Golden Age of Science Fiction Vol IX

by Various

  I was wrong there. It wasn't comfortable, but we stayed.

  I couldn't have said at first why we stuck, and if Doc could he didn't volunteer. Neither of us talked about it. We just went on living the way we were used to living, a few weeks here and a few there, all over the States.

  We'd hit the Florida west coast too late for the citrus season, so I went in for the fishing instead. I worked the fishing boats all the way from Tampa down to Fort Myers, not signing on with any of the commercial companies because I like to move quick when I get restless. I picked the independent deep-water snapper runs mostly, because the percentage is good there if you've got a strong back and tough hands.

  Snapper fishing isn't the sport it seems to the one-day tourists who flock along because the fee is cheap. You fish from a wide-beamed old scow, usually, with hand-lines instead of regular tackle, and you use multiple hooks that go down to the bottom where the big red ones are. There's no real thrill to it, as the one-day anglers find out quickly. A snapper puts up no more fight than a catfish and the biggest job is to haul out his dead weight once you've got him surfaced.

  Usually a pro like me sells his catch to the boat's owner or to some clumsy sport who wants his picture shot with a big one, and there's nearly always a jackpot--from a pool made up at the beginning of every run--for the man landing the biggest fish of the day. There's a knack to hooking the big ones, and when the jackpots were running good I only worked a day or so a week and spent the rest of the time lying around the trailer playing cribbage and drinking beer with Doc Shull.

  Usually it was the life of Riley, but somehow it wasn't enough in this place. We'd get about half-oiled and work up a promising argument about what was wrong with the world. Then, just when we'd got life looking its screwball funniest with our arguments one or the other of us would look out the window and see Joey Pond in his wheelchair, waiting for a one-eyed dog named Charlie to come trotting home across the palmetto flats. He was always there, day or night, until his mother came home from work and rolled him inside.

  It wasn't right or natural for a kid to wait like that for anything and it worried me. I even offered once to buy the kid another mutt but Ethel Pond told me quick to mind my own business. Doc explained that the kid didn't want another mutt because he had what Doc called a psychological block.

  "Charlie was more than just a dog to him," Doc said. "He was a sort of symbol because he offered the kid two things that no one else in the world could--security and independence. With Charlie keeping him company he felt secure, and he was independent of the kids who could run and play because he had Charlie to play with. If he took another dog now he'd be giving up more than Charlie. He'd be giving up everything that Charlie had meant to him, then there wouldn't be any point in living."

  I could see it when Doc put it that way. The dog had spent more time with Joey than Ethel had, and the kid felt as safe with him as he'd have been with a platoon of Marines. And Charlie, being a one-man dog, had depended on Joey for the affection he wouldn't take from anybody else. The dog needed Joey and Joey needed him. Together, they'd been a natural.

  At first I thought it was funny that Joey never complained or cried when Charlie didn't come home, but Doc explained that it was all a part of this psychological block business. If Joey cried he'd be admitting that Charlie was lost. So he waited and watched, secure in his belief that Charlie would return.

  The Ponds got used to Doc and me being around, but they never got what you'd call intimate. Joey would laugh at some of the droll things Doc said, but his eyes always went back to the palmetto flats and the highway, looking for Charlie. And he never let anything interfere with his routine.

  That routine started every morning when old man Cloehessey, the postman, pedaled his bicycle out from Twin Palms to leave a handful of mail for the trailer-court tenants. Cloehessey would always make it a point to ride back by way of the Pond trailer and Joey would stop him and ask if he's seen anything of a one-eyed dog on his route that day.

  Old Cloehessey would lean on his bike and take off his sun helmet and mop his bald scalp, scowling while he pretended to think.

  Then he'd say, "Not today, Joey," or, "Thought so yesterday, but this fellow had two eyes on him. 'Twasn't Charlie."

  Then he'd pedal away, shaking his head. Later on the handyman would come around to swap sanitary tanks under the trailers and Joey would ask him the same question. Once a month the power company sent out a man to read the electric meters and he was part of Joey's routine too.

  It was hard on Ethel. Sometimes the kid would dream at night that Charlie had come home and was scratching at the trailer ramp to be let in, and he'd wake Ethel and beg her to go out and see. When that happened Doc and I could hear Ethel talking to him, low and steady, until all hours of the morning, and when he finally went back to sleep we'd hear her open the cupboard and take out the gin bottle.

  But there came a night that was more than Ethel could take, a night that changed Joey's routine and a lot more with it. It left a mark you've seen yourself--everybody has that's got eyes to see--though you never knew what made it. Nobody ever knew that but Joey and Ethel Pond and Doc and me.

  Doc and I were turning in around midnight that night when the kid sang out next door. We heard Ethel get up and go to him, and we got up too and opened a beer because we knew neither of us would sleep any more till she got Joey quiet again. But this night was different. Ethel hadn't talked to the kid long when he yelled, "Charlie! Charlie!" and after that we heard both of them bawling.

  A little later Ethel came out into the moonlight and shut the trailer door behind her. She looked rumpled and beaten, her hair straggling damply on her shoulders and her eyes puffed and red from crying. The gin she'd had hadn't helped any either.

  She stood for a while without moving, then she looked up at the sky and said something I'm not likely to forget.

  "Why couldn't You give the kid a break?" she said, not railing or anything but loud enough for us to hear. "You, up there--what's another lousy one-eyed mutt to You?"

  Doc and I looked at each other in the half-dark of our own trailer. "She's done it, Roy," Doc said.

  I knew what he meant and wished I didn't. Ethel had finally told the kid that Charlie wasn't coming back, not ever.

  That's why I was worried about Joey when I came home the next evening and found him watching the sky instead of the palmetto flats. It meant he'd given up waiting for Charlie. And the quiet way the kid spoke of moving the stars around worried me more, because it sounded outright crazy.

  Not that you could blame him for going off his head. It was tough enough to be pinned to a wheelchair without being able to wiggle so much as a toe. But to lose his dog in the bargain....

  I was on my third beer when Doc Shull rolled in with a big package under his arm. Doc was stone sober, which surprised me, and he was hot and tired from a shopping trip to Tampa, which surprised me more. It was when he ripped the paper off his package, though, that I thought he'd lost his mind.

  "Books for Joey," Doc said. "Ethel and I agreed this morning that the boy needs another interest to occupy his time now, and since he can't go to school I'm going to teach him here."

  He went on to explain that Ethel hadn't had the heart the night before, desperate as she was, to tell the kid the whole truth. She'd told him instead, quoting an imaginary customer at the Sea Shell Diner, that a tourist car with Michigan license plates had picked Charlie up on the highway and taken him away. It was a good enough story. Joey still didn't know that Charlie was dead, but his waiting was over because no dog could be expected to find his way home from Michigan.

  "We've got to give the boy another interest," Doc said, putting away the books and puncturing another beer can. "Joey has a remarkable talent for concentration--most handicapped children have--that could be the end of him if it isn't diverted into safe channels."

  I thought the kid had cracked up already and said so.

  "Moving stars?" Doc said when I told him. "
Good Lord, Roy--"

  * * * * *

  Ethel Pond knocked just then, interrupting him. She came in and had a beer with us and talked to Doc about his plan for educating Joey at home. But she couldn't tell us anything more about the kid's new fixation than we already knew. When she asked him why he stared up at the sky like that he'd say only that he wants something to remember Charlie by.

  It was about nine o'clock, when Ethel went home to cook supper. Doc and I knocked off our cribbage game and went outside with our folding chairs to get some air. It was then that the first star moved.

  It moved all of a sudden, the way any shooting star does, and shot across the sky in a curving, blue-white streak of fire. I didn't pay much attention, but Doc nearly choked on his beer.

  "Roy," he said, "that was Sirius! It moved!"

  I didn't see anything serious about it and said so. You can see a dozen or so stars zip across the sky on any clear night if you're in the mood to look up.

  "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.

  * * * * *

  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.