ET- Curing Cosmic Star Knowledge

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.
...

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.

  The old voyager looked at the sleeping child, and felt a bittersweet feeling in his own body, an ache and a joy that he could not understand; but then he understood, that he loved this child.

- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventure on Earth, chapter 12