ET- Communicator Specs

His only error of the day was remaining in standby telepathy with Elliott. His full attention being on the Speak and Spell, he forgot about Elliott, but fine telepathic connections remained, and they gave Elliott a very difficult time, for Elliott was supposed to be cutting up a frog in biology class.

  The teacher was about to begin. But one of his students was receiving an incandescent message, concerning the schematic of a Speak and Spell.

  “We’re going to peel back the skin . . .” The teacher pointed to the tub of live frogs. “. . . and take a look inside.” He picked up one of the frogs and made a red line down its belly. “We’ll make our incision line—Elliott, just what do you think you’re doing?”

  The teacher stared down at Elliott’s lab report, which Elliott was furiously covering with diagrams of highly sophisticated electronic circuitry, his hand moving as if it were writing automatically, as if controlled by a ghost.

  The ghost, of course, was the extraterrestrial in Elliott’s closet, his mind overriding Elliott’s with the mysteries of digitized speech and programmable memory.

  But the teacher didn’t know this. His student, always something of a problem, was ignoring the lesson completely, was writing so feverishly that his brow was covered with sweat, and everyone in the room was suddenly watching him.

  “Elliott—”

  The boy wrote, right off the edge of the paper, onto the desk. His arm wrote in the air. He walked to the front of the room, snapped up the frog anatomy chart, and began writing in chalk on the blackboard.

  Tyler, Greg, and Steve stared in amazement. Tyler stretched his long legs out under the biology bench and tapped Greg on the ankle. Then he pointed at Elliott and made a whirling screw-loose sign with his finger near his head.

  Greg nodded, copious amounts of excited saliva collecting at the corner of his mouth, as he watched Elliott scribbling like a maniac on the board, weird diagrams flowing from his chalk like the insides of a radio or something. A nervous bubble formed on Greg’s lip; it was to blow such bubbles that he saved saliva. He had never succeeded in actually getting a bubble to float off his lip into the air, they always broke when he tried to blow them away, but a perfect specimen suddenly launched itself and sailed off toward the teacher, breaking on the back of his head.

  The teacher didn’t notice; he was screaming at Elliott. “Young man, sit down at once!”

  He grabbed Elliott’s arm, but it was infused with a power far beyond that of a boy; it felt like a pulsating rod of iron—and its cryptic creation was quickly covering the board and creating pandemonium in the classroom.

  “Class dismissed! We’ll continue this next week. Elliott!”

  The chalk snapped in Elliott’s finger and fell to the floor. He turned toward the teacher, his eyes fogged, mind carrying the combined expertise of a corporation’s full computer staff, all of it having descended on him at once, out of nowhere.

  “. . . analog to digital . . .” he muttered, and the teacher yanked him into the hall, a tiny drop of blood at the end of Elliott’s nose.

- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth, chapter 7