Hopeless indeed it seemed to Marlin and me as we sat there silent in the dusky little cell. For the colossal epic of Neptune's past and mighty plan which we had heard there from the Council of Thirty, from their globe-mechanism that centralized their minds, had implanted in us a profound despair. We had found at last the explanation of all this vast enigmatic thing that was wrecking our universe, but had found in that very explanation new depths of hopelessness. Earth was doomed, the solar system as such was doomed! We saw it, now, beyond all doubt, we, who alone of Earth's races knew whence that doom was coming. And I think that neither Marlin nor I, sitting silent there in the dusk of our cell, gave any thought to the terrible fate that hung over us two who had been kept alive, as we now knew, for whatever possible knowledge we might be able to impart to the Neptunians. We forgot our own fate of a living death amid the Neptunians in our agonized contemplation of the great deepening shadow of doom that was darkening the sun and all its universe. It seemed to me, as we sat there, that it was centuries, rather than weeks, since Marlin had given to Earth his first warning of that doom, his first news of the sun's increased spin. All that we had come through since that time seemed the events of countless years. The great meeting of the World Congress, and its adoption of the plan of Marlin and Whitely; the building of the space-flier and that start by night of Marlin and Randall and Whitely and myself in it; our hurtling flight out from Earth on our great mission, past Mars and through the dangers of the asteroidal belt, past mighty Jupiter and on, spinning through the peril that almost annihilated us at Saturn, to our goal, Neptune; our amazement at finding that world roofed and enclosed, the venture of Marlin and myself down into its dead and deserted compartment-city; the attack of the Neptunians, the pursuit and destruction, somewhere out in the mists of Neptune, of our two friends, of Whitely and Randall in the space-flier; and our own capture, our own journey to Triton's swarming, strange world, and our days' imprisonment; and now, at last, this titanic tale of the past and purpose of Neptune's races, which had been told us by the great globe of the Council. It seemed incredible, indeed, that all of these things could have been so compressed into the time of a few-score days as they had been.