Kestrel Valley is a hundred miles from anywhere. It has a drive-in, a radio mast, and about four hundred television aerials all pointed at the sky.
For years those broadcasts have been leaking upward into the dark, and somewhere out there a teenager has been listening to every one of them. The late films. The advert jingles. The songs between the weather reports. He learned an entire planet from its worst television, and he loved it.
So he came to see it for himself. He took the family ship without asking, and he brought a shopping list.
He never got to land it. The mothership tore open on the way in, and the twenty power cores that keep it flying fell out across the valley below. It is still up there tonight, wounded and hiding inside the weather. Without those cores it is never going anywhere.
Which leaves him the little saucer it carried, one beam, and seven nights to carry all twenty cores back up to it.
So every night he drops back down and lifts another core out of wherever it landed: a front garden, a drive-in car park, the field under the radio mast. And every night the valley gets better at stopping him. First the police spotlights. Then a helicopter the locals start calling the Whirlybird. Then searchlight arrays, radar trucks, people whose whole job is working out where he will be tomorrow. By the sixth night there is a roadblock on the county road, and the people manning it are not officially there: Division 51.
And every single night, alongside the cores, he takes something he does not need at all. A boombox. A VHS deck off somebody's porch. An arcade cabinet, which is far too heavy, and he takes it anyway. He is not robbing the place. He is a tourist buying souvenirs from a planet he is never going to see again.
On the seventh night the twentieth core goes up, the clouds part, and the mothership comes down in full working glory. Exactly the homecoming he was promised. And then the sky fills with jets.
[ THE REST IS THE ENDING. PLAY IT. ]