Dundundun... (original) (raw)
Through Grover's weak eyes, the world was black. He reached his arms out and tried to feel his way to the sofa, but managed to stub his foot on a table leg instead.
"Youch!" shouted Grover, and at the same instant, lightning struck again, and illuminated his darkened home for a fraction of a second. It was all somehow distorted. Too big. Tilted at strange angles. Then it was black again, and Grover was gripped with the unmistakable sensation of falling.
His feet were on the ground, but he was falling. Grover turned and stumbled and screamed, then he slammed unwittingly into that damned glass window, smashed straight through in a cloud of razor-fine shards into the pelting rain.
By the time Grover hit the ground, the rain was gone. The ground beneath him was dry. He lay there a moment, wincing at all the fine lacerations on his face and hands from the broken glass. Then he opened his eyes and struggled up to his feet.
Moonlight soaked the Earth, and even Grover could make out his surroundings. It was not his back yard, at least, it was not his back yard as Grover had ever seen it. He was standing on an uneven surface of large stones and equally large clods of dirt. To his left, the towering structure of an acorn loomed out of the earth. To his right, a blade of grass seemingly 6 feet wide and 60 feet tall stood like a very improbably tongue-shaped tree. In the distance, he could make out the white, wooden-paneled wall of his house. And littering his immediate surroundings were glittering shards of glass, like daggers.
Grover and his new friend slid outside into the harsh Xanadian atmosphere where another friend picked them up in a spacecraft. Views of other worlds…
Jeremy Blitz was Captain of the Research ship Xanadu, on the planet named for the ship, deep in the Omicron Eridani system. At the moment, Captain…
Grover physically woke up to the sounds of alarms and running footsteps, though he felt he had already been awake, as he had somehow seen one of his…