The great globe again was silent for a moment, the thirty members of the Council silent around it as their assembled minds poured their thoughts into its mechanism, to be released in a single voice. Marlin and I stood there at the great ring-table's edge, and surely no stranger scene could have been imagined than that, with the great circular compartment's towering black walls around us, the twilight that reigned above and around, the thirty silent disk-bodied Neptunians and our own disk-bodied guards, and the great, enigmatic globe-mechanism before us, that spoke and listened as a living thing, representing the massed minds of the thirty. And now that great globe was speaking to us again, in the staccato Neptunian speech. "It is most wise, perhaps," it said, "that you two of another world learn now what colossal forces and necessities lie behind the loosing of that great doom which you come to strive vainly against. It is most wise that you learn now how useless it is for you or any of your world to oppose yourselves to the plans of us Neptunians. For we of Neptune are of an ancient power and might, beside which you of the inner planets are as newcome children. And lest you doubt that power, lest you doubt the colossal forces that we of Neptune have called into being and use for our own purposes, we of the Council tell you now what mighty past is ours. "Oldest of all the eight worlds of this solar system, indeed, is our world of Neptune. This you must know, indeed, if your scientists know aught of the formation of the sun's planets. For those eight planets were formed unthinkable eons ago, out of the fiery sun itself. Up to that time the sun had moved through space entirely without planets, one of the countless stars of this galaxy of stars, all moving through the void in differing directions. One of these other stars chanced to be moving in the general direction of our own star, our own sun, and their mutual attraction for each other drew them closer together, until at last they passed each other closely, perhaps even touched each other, their nearness to each other causing by gravitational attraction huge masses of the flaming gaseous substance of each to break loose. Thus the space between the two passing suns was filled with those great flaming masses, and as they separated, each by its gravitational power drew a share of those fiery masses with it on its path through the void.