If they were entirely the play of electrical
forces, their change of place would be practically instantaneous,
which, however rapid their movement, is not the case."

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAST OF THE EARTH.

Finding that they were rapidly swinging towards their proper course,
and that the earth in its journey about the sun would move out of their
way, they divided their power between repelling the body they had left
and increasing the attraction of the moon, and then set about getting
their house in order.

Bearwarden, having the largest appetite, was elected cook, the others
sagely divining that labour so largely for himself would be no trial.
Their small but business-like-looking electric range was therefore soon
in full blast, with Bearwarden in command. It had enough current to
provide heat for cooking for four hundred hours, which was an ample
margin, and it had this advantage, that, no matter how much it was
used, it could not exhaust the air as any other form of heat would.

There were also a number of sixteen-candle-power incandescent lamps, so
that when passing through the shadow of a planet, or at night after
their arrival on Jupiter, their car would be brightly illuminated.
They had also a good search-light for examining the dark side of a
satellite, or exploring the spaces in Saturn's rings. Having lunched
sumptuously on canned chicken soup, beef a la jardiniere, and pheasant
that had been sent them by some of their admirers that morning, they
put the bones and the glass can that had contained the soup into the
double-doored partition or vestibule, placing a large sheet of
cardboard to act as a wad between the scraps and the outside door. By
pressing a button they unfastened the outside door, and the articles to
be disposed of were shot off by the expansion of the air between the
cardboard disk and the inside door; after which the outside door was
drawn back to its place by a current sent through a magnet, but little
power being required to reclose it with no resisting atmospheric
pressure. As the electricity ran along a wire passing through a
hermetically sealed opening in the floor, there was no way by which
more air than that in the vestibule could escape; and as the somewhat
flat space between the doors contained less than one cubic foot, the
air-pressure inside the Callisto could not be materially lessen