ET- Learning English

“. . . 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.

  Wonder 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.
...

He could nearly understand the child now, having spent his afternoon inside the reproduced wave-form of speech, in the Speak and Spell. Yes it was time to try a little of this new language . . .

  “Spell mechanic.”

  Gertie looked at him. “M-E-C-H-A-N-E-X . . .”

  “That is incorrect.”

  “You know how to talk!”

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