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discoveries, he logically evoked the two sons and companions of Ares, the Greek god of war. Phobos, avatar of fear. Deimos, purveyor of panic.
    Fear and panic. Is there a difference? I believe so. Beyond the obvious semantic distinction—fear the chronic condition, panic the acute—it seems to me that the Phobosians and the Deimosians, whether through meaningless coincidence or Jungian synchronicity, picked the right moons. Phobos, fear. Is fear not a principal engine behind the supernaturalist worldview? (The universe is manifestly full of terrifying forces controlled by powerful gods. If we worship them, maybe they won’t destroy us.) Deimos, panic. At first blush, the scientific worldview has nothing to do with panic. But consider the etymology here. Panic from Pan, Greek god of forests, pastures, flocks, and shepherds. Pan affirms the physical world. Pan says yes to material reality. Pan might panic on occasion, but he does not live in fear.
    When I returned to the Folly to Be Wise this morning, the lunatics were asleep, Rupert lying in the far corner, Annie curled up in her tiny bedroom, Melvin snoring beside her. He still wore his dish antenna. The pro-Deimosian argument lay on the harpsichord, twelve pages of sheet music. Annie had titled it “Materialist Prelude and Fugue in C-Sharp Minor.”
    I awoke my friends and told them about the imminent clash of arms at the New York Public Library. We agreed there was no time to hear the fugue right now—the world premiere would have to occur on the battlefield—but Annie could not resist pointing out some of its more compelling passages. “Look here,” she said, indicating a staff in the middle of page three. “A celebration of the self-correcting ethos at the heart of the scientific enterprise.” She turned to page seven and ran her finger on the topmost measures. “A brief history of postmodern academia’s failure to relativize scientific knowledge.” She drew my attention to a coda on page eleven. “Depending on the definitions you employ, the materialist worldview precludes neither a creator-god nor the possibility of transcendence through art, religion, or love.”
    I put the score in my rucksack, and then we took hold of the harpsichord, each of us lifting a corner. We proceeded with excruciating care, as if the instrument were made of glass, lest we misalign any of Annie’s clever tinkerings and canny modifications. Slowly we carried the harpsichord across the deck, off the island, and over the bridge. At the intersection of Second Avenue and 57th Street, we paused to catch our breath.
    â€œFifteen blocks,” said Rupert.
    â€œCan we do it in fifteen minutes?” I asked.
    â€œWe’re the Asaph Hall Society,” said Annie. “We’ve never failed to thwart an extraterrestrial invasion.”
    And so our great mission began. 56th Street. 55th Street. 54th Street. 53rd Street. Traffic being minimal, we forsook the sidewalks with their frequent impediments—scaffolding, trash barrels, police barriers—and moved directly along the asphalt. Doubts tormented me. What if we’d picked the wrong side of the controversy? What if we’d picked the right side but our arguments sounded feeble to the Phobosians? What if panic seized Annie, raw Deimosian panic, and she choked up at the keyboard?
    By the time we were in the Forties, we could hear the Martians’ glissando chirpings. Our collective pace quickened. At last we reached 42nd Street. We turned right and bore the peace machine past the Chrysler Building and the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Arriving at Grand Central Station, we paused to behold the Phobosian infantry maneuvering for a frontal assault on the Deimosian army, still presumably holding the library steps. The air vibrated with extraterrestrial tweets and twitters, as if midtown Manhattan had become a vast pet store filled with demented parakeets.
    We transported the