"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.