless hallway, which was originally intended to serve as adining area, and which had a kitchenette in one end. Six mattresses andfour sleeping bags were dispersed in the hallway and living room, andthe daybed, in the living room, accommodated the eleventh couple, thefavorites of the moment. On Gramps' bureau was his will, smeared, dog-eared, perforated andblotched with hundreds of additions, deletions, accusations, conditions, warnings, advice and homely philosophy. The document was, Lou reflected, a fifty-year diary, all jammed onto two sheets--a garbled, illegible logof day after day of strife. This day, Lou would be disinherited for theeleventh time, and it would take him perhaps six months of impeccablebehavior to regain the promise of a share in the estate. To say nothingof the daybed in the living room for Em and himself. "Boy!" called Gramps. "Coming, sir. " Lou hurried back into the living room and handed Grampsthe will. "Pen!" said Gramps. * * * * * He was instantly offered eleven pens, one from each couple. "Not _that_ leaky thing, " he said, brushing Lou's pen aside. "Ah, _there's_ a nice one. Good boy, Willy. " He accepted Willy's pen. Thatwas the tip they had all been waiting for. Willy, then--Lou'sfather--was the new favorite. Willy, who looked almost as young as Lou, though he was 142, did a poorjob of concealing his pleasure. He glanced shyly at the daybed, whichwould become his, and from which Lou and Emerald would have to move backinto the hall, back to the worst spot of all by the bathroom door. Gramps missed none of the high drama he had authored and he gave his ownfamiliar role everything he had. Frowning and running his finger alongeach line, as though he were seeing the will for the first time, he readaloud in a deep portentous monotone, like a bass note on a cathedralorgan. [Illustration] "I, Harold D. Ford, residing in Building 257 of Alden Village, New YorkCity, Connecticut, do hereby make, publish and declare this to be mylast Will and Testament, revoking any and all former wills andcodicils by me at any time heretofore made. " He blew his noseimportantly and went on, not missing a word, and repeating many foremphasis--repeating in particular his ever-more-elaborate specificationsfor a funeral. At the end of these specifications, Gramps was so choked with emotionthat Lou thought he might have forgotten why he'd brought out the willin the first place. But Gramps heroically brought his powerful emotionsunder control and, after erasing for a full minute, began to write andspeak at the same time. Lou could have spoken his lines for him, he hadheard them so often. "I have had many heartbreaks ere leaving this vale of tears for a betterland, " Gramps said and wrote. "But the deepest hurt of all has beendealt me by--" He looked around the group, trying to remember who themalefactor was. Everyone looked helpfully at Lou, who held up his hand resignedly. Gramps nodded, remembering, and completed the sentence--"mygreat-grandson, Louis J. Ford. " "Grandson, sir, " said Lou. "Don't quibble. You're in deep enough now, young man, " said Gramps, buthe made the change. And, from there, he went without a misstep throughthe phrasing of the disinheritance, causes for which weredisrespectfulness and quibbling. * * * * * In the paragraph following, the paragraph that had belonged to everyonein the room at one time or another, Lou's name was scratched out andWilly's substituted as heir to the apartment and, the biggest plum ofall, the double bed in the private bedroom. "So!" said Gramps, beaming. He erased the date at the foot of the willand substituted a new one, including the time of day. "Well--time towatch the McGarvey Family. " The McGarvey Family was a television serialthat Gramps had been following since he was 60, or for a total of 112years. "I can't wait to see what's going to happen next, " he said. Lou detached himself from the group and lay down on his bed of pain bythe bathroom door. Wishing Em would join him, he wondered where she was. He dozed for a few moments, until he was disturbed by someone steppingover him to get into the bathroom. A moment later, he heard a faintgurgling sound, as though something were being poured down the washbasindrain. Suddenly, it entered his mind that Em had cracked up, that shewas in there doing something drastic about Gramps. "Em?" he whispered through the panel. There was no reply, and Loupressed against the door. The worn lock, whose bolt barely engaged itssocket, held for a second, then let the door swing inward. "Morty!" gasped Lou. Lou's great-grandnephew, Mortimer, who had just married and brought hiswife home to the Ford menage, looked at Lou with consternation andsurprise. Morty kicked the door shut, but not before Lou had glimpsedwhat was in his hand--Gramps' enormous economy-size bottle ofanti-gerasone, which had apparently been half-emptied, and which Mortywas refilling with tap water. A moment later, Morty came out, glared defiantly at Lou and brushed pasthim wordlessly to rejoin his pretty bride. Shocked, Lou didn't know what to do. He couldn't let Gramps take themousetrapped anti-gerasone--but, if he warned Gramps about it, Grampswould certainly make life in the apartment, which was merelyinsufferable now, harrowing. Lou glanced into the living room and saw that the Fords, Emerald amongthem, were momentarily at rest, relishing the botches that the McGarveyshad made of _their_ lives. Stealthily, he went into the bathroom, lockedthe door as well as he could and began to pour the contents of Gramps'bottle down the drain. He was going to refill it with full-strengthanti-gerasone from the 22 smaller bottles on the shelf. The bottle contained a half-gallon, and its neck was small, so it seemedto Lou that the emptying would take forever. And the almostimperceptible smell of anti-gerasone, like Worcestershire sauce, nowseemed to Lou, in his nervousness, to be pouring out into the rest ofthe apartment, through the keyhole and under the door. * * * * * The bottle gurgled monotonously. Suddenly, up came the sound of musicfrom the living room and there were murmurs and the scraping ofchair-legs on the floor. "Thus ends, " said the television announcer, "the 29, 121st chapter in the life of your neighbors and mine, theMcGarveys. " Footsteps were coming down the hall. There was a knock onthe bathroom door. "Just a sec, " Lou cheerily called out. Desperately, he shook the bigbottle, trying to speed up the flow. His palms slipped on the wet glass, and the heavy bottle smashed on the tile floor. The door was pushed open, and Gramps, dumbfounded, stared at theincriminating mess. Lou felt a hideous prickling sensation on his scalp and the back of hisneck. He grinned engagingly through his nausea and, for want of anythingremotely resembling a thought, waited for Gramps to speak. "Well, boy, " said Gramps at last, "looks like you've got a littletidying up to do. " And that was all he said. He turned around, elbowed his way through thecrowd and locked himself in his bedroom. The Fords contemplated Lou in incredulous silence a moment longer, andthen hurried back to the living room, as though some of his horribleguilt would taint them, too, if they looked too long. Morty stayedbehind long enough to give Lou a quizzical, annoyed glance. Then he alsowent into the living room, leaving only Emerald standing in the doorway. Tears streamed over her cheeks. "Oh, you poor lamb--_please_ don't lookso awful! It was my fault. I put you up to this with my nagging aboutGramps. " "No, " said Lou, finding his voice, "really you didn't. Honest, Em, I wasjust--" "You don't have to explain anything to me, hon. I'm on your side, nomatter what. " She kissed him on one cheek and whispered in his ear, "Itwouldn't have been murder, hon. It wouldn't have killed him. It wasn'tsuch a terrible thing to do. It just would have fixed him up so he'd beable to go any time God decided He wanted him. " "What's going to happen next, Em?" said Lou hollowly. "What's he goingto do?" * * * * * Lou and Emerald stayed fearfully awake almost all night, waiting to seewhat Gramps was going to do. But not a sound came from the sacredbedroom. Two hours before dawn, they finally dropped off to sleep. At six o'clock, they arose again, for it was time for their generationto eat breakfast in the kitchenette. No one spoke to them. They hadtwenty minutes in which to eat, but their reflexes were so dulled by thebad night that they had hardly swallowed two mouthfuls of egg-typeprocessed seaweed before it was time to surrender their places to theirson's generation. Then, as was the custom for whoever had been most recently disinherited, they began preparing Gramps' breakfast, which would presently be servedto him in bed, on a tray. They tried to be cheerful about it. Thetoughest part of the job was having to handle the honest-to-God eggs andbacon and oleomargarine, on which Gramps spent so much of the incomefrom his fortune. "Well, " said Emerald, "I'm not going to get all panicky until I'm surethere's something to be panicky about. " "Maybe he doesn't know what it was I busted, " Lou said hopefully. "Probably thinks it was your watch crystal, " offered Eddie, their son, who was toying apathetically with his buckwheat-type processed sawdustcakes. "Don't get sarcastic with your father, " said Em, "and don't talk withyour mouth full, either. " "I'd like to see anybody take a mouthful of this stuff and _not_ saysomething, " complained Eddie, who was 73. He glanced at the clock. "It'stime to take Gramps his breakfast, you know. " "Yeah, it is, isn't it?" said Lou weakly. He shrugged. "Let's have thetray, Em. " "We'll both go. " Walking slowly, smiling bravely, they found a large semi-circle oflong-faced Fords standing around the bedroom door. Em knocked. "Gramps, " she called brightly, "_break_-fast is _rea_-dy. " There was no reply and she knocked again, harder. The door swung open before her fist. In the middle of the room, thesoft, deep, wide, canopied bed, the symbol of the sweet by-and-by toevery Ford, was empty. A sense of death, as unfamiliar to the Fords as Zoroastrianism or thecauses of the Sepoy Mutiny, stilled every voice, slowed every heart. Awed, the heirs began to search gingerly, under the furniture and behindthe drapes, for all that was mortal of Gramps, father of the clan. * * * * * But Gramps had left not his Earthly husk but a note, which Lou finallyfound on the dresser, under a paperweight which was a treasured souvenirfrom the World's Fair of 2000. Unsteadily, Lou read it aloud: "'Somebody who I have sheltered and protected and taught the best I knowhow all these years last night turned on me like a mad dog and dilutedmy anti-gerasone, or tried to. I am no longer a young man. I can nolonger bear the crushing burden of life as I once could. So, after lastnight's bitter experience, I say good-by. The cares of this world willsoon drop away like a cloak of thorns and I shall know peace. By thetime you find this, I will be gone. '" "Gosh, " said Willy brokenly, "he didn't even get to see how the5000-mile Speedway Race was going to come out. " "Or the Solar Series, " Eddie said, with large mournful eyes. "Or whether Mrs. McGarvey got her eyesight back, " added Morty. "There's more, " said Lou, and he began reading aloud again: "'I, HaroldD. Ford, etc. , do hereby make, publish and declare this to be my lastWill and Testament, revoking any and all former wills and codicils by meat any time heretofore made. '" "No!" cried Willy. "Not another one!" "'I do stipulate, '" read Lou, "'that all of my property, of whatsoeverkind and nature, not be divided, but do devise and bequeath it to beheld in common by my issue, without regard for generation, equally, share and share alike. '" "Issue?" said Emerald. Lou included the multitude in a sweep of his hand. "It means we all ownthe whole damn shootin' match. " Each eye turned instantly to the bed. "Share and share alike?" asked Morty. "Actually, " said Willy, who was the oldest one present, "it's just likethe old system, where the oldest people head up things with theirheadquarters in here and--" "I like _that_!" exclaimed Em. "Lou owns as much of it as you do, and Isay it ought to be for the oldest one who's still working. You cansnooze around here all day, waiting for your pension check, while poorLou stumbles in here after work, all tuckered out, and--" "How about letting somebody who's never had _any_ privacy get a littlecrack at it?" Eddie demanded hotly. "Hell, you old people had plenty ofprivacy back when you were kids. I was born and raised in the middle ofthat goddamn barracks in the hall! How about--" "Yeah?" challenged Morty. "Sure, you've all had it pretty tough, and myheart bleeds for you. But try honeymooning in the hall for a real kick. " "_Silence!_" shouted Willy imperiously. "The next person who opens hismouth spends the next sixth months by the bathroom. Now clear out of myroom. I want to think. " A vase shattered against the wall, inches above his head. * * * * * In the next moment, a free-for-all was under way, with each couplebattling to eject every other couple from the room. Fighting coalitionsformed and dissolved with the lightning changes of the tacticalsituation. Em and Lou were thrown into the hall, where they organizedothers in the same situation, and stormed back into the room. After two hours of struggle, with nothing like a decision in sight, thecops broke in, followed by television cameramen from mobile units. For the next half-hour, patrol wagons and ambulances hauled away Fords, and then the apartment was still and spacious. An hour later, films of the last stages of the riot were being televisedto 500, 000, 000 delighted viewers on the Eastern Seaboard. In the stillness of the three-room Ford apartment on the 76th floor ofBuilding 257, the television set had been left on. Once more the air wasfilled with the cries and grunts and crashes of the fray, comingharmlessly now from the loudspeaker. The battle also appeared on the screen of the television set in thepolice station, where the Fords and their captors watched withprofessional interest. Em and Lou, in adjacent four-by-eight cells, were stretched outpeacefully on their cots. "Em, " called Lou through the partition, "you got a washbasin all yourown, too?" "Sure. Washbasin, bed, light--the works. And we thought _Gramps'_ roomwas something. How long has this been going on?" She held out her hand. "For the first time in forty years, hon, I haven't got the shakes--lookat me!" "Cross your fingers, " said Lou. "The lawyer's going to try to get us ayear. " "Gee!" Em said dreamily. "I wonder what kind of wires you'd have to pullto get put away in solitary?" "All right, pipe down, " said the turnkey, "or I'll toss the whole kitand caboodle of you right out. And first one who lets on to anybodyoutside how good jail is ain't never getting back in!" The prisoners instantly fell silent. * * * * * The living room of the apartment darkened for a moment as the riotscenes faded on the television screen, and then the face of theannouncer appeared, like the Sun coming from behind a cloud. "And now, friends, " he said, "I have a special message from the makers ofanti-gerasone, a message for all you folks over 150. Are you hamperedsocially by wrinkles, by stiffness of joints and discoloration or lossof hair, all because these things came upon you before anti-gerasone wasdeveloped? Well, if you are, you need no longer suffer, need no longerfeel different and out of things. "After years of research, medical science has now developed_Super_-anti-gerasone! In weeks--yes, weeks--you can look, feel and actas young as your great-great-grandchildren! Wouldn't you pay $5, 000 tobe indistinguishable from everybody else? Well, you don't have to. Safe, tested _Super_-anti-gerasone costs you only a few dollars a day. "Write now for your free trial carton. Just put your name and address ona dollar postcard, and mail it to '_Super_, ' Box 500, 000, Schenectady, N. Y. Have you got that? I'll repeat it. '_Super_, ' Box 500, 000 . .. " Underlining the announcer's words was the scratching of Gramps' pen, theone Willy had given him the night before. He had come in, a few minutesearlier, from the Idle Hour Tavern, which commanded a view of Building257 from across the square of asphalt known as the Alden Village Green. He had called a cleaning woman to come straighten the place up, then hadhired the best lawyer in town to get his descendants a conviction, agenius who had never gotten a client less than a year and a day. Grampshad then moved the daybed before the television screen, so that he couldwatch from a reclining position. It was something he'd dreamed of doingfor years. "Schen-_ec_-ta-dy, " murmured Gramps. "Got it!" His face had changedremarkably. His facial muscles seemed to have relaxed, revealingkindness and equanimity under what had been taut lines of bad temper. Itwas almost as though his trial package of _Super_-anti-gerasone hadalready arrived. When something amused him on television, he smiledeasily, rather than barely managing to lengthen the thin line of hismouth a millimeter. Life was good. He could hardly wait to see what was going to happennext. --KURT VONNEGUT, JR. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _Galaxy Science Fiction_ January 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.