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?"