"But where could we go? Even if one of the other planets were suitable to receive us, we could not have transported all our masses from Neptune to another planet in time to escape the doom of cold and death that was closing down upon Neptune. To transport all those masses would have required countless trips with our limited number of cylinders. And to take refuge upon another planet, even had time been ours, was almost out of the question. For long our scientists had studied the other planets with their instruments, and though some of them were so cloud-wreathed and others so distant as to make observation difficult, it had long been known to us that none of the other planets, due to their natural conditions or to the presence of intelligent alien beings already upon them, would be possible as a world for us Neptunians. It was for those reasons, indeed, that no expeditions of cylinders had ever been sent to the other planets. "There remained, then, but one place where we might go, but one place to which our millions might go before Neptune's cold grew too great for life. That place was Triton, our peopled moon. For peopled as that moon was with its own masses of Neptunians, struggling against the same menacing cold that had vanquished us on Neptune, it was the one refuge for our peoples. By crowding into its every corner, the countless millions of Neptune's peoples would be able to exist upon Triton. And though the cooling of Triton had menaced it with cold also, it has been found, as we have mentioned, that it was not so hard to keep Triton warm by means of the artificial globular heat-mechanisms, the space enclosed by its great spherical roof being much smaller. It was a desperate expedient, truly, to mass all the thronging millions from the compartment-city that covered all giant Neptune, to mass all those millions upon little Triton, yet that was the one expedient open, and so it was followed at once. "Out from Neptune to Triton went all the cylinders of both worlds, loaded with as many Neptunians as they could carry, depositing those Neptunians upon Triton and racing back for more. Countless trips made those thousands of cylinders, trip after swift trip, each occupying but little time because Triton was so near. And so at last there came a day when the whole of Neptune's millions had been transported out to Triton, when there remained on Neptune itself no single one of our races, our giant world lying cold and deserted and dead, no longer a habitable world, its vast compartment-city empty of the millions that had for ages swarmed through it, while all those millions were crowded now upon little Triton.