When Tyler arrived for Dungeons & Dragons, he was greeted by the strange spectacle of Elliott in the kitchen with Gertie, slaving over her little Betty Crocker play stove. Elliott was wearing an apron and had a tiny muffin tin in his hand.
“Hey, you crackin’ up?” Tyler leaned his lanky, prematurely tall frame against the edge of the door. He was all legs and arms, and Elliott took this opportunity to call him Plastic Man, a name Tyler was sensitive about, conveying as it did his worst fear, that he might grow up to be seven feet tall.
“Whataya makin’, Elliott?” Tyler hunched over the little stove, where Gertie was puttering in ecstasy, her enslaved brother mixing up some dirt and water. “Looks like a hash brownie.”
“Get lost, will you, Tyler?” Elliott wiped his hands on the flowered apron.
“Yeah, well, we’ve got a D&D game on for tonight, remember?”
“He’s playing with me,” said Gertie, “for the rest of his life.”
The back door opened and Greg the Ork entered, in his dayglo shirt that made him look like a melting neon Popsicle, an impression heightened by the fact that he drooled when speaking. “Hey, what’s goin’ on here?”
“Nothing, Dribble Lips,” hissed Elliott from his muffin mix.
“Elliott and I,” sang Gertie, “are making dragon pies.”
Greg swung a chair around and sat on it, smiling crookedly, saliva spraying as he spoke. “Whadja, abuse her or somethin’?”
“Low, Greg,” said Tyler, “very low.”
Greg dribbled on the back of the chair. “I’ve seen everything now.” He stared at Elliott, who, so far as he knew, had been like every other brother in the world, taking pleasure in playing with his sister only when the game was interesting—for example, tickling her until she nearly had a nervous breakdown, a game he often enjoyed with his own sister. Or tying her to a tree and then tickling her. Or crashing into the bathroom with four or five other guys while she was taking a bath, and then standing around laughing while she screamed. Those were the right games. But this? Thoughtful drops of spittle ran off Greg’s lower lip, onto his neon shirt.
The last member of the Dungeons & Dragons team showed at the kitchen window: Steve, wearing a baseball hat with fat, floppy wings sticking out from it. He put his fingers behind the wings and wiggled them. Following this debonair greeting, he entered.
“Don’t say anything,” snarled Elliott, as he slipped his muffins in the little oven.
“What can I say?” Steve wiggled his hat-wings again. “These things happen.” His own sister had blackmailed him. You had to be on your guard, keep doors locked, lights off. You had to be cautious.
“Elliott and I run a little bake shop,” said Gertie, singing over her filthy pastries. “And everybody buys our cookies, even Santa Claus.” She turned the knobs on the oven and closed the door. Then she looked at Elliott and let her impish secret play in her eyes, about the monster upstairs. Elliott winced and started another batch of muck muffins.
C H A P T E R
7
In the night, the extraterrestrial looked up from his pillows to see Elliott climbing out the bedroom window, onto the tiled roof.
Where was the boy going?
The space traveler gazed from his own little window, as Elliott crossed the slanted roof and then scampered down the stairs leading from it to the garden. In another moment he was out of sight.
The old star-rover monitored the boy’s path telepathically: Elliott was climbing into the hills beyond the house. Did he go to get food for his friend in the closet?
No, the boy was creeping onto the dread fire road, where all troubles begin.
The extraterrestrial’s delicate mind-antennae twitched spasmodically, for across the night he could feel—the clicking of teeth on the ring of terrible trophy.
Elliott was not alone on the fire road.
Another was there, searching in the shadows. Searching for whom?
Could there be any doubt?
He felt the heavy footsteps, felt the cold, staring eyes of the Earthman, a gaze that pierced the night with its own telepathy.
The aged space traveler switched off his mind-radar and huddled in the closet. They were after him, with their blinding lights. They were up there in the hills, covering every inch of it, their own mental radar telling them—the extraterrestrial is hereabouts, and we shall find him.
And stuff him.
Under glass.
He reached for an Oreo cookie and chewed it nervously. They must never find him. But they were so near. And Elliott was up there, spying on them. What if he was caught? Could he be made to reveal what he knew about a certain oddly shaped guest in his closet?
He turned toward his geranium and gave it a pleading glance. The plant turned on its stem, faced him. Its tight buds unfolded and it bloomed all at once in a burst of brilliant red flowers.
Then it sighed, nearly expiring from the tremendous effort, but the space-botanist stroked it with his long fingertip and murmured softly. His cosmic speech, the quintessence of experience on innumerable worlds, renewed the plant, and stabilized it in its glorious blossoming.
Your voice is purest gro-formula, Ancient Master, said the geranium.
Yes, but it isn’t English.
The aged voyager scratched his head. English was what he needed, in order to get about better and make his wishes known.
Gertie had brought him her ABC book. He took it in his lap and slowly traced the letters M . . . and . . . M.
Elliott lay in the brush by the side of the fire road and watched the government agents pass, their lights sweeping in all directions. If they spotted him, he’d just say he was out walking his dog.
Harvey crouched beside him, shivering nervously. The animal had an uncontrollable urge to rush out and bite the man with the keys. Anyone with that many keys, Harvey felt, should be bitten.
“There’s nothing here tonight,” said one of the agents.
“I know. But I still have the feeling we’re being watched.” The man with the keys swept his light along the edge of the road. “But by whom?”
By a half-starved dog, said Harvey to himself, and wondered if emergency Milk-Bone rations might be present in one of the vehicles parked on the fire road. He tried to edge forward, but Elliott held him down.
“Cool it, Harvey . . .” whispered Elliott, and backed off into the deeper shadows. In another minute he was sliding silently down the sandy hillside, Harvey rolling along beside him.
The night was lit with a billion stars, and Elliott knew he had one of the great secrets of the night, hidden in his room. He would never sell that secret, never surrender it, not even if they caught him and tortured him.
Harvey, for his part, would sell out for a single Milk-Bone, but nobody was asking him. He pawed along, trying to formulate a plan.
“Harvey,” said Elliott quietly, “we have a great treasure with us. Do you know that?”
Harvey stared down at the passing sidewalk. All he knew was that there wasn’t enough dog food in the world.
“I love him, Harvey. He’s the best little guy I ever met.” Elliott looked up at the stars and tried to imagine which one belonged to his new friend.
They all belong to him, said a whisper from the moonlight.
Harvey’s ears perked up.
Did I hear someone? Rustling a bag of kibble?
He looked around, but the street was empty.
Mary woke to a noise on the roof. She removed her herbal eyepads and sat up.
But the sound had already ceased and the house was still again. She went to the window and looked out. The garden was empty, except for Harvey, who was furiously digging a hole.
She drew the shade on the demented dog, and returned to her bed. Something strange was going on, she knew it. But what? What were her children up to?
She smoothed out her pillow and embraced it sleepily. The dream she’d been having returned to her. She’d been dancing, how nice . . .
. . . wit
h someone who only came up to her navel. Her eyelids fell; the strange music began again—an odd, alien sound, with squiggles and bleeps—and she felt herself going around once more, her partner out of sight below, nose pressed to her stomach.
“We’ve got to tell, Elliott. It’s too serious.”
“No, he wants to stay with us.”
The two brothers were walking toward the school-bus stop. Michael was upset. His world had been turned upside down. Weird ideas kept moving through his head, about satellite paths and the surface of Mercury, instead of end runs and quarterback-sneaks, the important things in life. “He’s a man from outer space, Elliott. We don’t know what he’s gonna do or why he’s here. We could wake up and all be on Mars or something, surrounded by millions of these squashy guys.”
Elliott wasn’t listening; a new figure on the morning street had caught his eye. “That’s not our regular milkman, is it?”
“He must be on vacation, that’s some other guy.”
“Michael, listen, there are people in this neighborhood, people who’ve never been here before. Look at that car up there, with a man sitting in it, reading a newspaper. They’re looking for him.”
“They? Who are they?”
“They’re all around. They’re up in the hills.”
“You’d better figure something out pretty soon, Elliott, before they close in on us.”
“He needs time to plan his strategy.”
“Maybe he’s not that smart, maybe he’s like a worker bee who only knows how to push buttons or something.”
“Michael, he’s—he’s so far ahead of us, you can’t imagine.”
“Yeah, then why is he living in our closet?”
“He had bad luck. But we’re gonna change it.”
“Elliott, you and I are just a pair of dumb kids, can’t you understand that? If anybody helps him, it should be trained scientists or something. Guys with—with smarts. They could test him, feed him better.”
“We’re feeding him okay.”
“Oreo cookies, Elliott. What kind of diet is that? Maybe you’re killing him and don’t know it.”
Elliott’s face grew tense, his voice strained. “Michael, if we turn him over to anybody else, he’ll never get back to his home. I know that for sure.”
“How, Elliott? How do you know?”
“I feel it, like it was burned into me. It comes to me over and over. That he chose us ’cause we’re the only ones who could help him.”
“But why us? We’re nobody. We don’t have any money, we don’t have any ideas. We don’t even have a father.”
“None of that matters. He knows. We’re the ones to—to put it together for him.”
“Put what together?”
“Something. Something . . .” Elliott fumbled, as if he were just waking up from a dream he should remember but couldn’t, a dream the space creature had sent him, a picture of what he needed. But the picture had already faded, and the bus stop was just ahead.
Tyler, Steve, and Greg were there, needling each other as they waited, and needling Elliott as he approached. “Hey, Elliott, how’s the bake shop today? Make any fruit pies?”
“Kiss off, Tyler.”
Greg sprayed Elliott with some advice about Gertie, spittle shining on his habitually twisted lip. It was thoughtful, sound advice. “Stuff her in the clothes hamper.”
Steve wiggled his wings. “Say, Elliott, I forgot to ask—what ever happened to your goblin? Did he come back?”
The strain of Gertie’s dolly games, of playing jacks and potsy, of baking an endless variety of topsoil tarts, had taken its toll on Elliott’s spirit. He blurted out, “Yeah, he came back. And he wasn’t a goblin. He was a spaceman.”
“What, who’s a spaceman?” A small red-haired boy pushed forward, speaking in a loud, nasal voice. “You know how long it takes to get from Earth to Uranus?”
“Up your anus, Lance,” said Elliott, already regretting his slip. Lance’s ratlike gaze was bright, and he seemed to sense that something important was up.
The school bus pulled in to the curb and the boys climbed on, past a new driver. “Hey, what happened to George?”
“He’s sick,” said the new driver, whom none of the children had seen before.
Gertie had no nursery school today. She was supposed to, but she’d pretended to be sick and gotten the janitor to drive her home, where she could play in peace with the monster.
Because Elliott was keeping the monster all to himself.
She got out her wagon and started putting toys in it, which she knew the monster would like. She hoped he would stay with them forever and marry Mommy.
She pulled the wagon down the hall into Elliott’s room, opened the closet door, and went in. The monster looked up and rolled his eyes. Gertie rolled her eyes, giggling, and sat down beside him, with her wagon. “Are you a big toy?” She looked him up and down. “Well, if you’re not a big toy, what are you?”
He backed into the corner of the closet and seemed kind of scared. She wasn’t scared at all, not anymore, because last night she dreamt the monster had taken her to a beautiful place far away in the stars. He’d taken her hand and shown her wonderful flowers, and strange little birds had landed on his head, singing to him, and there’d been lovely light all around.
Now she took his hand. “Don’t be scared,” she said. “It’s just like in the dream.” She stroked his hand, petting it the way she petted Harvey. “Elliott and I are taking care of you, so you don’t have anything to worry about, even if you are a great big toy. Here are all my dolls in the wagon, see? Don’t they have nice hair? You don’t have any hair, do you know that?”
The extraterrestrial gazed at the chattering child, and though she was better company than Harvey, how could such children really ever help him to reach his people? They could hide him, yes, for a while. But he needed high technology, not a wagonful of dolls.
“. . . and here’s my rolling pin and this is my cowgirl vest, isn’t it pretty? And this is my Speak and Spell. Did you ever play with one of these?”
The elderly alien took the bright rectangular box into his long fingers. His mind leapt suddenly into higher focus, and his heart-light fluttered.
“It teaches you to spell,” said Gertie. “See . . .”
She pressed a button on the box, a button marked A. The Speak and Spell spoke to Gertie. It said, quite clearly, in a man’s voice, “A . . .”
She pressed the B button and it said, “B . . .”
The old voyager pressed the M button and heard, “M . . .”
“Now you watch this,” said Gertie, and pressed a button marked Go.
The box spoke. “Spell ‘mechanic.’ ”
Gertie pressed buttons, but her spelling wasn’t all that good yet. The box said, “No. Wrong. Try again.”
She tried again. The box said, “That is incorrect. The correct spelling is M-E-C-H-A-N-I-C.”
The space-being stared at the instrument, eyes flashing. Yes, it would teach him to speak an Earth language. But more important, far more important—in fact, the most important thing of all things in the universe at that moment—it was a computer.
His mind-scan was already inside it, racing over the microprocessor, the speech synthesizer, the memory chips.
“Hey, you okay?” Gertie touched the ancient creature, whose hands were trembling.
He nodded at the child, but his gaze remained fixed on the precious instrument, while his brain raced, sending solutions, alternate solutions, paths and bypaths to freedom—all of them born from this little box.
Gertie pressed buttons again.
“Spell ‘nuisance,’ ” said the box.
She engaged in some incorrect spelling, and the senior scientist watched her play, and waited until she grew tired.
“Well, Mr. Monster, that’s your spelling lesson for today. I’ll be back.”
The child skipped out. The monster flipped the box over in his lap, and removed its back.
Wond
er of wonders . . .
He caressed the circuits.
Here was the heart of his transmitter.
He munched an Oreo and began. A radiant schematic of the Speak and Spell appeared in his mind as he gazed, its secrets becoming his own. Stored information, and the methods of storage, were child’s play to an old space-hound like himself. Computers were familiar friends. Fancy finding one that spoke!
“Spell ‘mechanic’ . . .”
His ear-flap opened and he listened intently to the machine, his mind quickly grasping the phonemes on which the language was built.
“Spell ‘nuisance’ . . .”
His own circuits buzzed, assimilating, synthesizing. A glaze came over his eyes as his mind shifted into higher learning bands. On other planets—dead planets, lost planets—he had studied the tablets of ancient tongues, eventually mastering them. Here in his lap, now, was such a tablet—the Speak and Spell of Earth, the electronic stone by which he could master the signs and sounds of this planet.
“Spell ‘refrigerator’ . . .”
The subtle radiance of the word appeared on his inner scan, and he saw the object mentioned, saw a refrigerator, the place where milk and cookies were kept.
“Re-frigg-errr-a-tor . . .” His mouth wrapped itself around the word and the concept, simultaneously. His stomach seemed to speak and understand too, all his inner coordinates firing around this precious sound.
Thus inspired, the language center of his marvelous brain came fully on, a thousand stored tongues reappearing, as reference and cross-reference took place, so that Earth’s language could be viewed in the round. He grasped its fundamentals, and then its delicate edges.
“Can-dy . . . cake . . .”
Soon he would have a complete working vocabulary, one that would allow him to function anywhere in society, and say the important things.
“Ice . . . cream . . .”
He pressed the machine’s button, again and again. Truly, it was a friendly device, both teacher and companion. But it was more than that.
For, speaking Earth language already, this machine with a computer inside it could be made to speak yet another language. It would be his own language, and he would broadcast it to the stars.