Dr. Kometevsky's Day

By FRITZ LEIBER
Illustrated by DAVID STONE
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.