The old voyager looked at the sleeping child, and felt a bittersweet feeling in his own body, an ache and a joy that he could not understand; but then he understood, that he loved this child.
I am his guide and protector, though what have I guided him to? To the dark lunacy of the night. And what have I taught him?
To steal from the hardware store.
But Elliott—he touched the boy’s forehead again—my heart-light is brighter because of you. You are my teacher, my guide and protector. Has there ever been such a child as this?
So selfless and serving?
May every star bless you with gentle knowing, of the sort you can receive, use, and understand.
He made hand signs of command to the subtle flow of moon and starlight, and bent it gently around Elliott’s sleeping form.
A sniffing at the crack of the door indicated that Harvey the dog had arrived, for his nightly sojourn with E.T.
The space-goblin opened the door and Harvey slunk in sideways, still not perfectly secure. He sniffed the sleeping Elliott, then circled a pillow several times, and finally sat down in front of E.T.
E.T. gazed at him and the dog gazed back shiftily, but their gazes continued to merge. Gradually, Harvey’s tongue fell out, and one ear curled, as he saw, in his doggie-mind, the Great Cosmic Bone, floating in the soup of space. His tongue flicked over his chops and he made a low whining noise.
E.T. instructed him further, in telebeams of light, mind to mind, about things a dog should know while howling at the moon.
C H A P T E R
1 3
Mary stood in front of the filing cabinet, thumbing through the folders. It was only eleven and her feet were already killing her. She looked at the pile of papers yet to be filed. She would have liked to file them in the airshaft, a lovely fluttering storm of correspondence.
“Mary, when you get a chance, would you run these ideas down to the sales department?”
When I get a chance? She looked at her employer. He was a dumbbell, a tyrant, a sadist, and a fool. If he were single, she’d marry him. So she could sit down.
“Yes, Mr. Crowder, I’ll get to it just as soon as I can.”
“And while you’re at it, could you—”
“Yes, I’d be glad to.”
“But I didn’t tell you what it was yet.” A puzzled frown came to Crowder’s forehead.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crowder, I thought the filing cabinet was about to tip over. It does that occasionally.”
“It does?”
“If you open all the drawers at once.”
Crowder was temporarily sidetracked by this, and stood gazing at the cabinet. She frequently wondered how, without qualifications of any kind, he’d risen to the position he held in the corporation, but more frequently she wondered how she held the position she did, without going insane. She was thinking of quitting. Maybe she’d quit today and go to work in a gas station. Mechanics always seemed to have a sense of humor, especially when they were working on her car.
“You say, if you open all the drawers?” Crowder was examining the cabinet.
“I wouldn’t advise you to try.”
“But we should—fasten it to the wall, shouldn’t we?”
“Possibly.” More interesting, thought Mary, would be Mr. Crowder fastened to the wall. And used as a bulletin board.
“I must tell maintenance about this.” Crowder marched off, sidetracked until lunchtime. Mary spent it on a bench in the park, eating a submarine sandwich and massaging her instep. Beside her on the bench, an elderly woman was having a conversation with someone inside her shopping bag.
Mary looked at her; she’d probably been a file clerk.
And this is how I’m going to end up. Having a meaningful relationship with a paper bag.
She stretched her legs out and sighed. If only Mr. Right would come along with his own Visa card. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him.
But she kept getting the image of someone no bigger than an umbrella stand, waddling toward her with a candy bar.
“Traveling on business, are you?” asked the fellow passenger at thirty thousand feet.
“Ah, yes,” said the microbiologist. “A convention . . .”
Elliott opened his locker in the basement of the school, and tossed his books in, papers spilling out, notes falling any old way. He stared dejectedly at the jumble, wanting to make some kind of effort toward learning, but schoolwork wasn’t starshine, it was sludge. He swung the locker door closed and walked down the hallway. The gray walls of the school were as cheerful as jail. And Lance, Nerd of the Year, was coming toward him.
He’d brought along a Time magazine mirror. He framed Elliott’s face in it. “The Boy of the Year, friend of presidents and kings and—E.T.s.” He slid it over so that the mirror now included his own face. “Of course, somebody else will be on there with you. We know who, don’t we, sort of pink, with blue eyes?”
This tasteless speech, so typical of a nerdling, had the expected effect, of making the flesh crawl. Elliott’s was crawling, with a desire to kick Lance in the pants.
Lance smiled, feeling that he was finally getting somewhere in the world. With his face on the cover of Time, he could go straight from the fifth grade into the aerospace program and give advice on communicating with extraterrestrials, for wasn’t his head beeping constantly with just such messages?
“He’s talking to me, Elliott, all the time. He likes me.”
“I wonder why.”
“He senses that I can be useful. Elliott—” Lance took Elliott by the sleeve. “Do you realize that we’re the most important people in this school, at this moment? Because we’re in touch.” Lance’s squinty eyes became more so, like a nocturnal squirrel of the flying variety, out in daylight.
Elliott looked into those beady, watery eyes and had to admit—the glow of E.T. was there. He couldn’t kick Lance in the pants, much as he’d love to.
“Yeah, right, Lance, it’s true. We’re in touch. Hey, I’ve gotta go . . .”
He moved off down the hall, and Lance went his own way, both of them buzzing, but Elliott buzzing more so, and the buzz was not a happy one; the cosmic loneliness had returned in a wave that was coming through the wall of the school. Tracing it to the source was not a difficult matter: from the wall of the school, go across town, turn right, go up toward the hills, to the little collection of houses there, and enter one of them; in the upstairs closet an elderly space voyager is sitting with his geranium, deep in despair.
“. . . extraterrestrial,” muttered the microbiologist, as he was escorted down the hallway toward the briefing room. He turned to a colleague, in step beside him. “I’m sorry now I signed onto this damned roster.”
“Oh, well,” said the fellow scientist, “I needed a vacation.”
“The government,” said the microbiologist, “can think of more ways to waste a man’s time . . .”
They entered the briefing room, where the table was already filled, smoke curling overhead, scientific, military, and medical personnel seated together, their voices a low rumble.
A soft jingle of keys announced the entry of the team leader, who walked to the head of the table. Silence came almost at once.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we won’t keep you long. I know you’re tired from travel and you must rise before dawn tomorrow. The system of quarantine we’re employing is elaborate and will take considerable preparation . . .”
What sort of fellow was Keys, this quiet man at the center of a cyclone that was gradually picking up speed?
He’d had this odd dream as a child: that a spacecraft would come to Earth and select him as the recipient of its advanced knowledge. He would then turn this knowledge over to humanity.
The dreams of childhood seldom come true. Keys’ dream kept moving him into ever more recondite arenas of surveillance, until finally he was one of those who looked for that which was most obscure of all—a flashing light in the sky, a trail of vapor on the horizon,
a troubling shape on a radar screen.
Keys became a man familiar with deserts and mountaintops, had spent months on them, with the full map of stars overhead, through which the mystery sailed, maddeningly distant.
But like every hunter who is diligent, Keys gradually saw a pattern in the movement of his prey. He was outclassed in every way; he rode in a jeep while his quarry commanded a comet of power; he had to be satisfied with Earth technology, when the craft above him moved with inhuman grace. But habit seems universal, and Keys discovered that even the celestial captain had one—which had to do with the cycle of Earth’s vegetation.
Gradually, Keys came to this peculiar realization: the great Ship arrived when things blossomed.
So Keys followed the blossoms—and now, on his office wall, was a photograph of the Ship, taken close-up as it had blasted off in the hills behind Elliott’s house.
Outside his office, the warehouse now buzzed with activity as more specialists arrived, and technicians, and their backup teams. It was a trap that closed slowly, too slowly for Keys, but every piece had to be in place, so that the trophy wouldn’t be spoiled.
Within the warehouse was every available life-support system—for a dead spaceman was not the prize. The prize was a living trophy, and Keys had done all in his power to ensure that this one would be kept alive. Whatever shock it had sustained from prolonged time in an alien environment, Keys had the antidote. All that medical science had created, Keys had in his warehouse. Whatever Earth had to offer, it would offer the stranded member of the alien crew.
Keys had not considered that too much expertise might be dangerous, that a little spaceman who thrived on M&Ms did not need intravenous feeding, nor a possible organ transplant.
But Keys closed the only net of which he had ever conceived—a gigantic one, every knot in it an expert of some kind, and the entire thing able to restore life to a dead and frozen mastodon if it had to, to awaken any organ, rejuvenate any cell, sustain anything, from any conceivable atmosphere in the universe.
“I don’t want a dead spaceman,” was the order that went out continually to his colleagues, and to the gathering crew.
But already there was a smothering amount of equipment being assembled; if every one of the test-wires that now dangled at the ready were attached to E.T.’s body, he would look like a telephone switchboard. And everyone in the warehouse wanted desperately to attach themselves to the creature they’d heard about. Who wouldn’t?
Keys’ gigantic net was electric—incandescent—ready to be wrapped around a three-foot-tall creature hiding in a closet. And somehow, the creature knew.
The geranium was drooping, as was E.T., head down, hands folded like a pair of dead squid in his lap. All hope for his communicator had left him. It had been running for weeks, and there was no answer from space. The crew of the Great Ship was far off, speeding fast, gone beyond recalling.
I’m dying, Master, whispered the geranium faintly, but the old botanist could do nothing; the plant was absorbing his emotions, and over those he had no control. Cosmic loneliness had gotten to the marrow of his bones.
He leaned on the Muppet, pushed himself up off the creature’s head, and looked out the closet window. His gaze went off into the sky, telescopically focusing through the blue, but there was no glint of Ship, no halo of energy, no trail of vapor. A plane went by, trailing the advertisement of a nearby shopping mall, where a pair of orangutans would be on exhibit for shoppers that afternoon.
He turned away. In a short time, he too would be on exhibit. Stuffed, shellacked, and set on a shelf. Perhaps a few varnished Oreo cookies would be placed beside him to show on what the creature fed.
He opened the closet door and stepped out into Elliott’s room. Wearily he took a path through the boy’s piled-up clutter. Deeply depressed, he stepped into the hallway.
Broken in spirit, he descended the stairs, duck feet flapping on the carpet runners.
He stood in the downstairs hallway, feeling the inner pulse of the house. It was a chaotic, crazy place, but he loved it. How he wished he could bring riches to it, and the answer to everyone’s dreams, but all he was capable of was making the furniture float in the air, and what was the good of that? It would only make it difficult to get into a chair.
He shuffled down the hallway, his form no taller than the umbrella stand. It was giving him a complex, but with all his other problems, what did it really matter?
He entered the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
What could an extraterrestrial eat today?
He had a strange urge to eat Swiss cheese.
Moo, said the cheese.
“Moo,” said the ancient guest, and made himself a sandwich, with mustard.
What will I drink with this creation, he wondered, and finally chose a bright bottle.
He sat at the kitchen table, dined, and drank.
His tongue ran a quick analysis of the components of the beverage: malted barley, hops, adjuncts of rice and corn. Should be perfectly harmless.
He drank it down, found it much to his liking, and drank another.
The sun splashed its light across the kitchen table. He gazed at the window. It appeared to rotate slightly, first left, then right.
What a peculiar sensation.
He opened another bottle of the beverage and poured it down his throat, nonstop, enjoying the little gurgling sound it made.
Then he stood and found he could not walk.
It’s happened, he said to himself as he clutched the edge of the table. The gravity of Earth is finally weighing me down.
His knees buckled, just as he’d feared they would when the time came, when the pressure grew too great for his frame. His feet were going in opposite directions, his ankles felt like mush. He bumped into the stove, bounced back, crashed into the doorway.
His hands flailed about limply in the air, wrist joints apparently in deterioration too.
He staggered into the living room, stomach dragging over the rug in a somewhat lower profile than was usual. He wished he had wheels on his stomach; he imagined them, one on each side, with reflectors on them.
He switched on the TV set.
“. . . reach out,” sang the TV. “. . . reach out and touch someone.”
He stared stupidly at the screen, eyelids blinking slowly.
The telephone rang. He reached out his squidlike hand, gripped the phone as he’d seen Elliott do, and picked it up. From within the instrument came the voice of a woman whose voice-pattern was like Mary’s, but older, naggier, and somewhat nutty.
“Hello, Mary? I only have a minute, but I wanted to give you this recipe I know you’ll love, and it has things in it you should be getting more of, what with your unbalanced diet . . .”
“. . . reach out,” sang the TV, “. . . reach out and just say hi.”
“Say hi,” said the drunken old goblin.
“Elliott? Is this my little angel-eyes? What are you doing home from school? Are you sick? This is your grandma, honey.”
“Spell mechanic.”
“You should be in bed, Elliott. You get right back into bed this minute. Ask your mother to call me later.”
“Call me later.”
“You get better, sweetheart. Stay warm.” The scatterbrained old zany made kissing sounds into the receiver.
The potted old botanist returned them and lowered the phone back to its base.
He opened another bottle of beer, put his feet up, and continued watching the TV screen.
Humming drunkenly to himself, he tapped his feet back and forth against each other. Forgotten was the fact that his telepathic sender was on full force, and that flowing from his very pickled brain was a very plastered wave.
It swerved around the room, bumped through the wall, and sailed off across town, looping and swaying, until it reached the school, where it paused once, and then charged.
Elliott was leaning in over the biology work table when the tipsy, wobbling wave hit.
&n
bsp; The teacher was speaking. “Now in front of each position is a glass jar. I am going to come around and put a piece of cotton, soaked in ether, in each jar, and then we will deposit our frog into the same jar and wait for it to expire.”
Elliott swayed, sank forward, and put his lips to the bottle. He began making space-noises, indefinable but most definitely befuddled, like the ones the soused old space-warp was himself making at that very moment—burbles, babbles, and bleats.
“The comedian,” said the teacher, “will please silence himself.”
This Elliott attempted to do, but the room seemed bent out of shape, and so was he. Trying to compose himself, he looked at the girl next to him at the table, a certain Peggy Jean, who seemed to have enjoyed his noises of the previous moment. She gave him a faint smile, and he returned it, lips feeling as if made out of Silly Putty.
“Very well . . .” The teacher prepared the cotton, soaking it with ether.
Elliott returned his gaze to the frog bottle. The frog was looking out at him, and for the first time, Elliott saw that E.T. himself looked very much like a frog, a short, squat space traveler in ajar, staring helplessly out.
“You’re not gonna kill that poor defenseless thing, are you?” said Elliott.
“I am,” said the teacher.
Meanwhile, back at the TV set, the short, squat space traveler was watching an afternoon soap opera. Harvey the dog had come in through his doggie-door and was sitting beside E.T., hoping in dumb-doggie fashion that the monster would give him further instructions in the ways of space-time, and some of his sandwich.
On the TV screen, the soap-hero had just bent the soap-heroine over, and was presenting her with a passionate kiss.
E.T. looked at Harvey.
Harvey gave a low, cowering whine.
The besotted old monster reached out, embraced the muddled mongrel, and placed a kiss upon his snout.