# Octothorpe Productions Title:"Sphere's Warning" By: The Cruiser Date:8/14/87 And thus the Earth propelled itself through space, as uncountable numbers of reactions occured throughout the cosmos, revolving in one large cycle... Phillip sat on his patio and looked silently at his backyard, squinting in the slowly sinking sun. His mom lay on a lawn chair, circa 1975, under a fairly small apple tree. It was old alright, and taller than Phillip, but as apple trees go, it was a midget. An empty clotheline hung from two poles across the yard. Poles that once were the legs of a swing set when Phillip and his brothers were small. Now Phillip was thirteen, and he had a sixteen and a fourteen year old brother. They tended to ignore him most of the time. As a matter of fact, they were inside right now, watching TV with their six year old sister. Father was in the garden, watering the plants. The garden. It took up half their backyard, and was Father's pride and joy. Every year he would get a truckload of manure piled in it, and he built a trough in one corner which he filled with grass when they cut the lawn. It would pile up and eventually become 'good soil'. In the fall they'd use leaves. Father said that leaves were just as good. There was a shed in the back of the garden, with the lawnmower, a broken snow blower, an old bike and various garden tools. Unknown to its owners, a family of mice took residence in the back behind an old bag of mulch. The rest of the garden was full of tomato and onion patches. One section had a few walls of grapevines that made a neat little cave in the summer. Sometimes Phillip would go in there with a book and just read for a while. There was a small wooden fence around the whole garden, broken in some areas, and patched with wire mesh in others. The garden was quite an eyesore, being that they lived in a middle-class suburb of Chicago. Itching his Hawaiian-print shirt, he got up and grabbed the aluminum baseball bat he spotted across the lawn. Not finding a baseball, he kicked a golf ball that was embedded in the dirt by the patio. Hitting it with the bat, it sailed through the grass and landed somewhere on the other end of the lawn, scaring away a congregation of robins. He ran up to it and hit it again. This time it sailed in the air and hit a tree. Father saw it from the garden and looked slightly angered. Phillip picked it up and threw it against the house. "Watch where you throw that thing!", his mom ordered. Phillip ignored her and whacked it to the corner of their propery. It landed by a four-way property division. He jogged down to it, where it lay next to a drainage sewer. He could see all of the houses that were behind theirs by standing here. Someone down the street was having a barbeque -- the smell of hickory was rampant, and he saw the smoke above some trees. The sound of kids playing tag squealed in the distance. He bent over and picked up the ball, not noticing a small, gold spherical object in the grass. He walked back to where his mother was laying and tried to hit the sewer from there, which was a good 10 yards away. WHOOSH! The bat was a streak of silver, and the golf ball a projectile as he hit it with all his might. It missed the sewer and hit the sphere which lay next to it. "Shit! Missed!", he shrieked under his breath. But he was loud enough for his mother to hear. "Phillip! I don't want to hear that kind of language from you!" He ran up to the ball and picked it up, not seeing the crumbled remains of the sphere, which hit his heel and fell into the sewer. The sphere, only a half-inch across, had come from a far place in a future time, and had a warning message in it. Its creaters had spent many eons building and designing it, for the sake of warning our people of a danger only they knew about. And it was sent through time and space only to land there, undiscovered by anyone. No one was to ever be forwarned of the danger that lie ahead. Phillip walked away and whacked the ball in the other direction. It hit a cherry tree at it's base. "Phee-lip, don't do that, " Father said in his heavy Italian-Argentinean accent. "Phee-leep! Put-a that ball away, no?" "Okay, Father." And thus the Earth propelled itself through space, as uncountable numbers of reactions occured throughout the cosmos, revolving in one large cycle...