Despair was growing in me as we crept on through the sleep-compartments, through the thousands of slumbering Neptunians. For soon would come the signal that would awaken all those Neptunians about us, I knew, and unless we found a landing-compartment, a cylinder that we might steal before then, all was lost. Even with such a cylinder, indeed, little enough hope was ours, since we dared not attempt to get to the twenty controls of the great sun-ray across the swarming sunward side. Our greatest hope would be to escape from Triton in it, if possible through the great roof that surrounded Triton, but even that hope seemed a futile one now, since, as we went on and on through the dense darkness of this sleeping side of Triton, we were moving still through a maze of sleep-compartments, groping blindly through the vast checkerboard maze of intersecting, towering walls. And as we came into still another of the sleep-compartments, with its massed sleeping Neptunians in the wall-openings around it, I halted beside Marlin, twitched his sleeve. "Marlin!" I whispered. "That signal will be coming soon--this dark side's sleeping millions will be waking around us, and we've seen no sign of cylinders yet!" "We must go on, Hunt!" he whispered tensely. "It's our only chance now--to get to one of the cylinders before they awaken!" "But if we were to head in a different direction--" I began, then was abruptly silent, stiffening suddenly, as Marlin did, beside me. For there across the dark compartment from us it had seemed to us that one of the sleeping Neptunians in the wall-openings had moved! Fixedly, in that moment, we stared toward it, its own great glassy eyes staring back toward us like those of all the other sleeping monsters. Was the creature asleep or waking? The question burned in our brains at that moment as Marlin and I stood there motionless, gazing toward the Neptunian. It was but the merest moment, though, that we gazed thus at the thing transfixed, for in the next instant it and the one in the opening beside it, roused by its own movement, had moved again, and then with their low staccato cries of surprise sounding together as one, the two Neptunian monsters had leaped down to the compartment's floor from their openings and were confronting us! CHAPTER XII Through the Roof Even as the two creatures leaped down to the floor, and before they could change their low cries of astonishment into louder cries of alarm, Marlin and I had leaped across the compartment toward them! For a full two-score feet in one great leap we shot toward them, a feat only possible with Triton's lesser gravitation, and only possible, too, because we knew in that moment that a single loud cry from the two creatures would bring to their aid the hundreds of Neptunians sleeping about us. Before either could utter such a cry, we two had shot through the air and were upon them!