It was, indeed, a prison from which no efforts of ours, it seemed, could win us free. For even were we to escape from it, we knew, we would but find ourselves in the great compartment-city that covered all Triton, thronged with the Neptunians' countless millions. And even that city, in turn, was held beneath the giant metal roof that shielded and enclosed all Triton, so that never, indeed, it seemed, could we hope to be clear of the big moon-world and escape back across the solar system to Earth, to tell the peoples of Earth from what strange source was coming that colossal force-ray that was spinning the sun on to division and doom. Yet, despite that, Marlin and I paced ceaselessly about the little cell in a vain endeavor to formulate some plan of escape. Our first action was to remove from our feet the heavy-weighted little disks which the Neptunians had fastened upon them, and with those removed we found that we could jump a score of feet upward in our little cell, due to the lesser gravitational power of Triton compared to that of Earth, sailing slowly upward and falling as slowly. Yet this increased agility seemed of no avail to us in escaping, since there were no breaks in the surface of the cell's smooth, towering walls by which we might have been able to jump higher. So, after some futile attempts, we rested upon the cell's floor again, re-attaching to our feet for convenience sake the super-heavy little disks, that increased our weight to its normal Earth-figure. "It's useless, Marlin," I said, as we sat here, resting after our efforts. "We can never get out that way--or any other, I think." "Keep steady, Hunt," he told me. "We can't do anything now, it's clear, but a chance will come." "It had best come soon, then," I said. "For with but eighty-odd days left before the end, I see small hope." He did not reply to that, and I think that the gloom of utter despair that had settled upon me weighed upon him also. They were hours in which there was no change. The twilight that existed here on this band of Triton's surface never changed; its dusk never lightened or darkened. The only sounds to be heard, too, were the occasional staccato voices of the half-dozen Neptunian guards outside, or the answering snapping speech-sounds of other Neptunians, that seemed to be confined in cells like ourselves. Later we were to learn that despite their super-intelligence, perhaps because of it, the Neptunians were afflicted now and then with a brain disorder in which it seemed that a part of their mind's mechanism would cease to function for a time, during which time they were confined in these cell-compartments about us. Save for the staccato speech of these and the guards, and the dull, dim, distant roar of clanking and humming and hissing mechanisms that came to us from Triton's sunward side, there was no sound in our cell except when cylinders throbbed by overhead.