“This talk of the king convinced the Lunarians that he did not intend to pay the interest on their claim and as they could not afford to quarrel with him, they proposed a compromise, and it was finally settled that they should receive 1,000,000 kiks in addition to the property they had taken on the foreclosure, and a bond for ten million kiks to be paid at the option of the government without interest or security. They did not regard this bond as very valuable, and as a matter of fact it has not been paid off to this day, but still constitutes a “claim.” After all, however, they did well enough notwithstanding their astounding loss. “They were now recognized as men who through no fault of their own had sunk the most stupendous sum of money ever known to exist in one fund, and this circumstance gave them as much notoriety and almost as much influence and importance, as if they still had to their credit the sum of 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 kiks.” Deimos and the Great Cable. These financial questions being settled the Lunarians went to work to improve their new property. They commenced work on the south polar region, opening extensive mines of coal and iron and starting furnaces and rolling mills. It soon became known what they were up to, which proved to be nothing less than the capture of Jack-Deimos and setting him to work. The first thing to do was to construct a cable long enough to reach from the pole of Mars to Deimos. Deimos is 14,547 miles from the center of Mars and a little further from the pole viz 14,690 miles. The cable was made about 25 miles longer than that. It was composed of a vast number of strands of tremendously tough steel wire and put together in the most marvelous way, for they were in small bundles insulated from each other as to the attraction of gravitation and also insulated by sections of their length. By this construction a part of the strands might be made to be subject to the attraction of gravitation, others alongside of them to repulsion, also a strand might be made subject to attraction in one part while in another it could be subject to repulsion, and these conditions could be reversed, or all the parts could be caused to be in the same state. The effect of this was very remarkable. When the cable was completed it was stretched out a section of one to two hundred miles at a time, and tested, an alternating electrical battery being used to alter the gravitational conditions. By proper manipulation, the cable could be made to rise bodily from the ground, or it could be made to rise by sections, one section on the ground and another humped up like the back of an angry cat, or when lying down straight it could be made to roll over, by causing one side to be attractive and the other repelling.