Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

“Not serious, you fool,” Doc said. “The star Sirius—the Dog Star, it’s called—it moved a good sixty degrees, then stopped dead!”

I sat up and took notice then, partly because the star really had stopped instead of burning out the way a falling star seems to do, partly because anything that excites Doc Shull that much is something to think about.

We watched the star like two cats at a mouse-hole, but it didn’t move again. After a while a smaller one did, though, and later in the night a whole procession of them streaked across the sky and fell into place around the first one, forming a pattern that didn’t make any sense to us. They stopped moving around midnight and we went to bed, but neither of us got to sleep right away.

“Maybe we ought to look for another interest in life ourselves instead of drumming up one for Joey,” Doc said. He meant it as a joke but it had a shaky sound; “Something besides getting beered up every night, for instance.”

“You think we’ve got the d.t.’s from drinking beer?” I asked.

Doc laughed at that, sounding more like his old self. “No, Roy. No two people ever had instantaneous and identical hallucinations.”

“Look,” I said. “I know this sounds crazy but maybe Joey—”

Doc wasn’t amused any more. “Don’t be a fool, Roy. If those stars really moved you can be sure of two things—Joey had nothing to do with it, and the papers will explain everything tomorrow.”

He was wrong on one count at least.

The papers next day were packed with scareheads three inches high but none of them explained anything. The radio commentators quoted every authority they could reach, and astronomers were going crazy everywhere. It just couldn’t happen, they said.

Doc and I went over the news column by column that night and I learned more about the stars than I’d learned in a lifetime. Doc, as I’ve said before, is an educated man, and what he couldn’t recall offhand about astronomy the newspapers quoted by chapter and verse. They ran interviews with astronomers at Harvard Observatory and Mount Wilson and Lick and Flagstaff and God knows where else, but nobody could explain why all of those stars would change position then stop.

It set me back on my heels to learn that Sirius was twice as big as the Sun and more than twice as heavy, that it was three times as hot and had a little dark companion that was more solid than lead but didn’t give off enough light to be seen with the naked eye. This little companion—astronomers called it the “Pup” because Sirius was the Dog Star—hadn’t moved, which puzzled the astronomers no end. I suggested to Doc, only half joking, that maybe the Pup had stayed put because it wasn’t bright enough to suit Joey’s taste, but Doc 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 cripple, and he could go off on a crazy tangent because he’s upset about Charlie. The thing to do is give him a logical explanation instead of letting him think his fantasy is a fact.”

Doc was taking all this so hard—because it was upsetting things he’d taken for granted as being facts all his life, like those astronomers who were going nuts in droves all over the world. I didn’t realize how upset Doc really was, though, till he woke me up at about 4:00 A.M.

“I can’t sleep for thinking about those stars,” he said, sitting on the edge of my bunk. “Roy, I’m scared.”

That from Doc was something I’d never expected to hear. It startled me wide enough awake to sit up in the dark and listen while he unloaded his worries.

“I’m afraid,” Doc said, “because what is happening up there isn’t right or natural. It just can’t be, yet it is.”

It was so quiet when he paused that I could hear the blood swishing in my ears. Finally Doc said, “Roy, the galaxy we live in is as delicately balanced as a fine watch. If that balance is upset too far our world will be affected drastically.”

Ordinarily I wouldn’t have argued with Doc on his own ground, but I could see he was painting a mental picture of the whole universe crashing together like a Fourth of July fireworks display and I was afraid to let him go on.

“The trouble with you educated people,” I said, “is that you think your experts have got everything figured out, that there’s nothing in the world their slide-rules can’t pin down. Well, I’m an illiterate mugg, but I know that your astronomers can measure the stars till they’re blue in the face and they’ll never learn who put those stars there. So how do they know that whoever put them there won’t move them again? I’ve always heard that if a man had faith enough he could move mountains. Well, if a man has the faith in himself that Joey’s got maybe he could move stars, too.”

Doc sat quiet for a minute.

“’There are more things, Horatio….’” he began, then laughed. “A line worn threadbare by three hundred years of repetition but as apt tonight as ever, Roy. Do you really believe Joey is moving those stars?”

“Why not?” I came back. “It’s as good an answer as any the experts have come up with.”

Doc got up and went back to his own bunk. “Maybe you’re right. We’ll find out tomorrow.”

And we did. Doc did, rather, while I was hard at work hauling red snappers up from the bottom of the Gulf.