[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction February 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Before science, there was superstition. After
science, there will be ... what? The biggest,
most staggering, MOST FINAL fact of them all!
"But it's all predicted here! It even names this century for the next
reshuffling of the planets."
Celeste Wolver looked up unwillingly at the book her friend Madge
Carnap held aloft like a torch. She made out the ill-stamped title,
_The Dance of the Planets_. There was no mistaking the time of
its origin; only paper from the Twentieth Century aged to that
particularly nasty shade of brown. Indeed, the book seemed to Celeste
a brown old witch resurrected from the Last Age of Madness to confound
a world growing sane, and she couldn't help shrinking back a trifle
toward her husband Theodor.
He tried to come to her rescue. "Only predicted in the vaguest way. As
I understand it, Kometevsky claimed, on the basis of a lot of evidence
drawn from folklore, that the planets and their moons trade positions
every so often."
"As if they were playing Going to Jerusalem, or musical chairs,"
Celeste chimed in, but she couldn't make it sound funny.
"Jupiter was supposed to have started as the outermost planet, and is
to end up in the orbit of Mercury," Theodor continued. "Well, nothing
at all like that has happened."
"But it's begun," Madge said with conviction. "Phobos and Deimos have
disappeared. You can't argue away that stubborn little fact."
That was the trouble; you couldn't. Mars' two tiny moons had simply
vanished during a period when, as was generally the case, the eyes
of astronomy weren't on them. Just some hundred-odd cubic miles of
rock--the merest cosmic flyspecks--yet they had carried away with them
the security of a whole world.
* * * * *
Looking at the lovely garden landscape around her, Celeste Wolver felt
that in a moment the shrubby hills would begin to roll like waves, the
charmingly aimless paths twist like snakes and sink in the green sea,
the sparsely placed skyscrapers dissolve into the misty clouds they
pierced.
_People must have felt like this_, she thought, _when Aristarches first
hinted and Copernicus told them that the solid Earth under their feet
was falling dizzily through space. Only it's worse for us, because they
couldn't see that anything had changed. We can._
"You need something to cling to," she heard Madge say. "Dr. Kometevsky
was the only person who ever had an inkling that anything like this
might happen. I was never a Kometevskyite before. Hadn't even heard of
the man."
She said it almost apologetically. In fact, standing there so frank and
anxious-eyed, Madge looked anything but a fanatic, which made it much
worse.
"Of course, there are several more convincing alternate
explanations...." Theodor began hesitantly, knowing very well that
there weren't. If Phobos and Deimos had suddenly disintegrated,
surely Mars Base would have noticed something. Of course there was the
Disordered Space Hypothesis, even if it was little more than the chance
phrase of a prominent physicist pounded upon by an eager journalist.
And in any case, what sense of security were you left with if you
admitted that moons and planets might explode, or drop through unseen
holes in space? So he ended up by taking a different tack: "Besides, if
Phobos and Deimos simply shot off somewhere, surely they'd have been
picked up by now by 'scope or radar."
"Two balls of rock just a few miles in diameter?" Madge questioned.
"Aren't they smaller than many of the asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but
I think' I'm right."
And of course she was.
She swung the book under her arm. "Whew, it's heavy," she observed,
adding in slightly scandalized tones, "Never been microfilmed." She
smiled nervously and looked them up and down. "Going to a party?" she
asked.
Theodor's scarlet cloak and Celeste's green culottes and silver jacket
justified the question, but they shook their heads.
"Just the normally flamboyant garb of the family," Celeste said,
while Theodor explained, "As it happens, we're bound on business
connected with the disappearance. We Wolvers practically constitute
a sub-committee of the Congress for the Discovery of New Purposes.
And since a lot of varied material comes to our attention, we're
going to see if any of it correlates with this bit of astronomical
sleight-of-hand."
Madge nodded. "Give you something to do, at any rate. Well, I must be
off. The Buddhist temple has lent us their place for a meeting." She
gave them a woeful grin. "See you when the Earth jumps."