Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

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 because his legs had got thin and weak—partially atrophied muscles, Doc said—and it took time to make them round and strong again. But in a couple of weeks he was stumping around on crutches and after that he never went near his wheelchair again.

Ethel sent him to school at Sarasota by bus and before summer vacation time came around he was playing softball and fishing in the Gulf with a gang of other kids on Sundays.

School opened up a whole new world to Joey and he fitted himself into the routine as neat as if he’d been doing it all his life. He learned a lot there and he forgot a lot that he’d learned for himself by being alone. Before we realized what was happening he was just like any other ten-year-old, full of curiosity and the devil, with no more power to move things by staring at them than anybody else had.

I think he actually forgot about those stars along with other things that had meant so much to him when he was tied to his wheelchair and couldn’t do anything but wait and think.

For instance, a scrubby little terrier followed him home from Twin Palms one day and Ethel let him keep it. He fed the pup and washed it and named it Dugan, and after that he never said anything more about going to Michigan to find Charlie. It was only natural, of course, because kids—normal kids—forget their pain quickly. It’s a sort of defense mechanism, Doc says, against the disappointments of this life.

When school opened again in the fall Ethel sold her trailer and got a job in Tampa where Joey could walk to school instead of going by bus. When they were gone the Twin Palms trailer court was so lonesome and dead that Doc and I pulled out and went down to the Lake Okechobee country for the sugar cane season. We never heard from Ethel and Joey again.

We’ve moved several times since; we’re out in the San Joaquin Valley just now, with the celery croppers. But everywhere we go we’re reminded of them. Every time we look up at a clear night sky we see what Doc calls the Joey Pond Stellar Monument, which is nothing but a funny sort of pattern roughed in with a hundred or so stars of all sizes and colors.

The body of it is so sketchy that you’d never make out what it’s supposed to be unless you knew already what you were looking for. To us the head of a dog is fairly plain. If you know enough to fill in the gaps you can see it was meant to be a big shaggy dog with only one eye.

Doc says that footloose migratories like him and me forget old associations as quick as kids do—and for the same good reason—so I’m not especially interested now in where Ethel and Joey Pond are or how they’re doing. But there’s one thing I’ll always wonder about, now that there’s no way of ever knowing for sure.

I wish I’d asked Joey or Ethel, before they moved away, how Charlie lost that other eye.

Eighteen men and two women in the closed world of a space ship for five months can only spell tension and trouble—but in this case, the atmosphere was literally poisoned.

Five months out from Earth, we were half-way to Saturn and three-quarters of the way to murder. At least, I was. I was sick of the feuding, the worries and the pettiness of the other nineteen aboard. My stomach heaved at the bad food, the eternal smell of people, and the constant sound of nagging and complaints. For ten lead pennies, I’d have gotten out into space and tried walking back to Earth. Sometimes I thought about doing it without the pennies.

But I knew I wasn’t that tough, in spite of what I looked. I’d been built to play fullback, and my questionable brunet beauty had been roughed up by the explosion years before as thoroughly as dock fighting on all the planets could have done. But sometimes I figured all that meant was that there was more of me to hurt, and that I’d had more experience screaming when the anodyne ran out.

Anyhow, whole-wheat pancakes made with sourdough for the ninth “morning” running was too damned much! I felt my stomach heave over again, took one whiff of the imitation maple syrup, and shoved the mess back fast while I got up faster.

It was a mistake. Phil Riggs, our scrawny, half-pint meteorologist, grinned nastily and reached for the plate. “’Smatter, Paul? Don’t you like your breakfast? It’s good for you—whole wheat contains bran. The staff of life. Man, after that diet of bleached paste….”

There’s one guy like that in every bunch. The cook was mad at us for griping about his coffee, so our group of scientists on this cockeyed Saturn Expedition were getting whole wheat flour as punishment, while Captain Muller probably sat in his cabin chuckling about it. In our agreement, there was a clause that we could go over Muller’s head on such things with a unanimous petition—but Riggs had spiked that. The idiot liked bran in his flour, even for pancakes!

Or else he was putting on a good act for the fun of watching the rest of us suffer.

“You can take your damned whole wheat and stuff it—” I started. Then I shrugged and dropped it. There were enough feuds going on aboard the cranky old Wahoo! “Seen Jenny this morning, Phil?”