For the moment, at sight of those cylinders, Marlin and I came near to throwing ourselves toward them regardless of the three, but that we knew would be suicide, so despite our torturing agony of soul we waited there in the doorway, gazing desperately toward the cylinders. And in a moment, as we sought in vain for some way to get to the nearest of those cylinders, there came a final staccato order from one of the three Neptunians and at that order the other two turned and passed through a door in the landing-compartment's side opposite from us. It was our chance, the chance for which we had hardly dared to hope even, and no sooner had the two Neptunians disappeared through the opposite door, the other standing with his eyes following them for the moment, than Marlin and I had crept out a little bit into the landing-compartment and then with a great simultaneous leap had shot through the air toward that remaining Neptunian! There was no chance for resistance on the creature's part. For even as we knocked it sidewise with the force of our leap Marlin had grasped the creature's limbs and with fierce, desperate strength I had with my clenched fist closed its mouth-opening in that method whose deadliness had been proved to me in our other battle. The thing threshed wildly, then it, too, had gone limp, and had collapsed. And in the next instant Marlin and I were rising from it, were leaping across the compartment toward the open low door of the nearest great cylinder, from whose great gleaming upright bulk before us came the throbbing of its powerful generators. And then, a dozen feet from it, we stopped dead, and from Marlin came a hoarse cry. For at that moment there had swept over us, through us, past us, from the direction of Triton's sunward side across its surface, a band of intensely brilliant white light, white light that blazed brilliant for the moment all around us, turning the changeless night of Triton's dark side around us for the moment into a white and blinding day, and then sweeping swiftly on, around Triton's surface! It was the great signal of awakening, the signal for the millions of sleeping Neptunians about us to awake and change places with the swarming millions upon the sunward side! And even as that dazzling signal came, as Marlin and I stood stupefied there for the moment before the looming cylinder's open door, there came from all around us, from over all the dark side's great extent and from all its maze of sleep-compartments, a rising babel of staccato voices, the voices of its awakening Neptunian millions! Then, before ever we could recover from the stupefaction that in that instant held us rooted to the spot, there had poured into the great landing-compartment from the compartments on all sides of it swarms of hastening Neptunians, swarms of disk-bodied monsters, who in that moment saw us, uttered as one a sharp great cry of discovery, and in the next moment were rushing from all sides toward us! "_The cylinder!_"