Fortunately the Milk

range—said,
    “GALACTIC POLICE.
DO NOT MOVE.”
    My hands shook, but the milk did not touch the milk, and the Universe did not end.
    There were red and blue flashing lights and then, stepping off their space-bikes, were about half a dozen uniformed dinosaurs, holding unmistakably large and extremely serious weapons. They pointed their weapons at the green globby aliens.
    “You are charged with breaking into people’s planets and redecorating them,” said a noble and imposing-looking Tyrannosaurus Rex. “And then with running away and doing it again somewhere else, over and over. You have committed crimes against the inhabitants of eighteen planets, and crimes against good taste.”
    “What we did to Rigel Four was art !” argued a globby alien.
    “Art? There are people on Rigel Four,” said an Ankylosaurus, “who have to look up, every night, at a moon with three huge plaster ducks flying across it.”
    Something very long with a head on the end of it came over to us. It was attached to a very large body, on the other side of the room. “Who are you?” it asked Professor Steg. “And why is your gorilla holding a transtemporally dislocated milk container?”
    “I am not a gorilla,” I said. “I am a human father.”

    “The human is holding the milk in order to make these evil redecorating snot-bubbles go away and stop menacing this planet and us,” said Professor Steg.
    The Diplodocus in a police cap opened its mouth and didn’t say anything.
    The Tyrannosaurus, who had handcuffed all of the green globby people together with something that looked a lot more like pink string-in-a-can than it looked like handcuffs, which was a good thing because they probably didn’t have hands and they definitely didn’t have wrists, stared at us and his eyes opened wide.
    “Great day in the morning!” he exclaimed. “A biped. A Stegosaurus. A Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier. . . .” And he stopped, as if unable to go on.

    A Pteranodon flapped over to us, then landed at Professor Steg’s feet. It looked up at him, and said, hesitantly, “Would you be . . . ? Could you be…? The inventor of Professor Steg’s Pointy Zooming-into-Outer-Space-Machine? Of Professor Steg’s Really Good Moves Around in Time Machine? Would you be the author of My Travels into the Extremely Far Future and What I Found There? Professor Steg, wisest of all dinosaur-kind? MADAM, IS IT TRULY YOU?”
    “It is,” said the Professor. ( Madam? I thought, embarrassed.) “And this is my assistant.”
    The Pteranodon extended a wing tip for me to shake, and without thinking, I moved the second milk from my right hand to my left . . .
    Where the first milk was.
    EVERYBODY GASPED .

    Unfortunately, the milk that had been in my right hand, which was the same as the milk that was already in my left hand, the same milk fifteen minutes apart, touched each other .
    I held my breath.
    There was a fizzing noise, and a mewing as if a hundred kittens were being agitated in an enormous basket.
    Professor Steg closed her eyes. “I can’t look,” she said.
    Three purple dwarfs with flowerpots on their heads appeared from nowhere and began to do a little dance.
    “Did the Universe end?” said the Tyrannosaurus, with his eyes tightly scrunched closed.
    “LOOK!” I SAID.
    We all watched the dwarfs dance. They weren’t human and they weren’t dinosaurs. They had purple skin and the flowerpots on their heads had lots of flowers growing out of them. They did a complicated sort of a dance, with lots of leg kicking and shouts of “ OY! ” and “ OLAY! ” and “ PERTUNG! ” And then, as strangely as they had come, they vanished.
    “Ah,” said Professor Steg. “It was always a possibility that this might happen. And fortunately, the Universe has not ended.”
    She pressed the button again, with her tail. A small hole in space and time opened up. I was standing on the other side with a baffled expression on my face.
    “Catch!” I shouted, and threw the milk through the hole. As the portal closed, I saw me catch the milk using my stomach.
    The green globby aliens having been rounded up and taken away, all the space-dinosaurs gathered around.
    “I can’t believe it,” said the Diplodocus. “Professor Steg. Just like in the comics. The dinosaur who taught us that in the far future, small mammals will eat their breakfast cereal with milk on it. Inventor of the button. She’s here, in front of us, with her gorilla.”

    “Not a gorilla, but a