It was a curious night, to start things off. The first thing for people to note was that it was dark. Terribly dark, incredibly dark one might even say. This was not so surprising for its fact as to the extent of how quickly it became so. One moment, it seemed, the moon had been full, the next, apparently, empty -or rather, not there. The second thing for people to notice, or rather fail to notice on account of it, was that they were not there. Not anymore, at least. Actually, the above was the truth for about half of them.

The rest were faced with fear; pure, gripping, paralyzing, primitive, irrational, monkey-in-a-wind-tunnel fear. Many more of them died at that point, due to fear's effect on the psyches of large groups of people.

It had been noted, earlier in the day, with professionally-localized panic that the planet Mercury, long seen through astronomers' telescopes as that little grey crescent that appears above a larger body called the sun at certain times of year, appeared to have been torn, or even blasted apart. This was not generally circulated because, of course, sane people don't trouble themselves with such things. One moderately-read journal took a pole as to whether anyone would miss it, but that seems to have been the extent of the public's interest.

Soon after the moon's disappearance, and the events thereafter, the Earth was a mass of new-found volcanoes, shifted and wrinkled plates, fires, and people running around in a generic but newly intense level of terror. Lava flowed in bright bands as too-big-for-the-imagination pieces of our planet settled back under the intense weight of gravity to the few inches closer together they had been before. The Earth shuddered, acquiring the aura of a dropped and taped together crystal ball.

Soon enough, communication was reestablished for all those who could use a circuit-rather than a Ouija-board. Certain countries would no longer be needed on the maps, as well as Wyoming, not that it ever was. What was assumed to be a relatively small-on a global scale-piece of the moon, as a side note, had turned the British Columbia province, as well as Washington state, into a large crater. It was busy filling with water, and unavailable for comment to the frantic reporters of the time.

Committees were reconvened, governments brought back together, and soon people began to ask what had happened. One eccentric scientist, on the floor of the United States Congress, formerly the ceiling, suggested a hypothesis that Earth had, in fact, and along with other celestial bodies, been struck by several enormous blasts of energy from weapons that had, at some point in universal history, strafed free of an enormous battle over something-or-other and, by random chance, happened to pass through us, in a number of senses. This was quickly laughed down and rejected by the committee members, which is a shame because it is, in fact true.

The responsible parties would, no doubt, offer their sincere condolences except that, as you can imagine, they blew themselves and the others up quite a long time ago, even in a galactic sense.

So, as you can see, an idea is only improbable to the point of straight-out, mind-numbing foolishness until it happens.