A moment we glanced wildly about through the dusky compartment as they came toward us, then we had leaped aside from the door, had reached one of the compartment's corners, leaping more than a score of feet toward that corner and crouching there in the dusk, even as the dozen Neptunians came through the door! It was our one chance of escaping them, the chance that they might not perceive us in the compartment's corner through the twilight dusk that reigned in it. But I knew that so keen were their great bulging multiple eyes that it was against hope that I hoped. The Neptunians who had come into the compartment, however, seemed not to notice us as they entered, passing across it toward the great Council compartment, conversing among themselves in their snapping speech-sounds as they did so. Tensely we crouched there, stiffening suddenly, as we saw one of the disk-bodied monsters suddenly turn and glance back across the compartment in our direction. But in the next moment he had turned back, not seeing us, and then they had passed through the opposite door, their strange voices passing from our hearing. Marlin and I straightened, with long breaths of relief. "Close, Hunt!" he whispered. "But on to the dark side--we've little enough time left!" "We're almost out of the twilight band now," I told him, "and in the dark side we'll be a little safer." * * * * * And now we were moving quietly through the door from which the approach of the Neptunians had startled us, through the compartment beyond it and on through another and another. These compartments of the twilight band seemed for the most part quite empty, filled neither with masses of working Neptunians like those of the sunward side, nor masses of sleeping Neptunians like those of the dark side. We had found, however, that the compartments of the twilight band were in fact used only for the housing of the Council of Thirty and of the other activities and departments of the rulers of the Neptunians, their only purpose aside from that being to provide easy access from the dark to the sunward side of Triton, and _vice versa_. So it was that now as we crept through the twilight dusk of those compartments, we found them almost wholly empty and tenantless, though once or twice we were forced again to seek hiding in the shadows as we heard the staccato voices of Neptunians in the distance. Once, too, we were startled by one of the cylinders throbbing by close above us, and since we had had no time to hide from it, thought ourselves discovered by it, though after tense minutes it became plain that its occupants had not seen us.