oc called
me down sharp.

"Don't joke about Joey," he said sternly. "Getting back to
Sirius--it's so far away that its light needs eight and a half years
to reach us. That means it started moving when Joey was only eighteen
months old. The speed of light is a universal constant, Roy, and
astronomers say it can't be changed."

"They said the stars couldn't be tossed around like pool balls, too,"
I pointed out. "I'm not saying that Joey really moved those damn
stars, Doc, but if he did he could have moved the light along with
them, couldn't he?"

But Doc wouldn't argue the point. "I'm going out for air," he said.

I trailed along, but we didn't get farther than Joey's wheelchair.

There he sat, tense and absorbed, staring up at the night sky. Doc and
I followed his gaze, the way you do automatically when somebody on the
street ahead of you cranes his neck at something. We looked up just
in time to see the stars start moving again.

The first one to go was a big white one that slanted across the sky
like a Roman candle fireball--_zip_, like that--and stopped dead
beside the group that had collected around Sirius.

Doc said, "There went Altair," and his voice sounded like he had just
run a mile.

That was only the beginning. During the next hour forty or fifty more
stars flashed across the sky and joined the group that had moved the
night before. The pattern they made still didn't look like anything in
particular.

I left Doc shaking his head at the sky and went over to give Joey, who
had called it a night and was hand-rolling his wheelchair toward the
Pond trailer, a boost up the entrance ramp. I pushed him inside where
Doc couldn't hear, then I asked him how things were going.

"Slow, Roy," he said. "I've got 'most a hundred to go, yet."

"Then you're really moving those stars up there?"

He looked surprised. "Sure, it's not so hard once you know how."

The odds were even that he was pulling my leg, but I went ahead anyway
and asked another question.

"I can't make head or tail of it, Joey," I said. "What're you making
up there?"

He gave me a very small smile.

"You'll know when I'm through," he said.

I told Doc about that after we'd bunked in, but he said I should not
encourage the kid in his crazy thinking. "Joey's heard everybody
talking about those stars moving, the radio newscasters blared about
it, so he's excited too. But he's got a lot more imagination than most
people, because he's a crip