Fortunately, the Milk

I was out at the end of the plank, facing certain death, when a rope ladder hit my shoulder and a deep, booming voice shouted,

“QUICKLY! CLIMB UP THE ROPE LADDER!”

I needed no more encouragement than this, and I grabbed the rope ladder with both hands. Fortunately, the milk was pushed deep into the pocket of my coat. The pirates hurled insults at me, and even discharged pistols, but neither insults nor pistol-shot found their targets and I soon made it to the top of the rope ladder.

I’d never been in the basket of a hot air balloon before. It was very peaceful up there.

The person in the balloon basket said, “I hope you don’t mind me helping, but it looked like you were having problems down there.”

I said, “You’re a stegosaurus!”

“I am an inventor,” he said. “I have invented the thing we are traveling in, which I call Professor Steg’s Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier.”

“I call it a balloon,” I said.

“Professor Steg’s Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier is the original name,” he said. “And right now we are one hundred and fifty million years in the future.”

“Actually,” I said, “we are about three hundred years in the past.”

“Do you like hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers?” he asked.

“Coconuts?” I guessed.

“I named them first,” said Professor Steg. He picked up a coconut from a basket and ate it, shell and all, just as you or I might crunch toast.

He showed me his Time Machine. He was very proud of it. It was a large cardboard box with several pebbles on it, and stones stuck to the side. There was also a large, red button. I looked at the stones. “Hang on,” I said. “Those are diamonds. And sapphires. And rubies.”

“Actually,” he said, “I call them special-shiny-clear-stones, special-shiny-bluey-stones, and, um—”

“Special-shiny-red-stones?” I suggested.

“Indeed,” he said. “I called them that when I was inventing my Really Good Moves Around in Time Machine, one hundred and fifty million years ago.”

“Well,” I told him, “it was very lucky for me that you turned up when you did and rescued me. I am slightly lost in space and time right now and need to get home in order to make sure my children get milk for their breakfast.” I showed it to him. “This is the milk. Although I expect that one hundred and fifty million years ago you called it ‘wet-white-drinky-stuff.’”

“Dinosaurs are reptiles, sir,” said Professor Steg. “We do not go in for milk.”

“Do you go in for breakfast cereal?” I asked.

“Of course!” he said. “Dinosaurs LOVE breakfast cereal. Especially the kind with nuts in.”

“What do you have on your cereal?” I asked.

“Orange juice, mostly. Or we just eat it dry. But I shall put this in my book: In the distant future, small mammals put milk on their breakfast cereal. I shall write a wonderful book, when I return to the present.”

“Actually,” I said, “I think this is definitely the past. It has pirates in it.”

“It’s the future,” he said. “All the dinosaurs have gone off into the stars, leaving the world to mammals.”

“I wondered where you all went,” I said.

“The stars,” he told me. “That is where we will have gone.”

“So,” I said. “Can you take me home?”

“Well,” he said. “Yes and no.”

“What does that mean?”

“Yes, I would love to take you home. Nothing would make me happier. No, I cannot take you home. In all honesty, I do not believe that I can take me home. My Time Machine is being temperamental. I need a special-shiny-greeny-stone. I have pressed that button many times but nothing happens.”

“Button? Don’t you mean ‘big-red-flat-pressy-thing’?” I asked.

“I most certainly do not. It is a button. I named it after my Aunt Button.”

“Can I press it?”

“If you wish.”

I pressed the button. The sun shot around the sky, and the sky started to flicker in nights and in days, and the balloon began to rock and lurch and zoom around like an angry fly.

I held on to the ropes as hard as I could. Fortunately, I was still keeping tight hold of the milk in my right hand.

When we stopped being blown all across the sky, it was night and, according to Professor Steg, we had only gone back about a thousand years. The moon was nearly full.

“I am even further from my children and our breakfast,” I said.

“You have your milk,” he said. “Where there is milk, there is hope. Ah, over there. That looks like a perfect landing platform for time-traveling scientists in Floaty-Ball-Person-Carriers.”

We landed on the platform and got out. The platform stuck up out of the jungle and had flaming torches on each side. There were people standing on it with very black hair and sharp stone knives.

“Is this a balloon-landing platform?” I asked the people.

“It is not,” said a fat man. “It is our temple. We had a very bad harvest last year and we had just asked the gods to send us a sacrifice, to make sure that this year’s harvest is better, when you floated down in that thing, with your monster.”

“Thank you, by the way,” said a little thin man. “I was going to be the sacrifice if no one else turned up. Much obliged.”

“So now we will sacrifice you and your monster.”

“But my children are waiting for their breakfast,” I said. “Look!” I held up the milk.

“Why did they all just fall to their knees?” asked Professor Steg. “Is this usual hairless mammal behavior? Perhaps I should hold up some hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers and see what happens.”

“Coconuts!” I told him. “They are called coconuts!”

“What is that you are holding?” the fat man asked.

“Milk,” I said.

“MILK!” they exclaimed, and they prostrated themselves on the ground.

“We have a prophecy,” said the fat man, “that when a man and a spiny-backed monster descend from the skies on a round floaty thing—”

“Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier,” said the little thin man.

“Yes. One of those. We were told that when that happened, if the man held up milk then we were not to sacrifice them, but we were meant to take them to the volcano, and give them, as a present, the green jewel that is the Eye of Splod.”

“Splod?”

“He is the god of people with short, funny names.”

“It is,” I said, “a remarkably specific sort of a prophecy. When did you receive it?”

“Last Wednesday,” said the fat man, proudly. “The priest of Splod was woken in the night by a voice whispering from the heavens. And when he went to look and see who it was, there was nobody there. Also, he was sleeping on the top of the temple, and nobody else could have been up there with him. So it must have either been Splod himself talking, or one of his angelic messengers.”

We walked together down a jungle path. Professor Steg carried the rope in his mouth that led up to the balloon, and he dragged the balloon along. After half an hour we reached the volcano.

It was not a very big volcano. There were wisps of smoke coming from the top of it.

On the side of the volcano there was a carving of a big scary face with one eye in the middle of its forehead. The eye was the biggest emerald I had ever seen.

“A special-shiny-greeny-stone!” said Professor Steg, with his mouth full of rope.

The fat man clambered up the side of the volcano.

“It is a good thing that Splod himself told us to give you the Eye of Splod,” said the little thin man who had narrowly avoided being sacrificed, “because there is another prophecy that if the Eye of Splod is ever removed, Great Splod will awaken and spread burning destruction across the land.”

“Here you go,” said the fat man.

He handed us the emerald. Professor Steg nipped up the rope ladder into the balloon’s gondola and began to install the emerald in the Time Machine.

“Hang on. He was a stegosaurus?”

“Yes.”

“Then how could he just nip up a rope ladder?”

“He was,” said my father, “a large stegosaurus, but very light on his feet. There are fat people who are excellent dancers.”

“Are there any ponies in this?” asked my sister. “I thought there would be ponies by now.”