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Fortunately the Milk

Fortunately the Milk

Titel: Fortunately the Milk
Autoren: Neil Gaiman
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button.
    “It’s called a button,” I said.
    “Nonsense. We named it after our brood-aunt, Nessie Grundledorfer,” said the globby aliens. The particularly drippy alien pressed the black button on the metal wall with something that might have been a finger and might just have been a long strand of snot.
    There was a CRACKLE .
    There was a FIZZ .

    Standing around us, in attitudes of anger and irritation, were several pirates, some of the black-haired people from the jungle, a very unhappy-looking volcano god, a large bowl filled with piranhas, and some wumpires.

    “I’m not sure that I understand what the piranhas are doing,” said my sister.

    “They were from a narrow escape earlier that I forgot to mention,” said our father. “Fortunately, the milk floated at a crucial moment and it all ended for the best.”
    “I thought it might,” I said.

“U h-oh,” I said.
    “Prepare to be keelhauled, you scurvy dogs,” shouted the pirates.
    “Let us now sacrifice them both to great Splod!” shouted the men with shiny black hair.
    “They stole my eye! Twice!” rumbled mighty Splod.
    “Ve vants those willains and warmints wiolently vound up,” proclaimed a tall lady wumpire with long fingernails.
    The piranhas said nothing, but they thrashed about in their bowl, ominously.

    “Doomed,” moaned Professor Steg. “We cannot escape. They have frozen us in time and depowered us. Even my mighty Time Machine can do no more than open a small window in time and space—smaller than either of us could get through.”
    “But can you do it?” I asked. “Open a little window in time to our last location?”
    “Of course. But what good would that do?”
    “Quickly!” I said. “Do it!”
    Professor Steg pushed the button on the box with the tip of his nose.
    There was a zum! and a plip! and a window opened in space and time, large enough for an arm to get through.
    I reached into it.
    “I’ll explain later,” I said. “Fate of the world at stake.” I grabbed the milk from me, fifteen minutes earlier, through the tiny space-time portal.
    “You must like milk a lot,” said the globby aliens. “But that craving for lactic liquids will not make us take pity on you or let you go and spare your badly-designed planet.”
    “It should,” I said. “What am I holding in my left hand?”
    “Er. The milk,” they said.
    “And what am I holding in my right hand?”

    They paused. Then one alien, so green and small and so globby and crusted that he might have been an enormous snot-bubble blown by an elephant with a terrible head-cold, said, “. . . the same milk from fifteen minutes earlier.”

    “Exactly,” I said. “Now. Think about this one very carefully. What would happen if I touched these two things together?”
    The globby aliens went a very pale green. The pirates, shiny-black-hair-men, and the piranhas looked at them, puzzled, seeking some kind of explanation, as did the wumpires.
    “If two things that are the same thing touch,” proclaimed the volcano god, “then the whole Universe shall end. Thus sayeth the great and unutterable Splod.”

    “How does a volcano know so much about transtemporal meta-science?” asked one of the pale green aliens.

    “Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think,” said Splod. “Also, I subscribe to a number of learned journals.”
    I coughed, in what I hoped was an ominous sort of way. “Well?” I asked.
    “What he said,” admitted the green globby aliens. “The bit about the Universe ending.”
    “So,” I told them. “Unless you wish to spend the rest of your lives in a universe that no longer exists, you had better return things to the way they were. And then go away.”

    The aliens looked at each other. They grinned at each other.
    One of them pressed the grundledorfer .

    The wumpires, pirates, piranhas, volcano god, and the worshippers of the volcano god were gone.
    “What if,” suggested one of the green globby aliens hopefully, “we only redecorated the Southern Hemisphere?”
    “Not a chance,” I said. “Now, release us, or the milk touches itself! And then go away. Leave this planet forever.”
    The aliens looked at me, then they looked at each other, and then they sighed, with a noise like a hundred elephantine snot balloons all deflating at once.
    “Right,” they said.
    It was at that moment that a voice louder than anything I have ever heard—and I had heard a volcano erupt at very close
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