Explore "Cosmic Striptease" by Harlan Ellison on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
_A picture is worth a thousand words -- especially if they're Martian / words and nobody can understand them. So Mars put on a spectacular / for Earth, using the skies as a TV screen. This proved the / superiority of their science. But their morals -- Wow! _
The Atlas didn't make it -- it blew up. And so did the Thor. The Vulcan wasn't much better; it just went _pfftt_. None of them got anywhere near outer space -- the _real_ outer space. Oh, yes, they went up hundreds of miles, even thousands. The Vulcan went nearly five thousand. But they were still in the Electro-Magnetic Field. Nobody really understood the EMF. Einstein had hit on it with his final theory, before he died. He said gravity and magnetism were just manifestations of something else, some single thing that held the very secret of matter.