Near the end of The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, David Topman, realizing that his mother doesn't really believe he has been to Basidium but is just humoring him, he determines to take her to see Mr. Bass and go to the Mushroom Planet herself. Just then they are interrupted by a voice from the radio:
"-- and here's a little item that's been giving us a great deal of amusement in the newsroom. A small boy phoned in a few minutes ago to tell us that this morning, very early, before the storm had gotten well under way, but after the big wind had already begun, he looked out of his window and saw a neighbor of his swooped up by the gale and whipped right off into the sky. Up and up he went -- so the little boy said -- turning this way and that, his coat flapping about his ears, until he finally vanished altogether, a mere speck in the clouds." Over the radio came the deep, hearty, jolly voice of the newscaster, relishing to the fullest this ridiculous story. "Well," he finished, still chuckling, "I guess there's just no telling what's going to happen around here. Some storm!"
Mrs. Topman turned, laughing.
"Isn't that funny?" she said. "Imagine!"
"No," said David. "I don't really think it's funny," and he turned and went off to his room to think . . . (p. 148).
Later they go to Mr. Bass's house and meet the boy who made the report:
"I saw him this morning," said he, "but he blew away."
There was a moment of stunned silence.
"Blew away!" burst out Cap'n Tom at last. "Great jumpin' Jehosaphat! What was that ye said -- blew away?"
"Yes, sir," said the little boy respectfully, but in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice. "My mom let me phone the radio station and I told 'em he blew away. I saw him. I looked out of my window when the wind was really getting strong, and I saw Mr. Bass go up in the air like a leaf in the sky --" here the little boy made an upward, fluttering movement of his hand -- "and that was the last of him. After it stopped raining, I came over here to look for him. I looked in his planta . . . in his observatory, and in the closets, and under the bed, and behind the curtains, and down in the cellar, and everywhere, but he's gone. He just blew away" (pp. 157-58).
Mr. Bass reappears in later books in the series, but he is different after blowing away. Most notably, he now has the power to travel by thought -- to think of a place and instantly appear there. The spaceship is no longer necessary. In Time and Mr. Bass, Chuck Masterson asks him what exactly happened that morning when he "blew away," and he explains:
You will recall I told you at the time that I knew I was about to have the most important appointment of my life. I knew somehow that the Ancient Ones had work for me to do, but I did not know what work, nor where. And so when, moved by some strange impulse, I went out into the wind and looked up into the sky, I had a feeling that I was about to leave earth and I was happy and peaceful that I had left my affairs in good order. Then -- away I went, lifted up, up, as if by the wind, but I knew it was a greater power than the wind trying to teach me something I had never experienced before.
At first I was hollow with loneliness, for it seemed to me that surely I had been cast adrift forever in the vast reaches of space. And even after I found myself in my new home on a little planet in a solar system in the galaxy of M 81 in Ursa Major, it was is if I were a blurred picture of Tyco Bass trying to become clear again. I couldn't get focused -- I couldn't get my "me" focused. And when I first used to travel by thought, it exhausted me because I was trying so hard to help my mind and my imagination (because they work together) do something they can do quite easily by themselves. But no longer -- no longer. Now I am focused very clearly and I can do whatever I have to do (p. 24-25).
The parallel to the prophet Elijah, who "went up by a whirlwind into heaven" (2 Kgs. 2:11), is clear. As with Tyco, everyone understands that Elijah was in fact taken up by "a greater power than the wind" and that the experience changed him into something other than an ordinary mortal. In Joseph Smith's terminology, Elijah was "translated" -- a state distinct both from mortality and from the full immortality that comes with resurrection.
Tyco Bass didn't "go to heaven" in the religious sense but rather to a planet in a distant galaxy,among whose people he has some unspecified work to do for the Ancient Ones. He also makes frequent visits to Earth and to Basidium. This fits remarkably well with what Joseph Smith said of translated beings like Elijah:
Many have supposed that the doctrine of translation was a doctrine whereby men were taken immediately into the presence of God, and into an eternal fullness, but this is a mistaken idea. Their place of habitation is that of the terrestrial order, and a place prepared for such characters He held in reserve to be ministering angels unto many planets, and who as yet have not entered into so great a fullness as those who are resurrected from the dead (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 170).
The Mushroom Planet series is full of little surprises like this. Another impressive one is the invention of a "hole in space" several years before the term black hole was coined.
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