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.
* * * * *
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?"