* * *

I got home a little earlier than usual that night, just before it got
really dark. Joey was sitting as usual all alone in his wheelchair. In
the gloom I could see a stack of books on the grass beside him, books
Doc had given him to study. The thing that stopped me was that Joey
was staring at his feet as if they were the first ones he'd ever seen,
and he had the same look of intense concentration on his face that I'd
seen when he was watching the stars.

I didn't know what to say to him, thinking maybe I'd better not
mention the stars. But Joey spoke first.

"Roy," he said, without taking his eyes off his toes, "did you know
that Doc is an awfully wise man?"

I said I'd always thought so, but why?

"Doc said this morning that I ought not to move any more stars," the
kid said. "He says I ought to concentrate instead on learning how to
walk again so I can go to Michigan and find Charlie."

For a minute I was mad enough to brain Doc Shull if he'd been handy.
Anybody that would pull a gag like that on a crippled, helpless
kid....

"Doc says that if I can do what I've been doing to the stars then it
ought to be easy to move my own feet," Joey said. "And he's right,
Roy. So I'm not going to move any more stars. I'm going to move my
feet."

He looked up at me with his small, solemn smile. "It took me a whole
day to learn how to move that first star, Roy, but I could do this
after only a couple of hours. Look...."

And he wiggled the toes on both feet.

It's a pity things don't happen in life like they do in books, because
a first-class story could be made out of Joey Pond's knack for moving
things by looking at them. In a book Joey might have saved the world
or destroyed it, depending on which line would interest the most
readers and bring the writer the fattest check, but of course it
didn't really turn out either way. It ended in what Doc Shull called
an anticlimax, leaving everybody happy enough except a few astronomers
who like mysteries anyway or they wouldn't be astronomers in the first
place.

The stars that had been moved stayed where they were, but the pattern
they had started was never finished. That unfinished pattern won't
ever go away, in case you've wondered about it--it's up there in the
sky where you can see it any clear night--but it will never be
finished because Joey Pond lost interest in it when he learned to walk
again.

Walking was a slow business with Joey at first b