“No, you didn’t.”
“I don’t want to be a tough guy, but there’s a man on the block right now, knocking on doors, asking a lot of questions about ‘did anybody see anything strange in the neighborhood . . .’ ”
“So?”
“So I could walk right up to him now and tell him all I know. And I know a lot.” Lance gazed at Elliott, his Swiss-cheese complexion glowing. He was not a bad person, just a born creep. They always seem to show up on days when people are feeling bad, and make them feel worse. “Or I could dummy up. It’s your choice.”
Elliott sighed, and Lance knew it was surrender. He began to babble. “Where did you find him, Elliott? Do you know where he came from, or what race he is? Is he from our solar system? Does he talk? Has he got any super powers?”
Michael interrupted, “You tell anyone and he’ll disintegrate you, you’ll just spin around into nothing.”
“Can he do that? Really? Has he done it already?”
Elliott walked to the closet, opened it, and stepped in.
The aged monster stared in confusion, for he’d heard Lance’s familiar voice, and his mind-probe did not fail him this time. A threatening presence had arrived.
“He’s a nerd,” said Elliott. “But he won’t hurt you. I promise.”
E.T. covered his face and shook his head. It was no longer Halloween. His face was not something that could just be shown casually to people.
He was saved by the bell—the doorbell. Elliott and Michael both felt it go off in their nerves, like a wire suddenly growing hot. Elliott backed out of the closet, just in time to see Michael sneaking into the hallway.
The older brother went softly along the hall carpet, then descended silently to the first landing of the stairwell, where he could eyeball the situation below.
The situation had brought Mary from behind the sofa, where she’d found a lifetime supply of spitballs and a magazine that seemed to be devoted to the sex practices of voluptuous space nymphs.
My babies, she thought wearily, my innocent little lost boys.
She walked toward the insistent doorbell, knowing for certain that it would not be someone tall, dark, and devastating.
She opened it.
He was tall, dark, and devastating.
But—he was crazy.
“. . . investigating rumors of unidentified flying objects . . .”
She stared at the ring of keys hanging from his belt. He certainly had a great many doors to open in life, whoever he was.
Then he showed her what appeared to be a government badge. But couldn’t he have gotten it from a cereal box or something?
“I’m sorry,” she stammered, “but I don’t understand . . .”
“Not far from here, a UFO put down. We have reason to believe one of its crew was stranded . . .”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I assure you—” his eyes penetrated her own “—I’m not.”
She gazed back, in wonder. Here she was, divorced, with three kids to support, lonely, frustrated, and thinking of taking dance lessons—when to her door comes an attractive man, possibly single, and looking for flying saucers.
She slumped, just slightly, and fingered her dust-cloth. “Well, I haven’t seen anything.”
He stared at her, then shifted his gaze beyond her, into the house, as if he already knew a great deal about it, and her, and was just finalizing some elaborate plan. If he tried to push past her, she’d brain him with the dust mop, then nurse him back to health.
But now he was apologizing for bothering her, and backing down the steps. She watched him go along the sidewalk, and wondered if he’d read too many comic books as a child. Or had he taken a bad fall?
Then she noticed a sleek, government-style car pulling in to the curbstone alongside him. The driver gave him a sort of salute, and the man climbed in, joining some other men in the back seat.
Had they all taken a bad fall?
She stepped away from the hall window, and resumed her intimate relationship with the dust mop. Maybe she had misjudged the caller. Maybe he was a serious person, with a serious mission.
Yeah, sure, and there’s a spaceman in the closet.
She opened it, arranged the scattered overshoes, coats, hats, gloves. The umbrella was still missing. She knew Michael and Elliott had taken it; she just hoped it wasn’t being used for anything pornographic.
Michael snuck back into Elliott’s room. “He’s an investigator. He showed Mom a badge. He says there have been UFOs . . .”
Lance bounced up and down, as if upon springs. “Did you see a UFO? You must be the luckiest person in the world.”
Elliott interrupted. “Did she tell him anything?”
“No.”
“Does he know about the communicator?”
Lance bounced some more. “That’s what it is! Did he bring it from some other world? Is it like a real future machine?”
“He made it out of bobby pins.”
“Bobby pins?” Lance fumbled with this momentarily, then pressed on, as a nerd will. “Is he trying to reach his planet? Oh, God, Elliott, are they going to land? Where? When?” Then, feeling that he was losing position, he renewed his threat. “Show me the E.T. right now, or I’ll run after the guy with the badge. I mean it.”
“Do you know that you suck?”
“I can’t help myself.”
Elliott, knowing he had to do it, opened the door. The monster stepped forth, calm once more, lost in his own thoughts and munching an Oreo. He looked at the nerd.
Lance’s hands dropped limply to his sides. The blood ran completely out of his cheeks, leaving them the color of white American cheese still wrapped in plastic. A variety of beeping noises sounded behind his brow, the same sounds he’d heard on his moonlight ride. “I could die today,” he said in a whisper, “and go to heaven.”
“You might,” said Michael. “You’re going to make a blood oath.”
“Anything,” said Lance, hardly knowing or caring about Michael, Elliott, or the world. Because here before him was the most incredible being on earth. “I’ve . . . dreamt . . . about you . . .” said Lance, softly, “. . . all my life . . .”
Michael grabbed Lance by the wrist. “Say after me: I swear I will never tell a living soul what I have seen today.”
Michael’s pocket knife cut into his own finger, and into Lance’s, as Lance muttered, “I swear . . .”
Blood flowed from their fingers, and Michael pressed them together. The cosmic voyager, watching in puzzlement, raised his own finger, which began glowing pink.
“No,” said Elliott, “don’t.”
It was too late. The pinkish glow spread outward, touching Michael and Lance. The cuts in their fingers stopped bleeding, the skin fused back together, and the wounds were healed without a trace.
C H A P T E R
1 1
Everyone on his staff called him Keys. He had a name, but his keys were his real signature: keys to an ordinary looking warehouse with a lot of extraordinary rooms inside, to which he also held the keys.
He stood in one of these rooms now, in front of an operations map on which concentric circles were drawn, ever narrowing, to a single point.
He addressed his assistant, quietly, his eyes remaining on the map. “I heard some religious fanatics on the radio the other day. Talking about our sighting. They claim the Ship is a Satanic manifestation.”
The assistant drank black coffee, and continued working on the roster slip before him. It was a list of names, most of which had scientific credentials after them: doctors, biologists, laboratory specialists of every kind. “You know, don’t you, that once we bring these people into the act, your chances of looking like an idiot grow at an astonishing rate?”
“It’s time to bring them in,” said Keys, eyes still on the map, on the point that was Elliott’s house.
His assistant looked up from the roster. “But suppose the children are just imagining it all? Suppose what we
picked up on the snooper is just a kid’s game?”
“The Ship landed here.” Keys pointed at one of the outer circles. His finger came back along the inner circles. “We picked up conversation about a stranded crewmember here.” He put his finger on the dot that was Elliott’s house. “It’s too close to be a coincidence.”
Keys reached behind him and pressed the button of a tape recorder, and Elliott’s voice sounded on the tape:
“. . . from far away in space, Michael, from a place we can’t begin to understand. We’ve got to help him . . .”
Keys pressed the stop button and the operations room was quiet again. He’d felt the awesomeness of the Ship the night it landed, had seen its incredible approach on his tracking screen: an amazing power-package from the stars, sinking over the horizon. The Ship’s performance conformed to the pattern his agency was familiar with from other sightings. Only this time the Ship had been taken by surprise.
His assistant rose from the desk and joined him at the map. “All right,” he said, tapping the roster slip with his finger, “this is everyone you want. It reads like a Nobel Prize banquet.”
“Round them up.”
“Will you listen to me for just one second? Before we involve the scientific community?” The assistant turned to the map. “If a crewmember was left behind, it doesn’t seem likely he’d be hiding in somebody’s house.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s an alien being. He’d be handling himself guerrilla-style, out in the hills.” The assistant pointed to the terrain he thought likely to be sheltering whatever it was they’d been chasing. “You think they have no training in survival? You think the intelligence behind that ship never planned on such a contingency?”
“We caught them with their pants down,” said Keys, quietly.
“Maybe we did. But if you were an alien being, would you go knocking on doors in the nearby neighborhood?”
“He’s in that house,” said Keys.
“Let’s find that out for sure before we ring in this crowd.” The assistant tapped the roster again. “It’s going to be a three-ring circus once these people arrive. There’ll be no way to plug leaks. And if you’ve guessed wrong, if that house has nothing in it but a couple of goofy kids with a Space Invaders mentality, you are going to be out of a job. Because you will have spent about ten million bucks on a wild-goose chase. The government is cutting the budget, remember? We operate on the fringes.”
Keys pointed at the roster. “Round them up.”
The assistant sighed. “If you’re wrong, we can both look forward to careers gathering evidence for divorce courts. The motel unit of some sleazy private eye outfit . . .” He started to turn away, then turned back, pointing at the outermost circles of the map, the forests and hills. “Your man, if he’s anywhere, is up in these hills, eking out a marginal existence.”
“Robinson Crusoe, I suppose.”
“That’s right. Certainly not sitting in somebody’s kitchen having a milkshake.”
E.T. sat in the kitchen, sipping his milkshake through a straw. The straw, he felt, was one of the finest inventions on Earth, making drinking so much easier.
“You like that, E.T.?” asked Elliott, across from him at the table.
The alien being nodded, as the delicious liquid gurgled in his glass.
The roster was called up: a scattered group of specialists who had previously been investigated, given security clearance, and then asked to sign themselves on to a most peculiar standby group; this they did, some with amusement, some with scorn, all of them idly, never dreaming their expertise would someday actually be required. So it was with great surprise that each of them listened to a voice somewhere on the other end of the telephone line, and it was with a profound quiet that they finally laid the phone back into its cradle, staring at it and wondering who was crazy, they or the government.
C H A P T E R
1 2
In its hidden spot near the landing site, the communicator continued to send its constant signal, out, out, out, into space. It had no patent, it wasn’t licensed, and it looked like something you might find at a public dump. But as Elliott approached, he felt the energy that powered it, and knew this pile of spare parts had class.
Night had fallen, and he was alone with the thing. Its ratchet-wheel clicked faintly in the grass, like a kind of cricket, calling to another.
Elliott lay back in the grass and stared up at the star-filled sky. He lay for a long time, just a little punk kid with a head mostly filled with trash, but he had come to like starlight. At times the moon seemed to open out with a great yellow light and then a shimmering veil would flow between the stars. A soft voice would speak an unintelligible word—or was it just the wind?
He listened to the transmitter, to the code that was beyond him but went all through him anyway; the overturned umbrella shining with moonlight, shone into him.
Inside his head, he could hear Mary wondering where he was, what he was doing out so late, but he just switched her off and spread his arms in the grass. The stars worked their veils of light, subtle streams of loveliness, moving, hypnotizing him. He lay for hours, caught by forces he couldn’t resist, forces he was never supposed to have known, that no one on Earth was to have shared.
Elliott shivered, not from cold, but from the feelings that were starting to move through him. Cosmic loneliness had gotten into the marrow of his Earth-bones.
He moaned in the grass, under a heavy burden, for Earthlings weren’t ready for the hunger of the stars.
The voice whispered this to him, opening his youthful mind, wider, wider.
Still bound to their planet, Earthlings can’t deal with the ache of universal love, said the golden whisper echoing through the endless corridors.
Elliott stared at the night sky and seemed to go out of himself, into the starshine of old, so sweetly alluring yet whose secrets are hidden from men, and wisely so. He rolled on the grass, body buzzing with cool starfire. The message shot through his whole being—a message meant to be carried by a creature much more evolved than himself, a creature whose inner nature was such that it could love a star and be loved in return by the overwhelming solar force.
The music of the spheres devoured him, taking his meager little Earth-soul and overwhelming it with the ecstasy of the cosmos, against which Earthlings by birth are shielded.
He choked back a sob, climbed to his feet, staggered over to his bike. He couldn’t take it, couldn’t deal with the images that were starting to cascade over him, of space-time, of the unbearable, unthinkable curve.
He pedaled, reflectors turning, little moons at his feet, round and round, round and round. He bounced down the fire road, shaking in every limb.
Keys’ office had photos on all the walls; the caption beneath each photo identified the print as belonging to the Air Force. While some of the shots were merely blurs of light—beautiful streaks moving horizontally or vertically across the sky—others were clear enough to make a man believe, especially when the photographers happened to be Air Force reconnaissance pilots with a low margin for hallucination and none for darkroom hocus-pocus.
Upon Keys’ desk was a plaster cast of E.T.’s footprint, taken from the soft ground of the landing site. Beside it was a portfolio containing an analysis of the traces of fuel emission left at the site by the Ship.
Keys, therefore, was not some drunk in the moonlight, nor a frustrated zany, nor a professional hoaxer. He was a reasonably well-paid government employee who, at the moment, was on the telephone with a figure far above himself in the hierarchy, to whom he was giving his assurances that the agency he headed was about to earn its salary.
“It will take several more days . . . no, the delay is unavoidable . . . we’re following the original directive, that the specimen be given a complete life-support system . . .”
Keys listened, nodded, drummed his fingers, gave another assurance. “The area is under surveillance and no one, nothing, can get by us now .
. . yes, very good . . .”
He hung up the phone. It was night, during the last calm before the storm. He sipped his coffee. If he was wrong, if the net closed on nothing but air, he would most definitely be out of a job. But it would be a glorious couple of hours.
The door opened and his assistant entered. “The Quarantine and Contamination Unit is enormous. The entire house will have to be screened.”
“So?”
“So have you ever seen a plastic tent the size of a house? With tubes sticking out of it? We’re going to be the weirdest-looking sight in five counties, and about a million people are going to show up, I promise.”
“They won’t get through.”
Keys’ assistant looked down into the plaster print of E.T.’s foot. “Why don’t we just glide in, grab the spaceman, and vanish? A low-profile operation.”
“I might prefer it that way,” said Keys, “but that’s not the way they want it.” He pointed to the telephone.
“Sure, because they want to ride the publicity if the spaceman is there. But if he’s not—if we storm this neighborhood with the kind of equipment you’ve got here—” he tapped another sheaf of papers “—we are going to traumatize a lot of people. Who will sue the government. Bear it in mind.” The assistant turned and left.
Keys bore it in mind. But it was only in a corner of his mind. Because he knew the spaceman was there. He lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the ceiling, and tossed the dead match into E.T.’s plaster footprint.
Government vehicles rolled; a certain warehouse opened its doors, and uniformed attendants waved equipment into the voluminous depths of the building.
Keys checked it all, and checked in those whose job it was to reassemble and run the equipment. The interior of the warehouse started to resemble a military hospital.
E.T. opened the closet door and Elliott fell in, onto the pillows. His eyes were swollen, his lips trembling with star-words he couldn’t pronounce. He sat, sobbing to himself, as the aged guest looked on.
The space creature touched Elliott’s forehead. The gathered influence of the galaxies withdrew, whirling away, out to the denizens of deep space for whom it was intended. Elliott slouched down, sighing from the toes. In a few minutes he was asleep, in a cocoon through which the star-bane could not shine.