“A little over a thousand years ago the Lunarians began to think of foreclosing their mortgage. They had the polar regions of Mars quietly explored, and were agreeably surprised to find large deposits of coal, iron, gold, silver, tin, copper and many other metals and valuable minerals. They were already posted as to the nature of the little moons Jack-Deimos and Lucy-Phobos. It was a difficult and perilous task to effect a landing on them, but after much effort it was accomplished. It was found that Jack Deimos, which by the way is about seven miles in diameter and twenty-two in circumference—you could ride clear around it on a bicycle in four hours—is about one-half iron, the rest rock containing gold, silver, lead and tin. Deimos always has the same side turned toward Mars, and on the opposite side is a lake about a mile in diameter and frozen solid to the bottom, which melts down a few inches every day and freezes up again at night. There is a little thin air, that does not extend more than one or two hundred yards high. The mass of this little moon is so small that its attraction for anything on it is very slight. An ordinary man weighs less than an ounce. He is considerably lighter on the side toward Mars than he is on the opposite side. One might stand on that side and shoot an arrow toward Mars, and it would not return to him, but continue its flight till it reached the planet. “There is in several places quite a growth of a hardy plant something like an alga, although the temperature on the shady side is 40° below 0. It is hot on the sunny side. The difficulty of getting on this little moon is due to its small attractive power. When we approach a large body, such as the Moon or Mars its attraction draws us after it and gradually brings us to its surface. But Deimos attracts with so little force that we have to get up speed and force from some other body and so run alongside and catch him. He flies around his orbit at the astonishing speed of 3,610½ miles an hour or more than 50 miles a minute. In order to get up such a speed as that our folks had to go off a million miles from Mars in a direction opposite to the sun and then allow themselves to fall toward Mars until they were near the orbit of Deimos; then they turned on repulsion which sheered them off and caused them to describe an orbit around Mars in the same direction as that of Deimos. Deimos passed them several times before they could get into his attraction close enough to be pulled in by him. “They afterwards boarded Lucy-Phobos in the same way. Her attraction is a little stronger than Jack’s as she is over eight miles in diameter. But her speed is still more terrific than his as she goes at the rate of 4,777 miles an hour or more than 79.2 miles a minute. She, too, always presents the same face to Mars.