“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.”
I was standing on the ground, holding on to the rope ladder, when the ground shook and the very small volcano began to belch smoke and lava.
“Splod is angry!” shouted the little thin man. “He wants his eye back.”
There was a rushing wind, and the balloon jerked me up into the air, high above the splurting lava.
Unfortunately, I dropped the milk. I wasn’t holding on to it tightly enough. It landed on the top of Splod’s head.
Professor Steg hauled the rope ladder up with his tail.
“I’VE LOST THE MILK!” I told him.
“That’s not good,” he admitted.
“But I know where it is. It’s on top of Splod’s head, on the side of the volcano.”
Professor Steg said, “Good Splod! What on earth is that?”
Before our eyes, another balloon, just like ours, appeared, over by the volcano. A man hurried down the rope ladder. He placed a large emerald in Splod’s eye, picked up the milk from Splod’s head, ran up the ladder, and the balloon vanished.
The very small volcano stopped erupting as suddenly as if it had been turned off.
“That was a bit peculiar, wasn’t it?” said the professor.
“It was,” I agreed, gloom and despair and despondency overcoming me. “That man in that balloon stole my milk. We are lost in the past, with jungles and pirates and volcanoes. Now I will never get home. My children will never have breakfast. We are doomed to float forever through the dusty air of the past in a hot air balloon.”
“It is not a balloon,” said Professor Steg. “It is a Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier. What nonsense you do talk. Now, I think that should do the trick.”
He finished attaching the emerald to the box, using string, mostly, and also sticky tape, and he pushed the red button.
“Where are we going?” I asked. It seemed like the sun was zooming across the sky, as if nights were following days in a flickering strobe.
“The far, far future!” said Professor Steg.
The machine stopped.
We were hanging in the air above a grassy plain, with a very small grey mountain beneath us.
“There,” said Professor Steg. “It is now an extinct volcano. BUT LOOK!”
On the side of the extinct volcano was carved the face of Splod, still recognizable, even though it was much eroded by time and the weather, and in the single eye was a huge green emerald, a perfect twin to the one that we had attached to the Time Machine.