“He’s lying, Your Majesty!”
She pulled out her cutlass. “You dare lie to the Queen of the Pirates?”
Fortunately, I had kept tight hold of the milk, and now I pointed to it.
“If I did not go to the corner shop to fetch the milk,” I asked them, “then where did this milk come from?”
At this, the pirates were completely speechless. “Now,” I said, “if you could let me off somewhere near to my destination, I would be much obliged to you.”
“And where would that happen to be?” said the Queen of the Pirates.
“On the corner of Marshall Road and Fletcher Lane,” I said. “My children are waiting there for their breakfast.”
“You’re on a pirate ship now, my fine bucko,” said the Pirate Queen. “And you don’t get dropped off anywhere. There are only two choices—you can join my pirate crew, or refuse to join and we will slit your cowardly throat and you will go to the bottom of the sea, where you will feed the fishes.”
“What about walking the plank?” I asked.
“NEVER heard of it!” said the pirates.
“Walking the plank!” I said. “It’s what proper pirates do! Look, I’ll show you. Do you have a plank anywhere?”
It took some looking, but we found a plank, and I showed the pirates where to put it. We discussed nailing it down, but the Pirate Queen decided it was safer just to have the two fattest pirates sit on the end of it.
“Why exactly do you want to walk the plank?” asked the Pirate Queen.
I edged out onto the plank. The blue Caribbean water splashed gently beneath me.
“Well,” I said, “I’ve seen lots of stories with pirates in them, and it seems to me that if I’m going to be rescued—”
At this, the pirates started to laugh so hard their stomachs wobbled, and the parrot took off into the air in amazement. “Rescue?” they said. “There’s no rescue out here. We’re in the middle of the sea.”
“Nevertheless,” I told them. “If you are going to be rescued, it will always be while walking the plank.”
“Which we don’t do,” said the Pirate Queen. “Here. Have a SPANISH DOUBLOON and come and join us in our piratical adventures. It’s the eighteenth century,” she added, “and there’s always room for a bright, enthusiastic pirate.”
I caught the doubloon. “I almost wish that I could,” I told her. “But I have children. And they need their breakfast.”
“Then you must die!
Walk the plank!”
I edged out to the end of the plank. Sharks were circling. So were piranhas—
And this was where
I interrupted my dad for
THE FIRST TIME.
“Hang on,” I said. “Piranhas are a freshwater fish. What were they doing in the sea?”
“You’re right,” said my father. “The piranhas were later. Right. So . . .”
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.”