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.