There is a valley in the middle of nowhere with a drive-in, a radio mast, and about four hundred television aerials.
For years its broadcasts have been leaking upward into the dark, and somewhere out there a kid has been listening to all of it, the late films, the ad jingles, the songs between the weather reports. He learned an entire planet from its worst television and loved every second of it.
So he came to see it. He brought the family ship, which he was absolutely not supposed to take, and he brought a shopping list.
The accident happens on the way in. The mothership tears open above the clouds and twenty power cores scatter across the valley below, and the ship that was going to take him home becomes a wounded thing hiding in the weather, waiting.
Which leaves the small saucer, and seven nights.
Every night he descends and takes back what he needs. The valley notices. First the police spotlights, then a helicopter the locals would call a whirlybird, then searchlight arrays, then radar trucks trying to work out where he'll be next. By the sixth night there is a roadblock on the county road with a designation nobody is supposed to know: 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 frankly too heavy, and he does it anyway. Souvenirs from the gift shop of a planet he is about to leave for good.
On the seventh night the clouds part and the mothership comes down in full working glory, exactly the homecoming he was promised. And the sky fills with jets.
[ THE REST IS THE ENDING. PLAY IT. ]