So, spurred on by that necessity, we swung ourselves over the wall's edge and then dropped down through the dusk two hundred feet toward the ante-room compartment's floor. Yet that great drop was to us not more than a drop of a tenth that distance on Earth, so slowly did we float down toward the floor, breaking our fall a little by scraping along the smooth wall. We struck the floor, tumbled in a heap there, and then straightened, gazed about. The ante-room was quite empty and in it were but three of the broad low doors. One led back to the cell-compartments from which we had escaped, another led to the sunward side. Through that had just passed the Council of Thirty and their guards. The other led into the great circular Council compartment itself. The last, it was clear, was the only one that held out to us any prospect of reaching the dark side, so we passed through it quickly and into the great Council compartment, moving now in great floating leaps each step. The great circular compartment was as empty of life as the one which we had just left, the twilight dusk in it dispelled somewhat by the soft-glowing disks in its walls. The great ring-table in it had in the seats around it no Neptunians of the Council now, but at that table's center stood still the great metal globe whose strange mechanism made of the thirty minds of the Council members a single mind, in perception and action. Knowing even as we did that it was but a lifeless mechanism now, without the Council's members connected to it, it was yet with some awe that we stared toward that great mechanism, to whose voice we had listened so short a time before. Much would I have given to have examined it, to have inspected whatever strange mechanism lay within the globe, but time now was our enemy. Soon the signal would come that would send the millions of Neptunians on dark and sunward sides streaming across Triton to change their sides. And unless we could steal one of the cylinders and escape before that signal came, we would inevitably be discovered. So, sparing only a glance toward the great silent globe, Marlin and I moved silently across the great Council compartment, toward one of the low doors in it that led apparently toward the dark side of Triton, to our right. Cautiously we passed through that door, finding ourselves in another ante-room compartment, as empty now as the one through which we had already come. Swiftly we moved across it, in the great floating leaps that each step of ours made now, toward the door in it that led in the direction of the dark side. But even as we moved toward that door, as we stooped to pass through it, Marlin and I shrank suddenly back, appalled. For as we bent toward that door, the sound of staccato voices had come to us from just ahead, and we had seen in that moment that there were Neptunians in the next compartment, several armed with ray-tubes, who were coming straight toward that door, straight toward us!