Elliott turned to Peggy Jean, bent her backward over the desk, and placed a passionate kiss upon her lips.
The teacher went berserk, with some justification, for now Elliott was running from bottle to bottle, releasing the popeyed prisoners, who did not hesitate to vacate the premises at once, hopping along the floor and out the door.
“Heal!” cried Elliott, quite out of his mind by now, and speaking biblically. Perhaps he was tuning in to other waves, from special-interest TV channels. In any case, he was running through the classroom, shouting, “Out, you poison demons, in the name of God!” Which advice the last lingering frogs took, by catapulting leaps to the windowsill.
Tyler stretched his long legs under the worktable and shook his head sadly. For the first time since he’d known Elliott, he sort of felt sorry for him; Elliott had changed, wasn’t a stingy little rat like he used to be. In fact, he was almost a good guy. Except he was flipping out. “Sir, sir,” said Tyler, trying to divert the teacher from Elliott, “a frog just hopped in your lunch bag.”
The teacher swerved from his course, grabbed the bag, and shook it, spilling out his sandwich, the contents falling into a formaldehyde solution, ham and cheese sinking down, instantly pickled. No frog was visible. The last one was being assisted off the windowsill at the back of the room, by Greg, who was foaming at the mouth with excitement. The frog sailed through the air, followed by a perfect floating spit-bubble, radiant in the sunlight.
Elliott was dragged from the room by the enraged teacher. Steve took out his winged hat, put it on, and wiggled the wings. “Suspension for sure,” he said, and gave more deep thought to the things that could happen to you when your kid sister got in control of your life.
The real control behind Elliott’s fit of madness was just now drunkenly switching channels on the TV set. E.T., plastered out of his mind, settled back into the living room chair, his short legs sticking straight off the end of the cushion. The news came on, spoiling the afternoon with an account of a mine cave-in.
“. . . the south tunnel collapsed,” a dust-covered rescuer was saying into a microphone. “I think we have everyone out, but these men are in critical condition.”
A closeup of the injured miners was flashed to the afternoon world. In his easy chair, the tipsy little goblin lifted his finger. It began glowing pink.
The injured men leapt off their stretchers. They threw their arms around each other, crying with amazement as they held up their healed arms and legs.
The spaceman opened another bottle of beer.
Elliott’s teacher dragged him down the hall, fed up with his behavior. A biology teacher’s life is no bed of roses; the hordes of pimply adolescents he dealt with each day had pretty much shattered his nerves; on occasion, he’d thought of putting his own head in the ether. Certainly he would have liked to put Elliott’s in the solution. Fighting down this homicidal urge, he settled for turning Elliott over to the principal, with hopes that the principal would flog him, or have him flogged. Of course, such things are not done in a modern school system, and the trembling, broken biology teacher reeled out of the principal’s office, feeling that ultimately the children would win, sacrificing him on his own lab table, with cotton wads up his nose and a red incision down his torso.
Within the principal’s office, moderation, as indicated above, was being practiced. The principal, a forward-thinking educator, took out his briar pipe, lit it, and attempted to produce an atmosphere of mutual confidence. “Tell me what it is, son. Pot? Quaaludes? Angel wings?”
He extinguished his match and puffed gently. “Your generation, my boy, is going to hell in a hand-basket. You have to take responsibility for your life . . .”
The principal was off and running; he enjoyed the sound of his own voice as much as the next person, and the fact of a completely captive audience, Elliott, who dared not move, was reassuring to him. He flogged the boy with clichés, strings of them, taken from television, newspapers, boring professional journals, and the sparkling shallows of his own mind. “. . . understand that in this day and age, one must pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps . . .”
His pipe sent out contented little puffs. The world was firmly in place. Rebellious youth would soon see that it did no good to rock the boat. “. . . you can’t fight the system, son, it doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t make sense . . .” He pointed with his pipestem for emphasis. His predecessor in the office had been a sexual offender, retired early after several private incidents in the supply closet became public. He’d rocked the boat. The office of principal now, however, was stable; a predictable atmosphere prevailed. The pillars of education were unshakable; the earth had been tamed. The system would prevail.
Except that Elliott had started to float out of his chair.
It was E.T.’s fault, of course. His drunken wave-length was still acting up, bouncing around the principal’s office, and finally, as seen now, buoying poor Elliott upward like a loose cork.
Elliott gripped the arms of his chair with all his might and forced himself back down; the principal didn’t notice, thought the boy was merely squirming.
“. . . this fairy-tale approach to life you and your friends have is costing you valuable time. Do you see what I’m driving at?” He went on jawing, oblivious of Elliott, captivated by his own drone. “. . . the world is a known quantity, son. Stop looking in the cobwebs. Stop daydreaming about things that don’t exist. This, I think, is the root of all your problems.”
The root of Elliott’s problems was that he was being uprooted from the gravitation of Earth. The tipsy wave was under his bottom again, playfully bearing him upward with a force that now broke Elliott’s grip on the chair. Without further notice, he floated up to the ceiling of the principal’s office.
The principal was cleaning his glasses, gaze averted as he held the lenses to the light and droned on. “. . . predictable behavior, my boy. Do you know what tremendous advances have been made because mankind found that matter behaved in predictable ways?”
He looked toward Elliott’s chair.
Elliott was not there.
He was floating at the ceiling, a fact discerned a moment later by the principal, whose eyeballs grew considerably more convex at the discovery. He pressed back deeply into his swivel chair, tightened fingers popping a lens out of his glasses. A lifetime of clichés seemed to be raining over him in a shower of tinkling noises, as if a skylight had collapsed on his head. His nose was swelling—perhaps it was going to bleed—and his mind felt like a sock suddenly turned inside out. He signaled for silence, but no one was speaking. It was just a boy, floating on the ceiling that made his ears ring as if anvils were going off in them, as if multitudes were shouting, as if a train had just passed over him, wheels clickety-clacking.
He collapsed deeper into his chair and, like Harvey the dog, a whining noise escaped his lips.
Elliott slowly descended into his chair once more.
“May I go now, sir?”
“Yes, yes, please go . . .” The principal waved him away, and swiveled slowly toward the window where the sunlight danced. Then he swiveled back, opened his Confiscated Drugs drawer and swallowed a handful of Quaaludes.
Back at its source, the drunken wave was strongest, as the soused old space-being flapped about the house. He’d finished the sixpack of beer; to a resident of Earth, it was not a great deal of alcohol to have running around in one’s system. To this sawed-off, finely tuned, ages-old, innocent creature of the sky, it was like a ton of bricks.
Bumping into things, overturning others, he bumbled around from room to room, Harvey the dog following faithfully.
Harvey himself was in bad shape, owing to his own telepathy; his normally bouncing dogtrot was now a half-loaded stagger, and the poor beast slid under a chair, crawled out with effort, and then fell splay-legged under the sofa.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked the old monster. “Can’t you walk straight? Walk like me . . .” E.T. demonstrated, rolli
ng over the hassock.
Dogs generally enjoy foolish behavior, but Harvey was seeing little soup bones floating all around him, along with spaceships labeled Ken-L Ration blinking on and off; he bit at them, only to find, to his frustration that they were not there.
E.T. rolled back and forth on the hassock awhile, then pushed off and tried a few disco steps Gertie had taught him, as he sang, “Accidents will happennnnn . . .”
He sang on key but he did something to the tone values, so that radiant over-echoes filled the air. Harvey whimpered, hearing great long caverns of stone, hewn in far-off worlds where little monsters came and went.
“. . . but it’s only rocks and rolling . . .”
The monster swayed, attempting to Hustle his bowling ball of a stomach. This bizarre display of dancing prowess might have gone on longer, except for Mary returning home. She came through the front door, leafed through a magazine at the mail table, then stepped toward the kitchen.
The aged space-hero decided the time had come for presenting his love to her. He could hear her, feel her every thought-wave; she was ready for a mature creature like himself.
He stepped into the hallway.
Harvey, though being bombarded by strange dreams himself, knew this was madness.
He leapt after E.T., just as Mary turned their way. The dog went up on his hind legs in front of the monster, and sat begging, tongue out, straining every part of his dog’s-body to block the space monster from Mary’s view.
As stated previously, E.T. was not an overlarge being, about the height of an umbrella stand, and Harvey was able to cover this much with his own pawing, begging, tongue-out form.
“Why, Harvey,” said Mary, “I didn’t know you could beg so well. Did Elliott teach you that?”
The dog nodded.
“But I don’t feed you till later, Harvey, you know that.” Mary walked off, back down the hall and out the door to her garden.
Harvey collapsed from his excruciating beg-posture; never one to overexert mind or body, he had not fully enjoyed his performance. He looked at the old space monster.
The old monster looked at him, and looked past him, toward the door to the garden. E.T. had decided it was senseless to hide his wisdom from Mary, and that now was the hour to win her with song, story, and cosmic finger signals of the more intimate kind.
He pushed Harvey aside.
The dog up-gravitied and came down two steps to the right, just as Mary came back in with an armful of flowers.
Harvey leaped in front of E.T., and whipped his tail with much force. E.T. had one foot off the floor, eager to go forward; off balance in this way, and half crocked or more, he was knocked across the hall by the swiping tail, and through an open doorway.
Harvey again assumed the beg-posture, knees killing him, but holding it anyway, as Mary stopped, covered in blossoms and seeing nothing.
“Harvey, you’re certainly active today.” She turned and looked at him. “Did Michael put speed in your Alpo?”
The dog nodded.
Mary continued on by, and set the flowers on the kitchen table, where she picked up an armload of dry-cleaning, swiveled it over her shoulder and headed for the stairs. Did I see that dog nod?
E.T. struggled to his feet, bracing himself against a chair. He seemed to be bouncing all around the house, getting nowhere. It was worse than navigating an asteroid belt. He swayed, took a deep breath, and resumed his advance.
For who knew? Today might be his last day on Earth. If gravity kept buckling his knees, he wouldn’t last till nightfall. He mustn’t die without telling her of his deep affection for her.
He struggled back into the hallway and headed for the stairs. Harvey bounded alongside him, tongue out, nervous little growls coming out of him as his tail played along the bannister rungs, platta-ta, platta-ta-plat.
Mary had entered the bedroom, and was in the first stages of preparation for her much-loved afternoon shower. In this warm interlude, she slowly regrouped her forces in order to hold the world at bay for one more day.
At such a sacred hour, would she want an extraterrestrial in the shower with her? Standing ankle-deep on duck feet and staring up at her with bulging and beseeching eyes?
It wasn’t likely. But its probability was rapidly increasing, as E.T. mounted the stairs, once again humming, “. . . it’s only rocks and rolling . . .”
Mary was spared this musical offering, as the faucets in the shower were now on. It took several minutes for the hot water to gyrate itself out of the boiler, and during these few moments she began to undress.
E.T. was just passing Mary’s bedroom. He looked in and the plants keeled over, limp, possibly loaded, certainly confused. What was the ancient flower-master doing? The plants felt a vibration like the legendary swarms of bees from Venus, swarming from the ancient master’s brain.
He continued down the hall toward the bathroom, vibrations of bee-sound preceding him, its point headed for the bathroom door.
Harvey cowered down, paws over his snout, as he was not allowed in the bathroom, ever since eating the bath mat. But the slamming bathroom door, the click of its lock, relieved the poor beast’s anxiety.
E.T. stopped in the hallway outside it; the bee-squadron of Venus circled once, signaled with a brilliant light, and departed in a blur.
The elderly voyager shuffled back to his closet and fell onto the pillows, unconscious.
Keys did not know that he was already strangling his prize, that the array of elegant medical machinery in his warehouse had been sensed by E.T.’s telepathic beam, and that the signal filled the little being with heaviness. E.T. could not tell precisely what the signal meant, this varied pattern of light, this network of probes that kept assaulting his peripheral consciousness. But it had thrown him into melancholy, into depression, his body filling with a thousand vague anxieties, which his drinking bout did not dispel. Even as he lay in his closet, sprawled out, unable to lift his head, he could feel mechanical arms reaching out toward him, embracing him, holding him fast. He slept fitfully, with terrible visions troubling his dreams.
The source of these dark visions, a certain nearby warehouse, pulsed with its accelerating mission. Keys was exuberant, buoyed up by a vision of approaching triumph. His crew swirled around him in a kind of exultation; an important moment for Earth was approaching. Keys knew how important, for he had somehow touched the telepathic field of the civilization that had created and manned the Ship. Marvelous dreams had come to him, far outstripping anything of his childhood—and a strange love had grown in him, love for this beautiful intelligence that had flirted with Earth.
His team was in readiness, the countdown clicking. But all of this activity was somehow veiled by the continuous sensation he now had, of being with the Ship and its crew. Their power was a constant thought-wave flickering over him, monitoring him. He felt they would not find him wanting in compassion, or preparation. He had done everything he could to protect their stranded crewmate.
His fleet of vehicles gleamed, and where the doors were open, one could see the interiors gleaming too—readouts flashing, needles dancing, complex circuitry glowing.
He was bringing this to the lost creature from space, as an offering.
Elliott returned home, Lance the nerd at his side. “What happened to you in biology class, Elliott? You went crazy today, do you know that?”
“I know it.”
“Bizarre behavior, Elliott. Don’t you think it’s uncool to draw attention to yourself—at this time?” The nerd gave Elliott a significant stare, like a mouse looking left and right after eating through a block of cheese.
Elliott stared back at him, and again resisted the impulse to kick Lance in the pants—for, as before, the nerd’s squinty eyes were reflecting E.T.’s own eyes, tiny lights going off deep inside them.
Elliott sighed and walked toward the stairs, Lance following close behind him, like a persistent wad of gum on the sole of your shoe. “But I have to admit you gave it to th
at bio-creepo, Elliott. The kids from the class after ours said they came in and found him wiped out in his own ether. You know how ether-heads get, all out of synch, stumbling around? That’s how he was . . .”
They entered Elliott’s room, picked their way through the debris, and opened the closet, where they found E.T. on the pillows, toes in the air.
Lance was aghast. “You just leave him alone like this? Are you nuts? This is the most valuable thing in the world, anybody could break in here and kidnap him, or he could hurt himself or anything.”
Elliott lifted the old voyager up from the pillow. “He’s loaded.”
E.T. opened his eyes. “Spell sixpack.”
“You’ve had enough, E.T.”
The ancient pilgrim from the stars made some cosmic finger signals, rotated his eyes, and hiccupped. Lance continued, appalled, “What do you want to hide him for, anyway? Do you know how many people pay good money to see KISS, for Pete’s sake? He’s bigger than KISS, he’s bigger than the New York Yankees! Elliott, you have a gold mine here. Take him on the road.”
Lance gestured, to show he had all the qualities it took to be a manager. His cowlick, glowing red, gave him the appearance of someone whose scalp had been elongated by a narrow escape from a cheese-loaded spring-trap; a big promoter would have had him thrown down the backstairs with the trash. But, being a nerd, he didn’t know that. Nerdishly he pressed on. “You, me, and E.T. We’ll make it legal.”
Elliott kept E.T. upright, but the timeless traveler kept swaying back and forth. “Spell headache, Elliott.”
“He’s hung over,” moaned Lance. “Elliott, you need a handler in here. You don’t know the first thing about taking care of an extraterrestrial.”
Elliott continued bracing E.T., but felt the heaviness in the old creature’s body—a strange heaviness, a deep heaviness, unlike anything he’d ever handled.
“E.T.” He shook the extraterrestrial, and E.T. turned his eyes upon him, but they held visions of the cosmos such as Elliott had never seen, not in all the weeks E.T. had been with him. They were the farthest-out signals imaginable. They hit Elliott all over the body, and the heaviness became his own.