“The King began to be much concerned in regard to the great debt. He called his bankers together and had them compute it down to date. Then after brooding over the matter for some days he called his council and the Lunarian claimants together and made them a speech. He declared he was sick and tired of “paying interest.” True, he had never paid any, but it constantly added to the already most appalling debt to be found in the solar system. “In fact it is so great (said he) that we have no single words to express it. It is written by setting down 20 and then annexing to that a string of 153 ciphers. The original debt left by my illustrious ancestor the father of the canals was 1,000,000 kiks, at least that is all his successor assumed, and it is that insignificant sum that has grown to such overwhelming proportions. “Take 20,000,000 septillions of kiks and multiply by 1,000,000 sextillions; multiply this product by 1,000,000 of quintillions and this by 1,000,000 quadrillions; this by 1,000,000 millions; and finally multiply[256] this by 1,000,000. Now from this inconceivably great sum subtract one kik. That kik is the principal; all the rest is interest. As the whole principal was 1,000,000 kiks, our whole debt is 1,000,000 times the above sum.[5] I have for several days been endeavoring to master the financial principle applicable to this case. Our Lunarian professors have told us that the normal advance of natural modes of motion is by undulation, or the progressive rising and falling of one wave after another, as in the ocean, the movement of heat and light, the ebbing and flowing of the tides etc. I have observed that the same law holds in the accumulation of wealth. It undulates. It is lively awhile, then dull. Business men accumulate a pile, then lose it. It is the same with money engaged in business, it sometimes gains, sometimes loses. A man may drink twenty hogsheads of wine, but he cannot accumulate that much inside of him at once.
“It may be possible for one little kik in the course of 7,000 years to earn on Mars all the wealth both real and personal that there is on all the planets in the solar system and much more besides. At any rate it has done it on paper according to the figures and the claim of our Lunarian friends, but evidently it could only be done by its dropping a lot of it occasionally and earning it over again. So the undulatory movement applies here as a physical necessity. But the papers[257] in this case so far, represent only the swelling of the wave without the complementary sinking that completes an undulation, and makes its continued movement a physical possibility. These papers relate only to the ascending or crescendo half of the wave, but fail to provide for the diminuendo side of it. This wave has been swelling for 7,000 years. It is high time it had reached its culmination or greatest amplitude and I think it has. Seven is a mystic number and in this case evidently marks that epoch. Time alone was competent to enable a little kik to pile up such an accumulation of debt against us, and what time has done, time can undo.
“I propose now to issue a diminuendo bond that will in the course of 7,000 years reduce this debt back to the level it started from. Instead of bearing interest, this bond will bear discount. This discount the first year will be precisely what the interest was the last, and each year in the descending future the bond will be reduced to the same amount to which it was increased in the year as far in the past as it is in the future counting from the date of the bond. So that 1,000 years hence the amount of it will be the same that it was 1,000 years ago and so on. Coupons shall be attached, representing the amount of the discount each year which the holders of the bonds shall detach and present to the treasurer to be cancelled. Thus the debt will be reduced every year and it will cost nobody a kik.
“At the end of 7,000 years all the accumulation of interest will have been dissipated and only the[258] principal will be left. This if not paid then will begin to draw interest again, because by the undulatory theory, the wave having reached its lowest ebb must thereafter rise.”
“This was the substance of the king’s speech, and it was highly applauded by the whole assembly, except the Lunarians. They said it looked to them like repudiation, and they told the king they feared it would hurt his credit not only in the Moon, but on the Earth, and Venus, Juno, Pallas, Ceres, Vesta and all the rest. The King replied that he would be sorry to do anything that would impair his credit in the other planets and for that reason would not on any account repudiate. That was why he gave this bond. If he intended to repudiate he would not need to give any bond. By this arrangement they would get their million kiks in the course of time—would no doubt have got them long ago—if that load of interest had not been piled on top of them. The object of this bond was to remove this interest. According to the undulatory theory of finance that he had just announced, the total amount of loss of money employed in business exactly equals the total amount of gain, since money does not change in amount by being used. But in particular cases there may be net gains at the expense of loss somewhere else. And he said that the shrewdness of the Lunarians would have insured to them a measure of net gain; but by no possibility could it have amounted to many times itself even in the course of ages. “It is labor, not money, that creates wealth. If you bury 100 kiks[259] in the ground and after a year dig them up you will not find that they have increased to 105.”
“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.[260] 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[261] could be made to roll over, by causing one side to be attractive and the other repelling.
“This cable was eight inches in diameter. The lower end was doubled on itself to form an eye five feet in diameter. The other end for 25 miles was left free, the wires all being separate and loose with balls of iron attached to their ends. When this end of the cable was tested, a considerable section, by being subjected to repulsion, rose from the ground and assumed a perpendicular position, the loose ends of the wire parting and repelling each other like the hairs on the head of an electrified person. This was what was required and the test was pronounced a perfect success.
“Over the south pole of Mars is a mountain some 8,000 feet above the sea level. They found the exact pole not far from the highest part of this mountain which was a lucky circumstance. Here they planted a great steel shaft deep in the hard rock, its end sticking up so as to receive the eye of the cable. A good deal of grading and leveling off of obstructions that stood up above the proposed............