In the next instant we had a glimpse of those massed cylinders that had been rushing thus beneath us driven down by the power of our great force-ray with inconceivable speed and force, driven down in a whirling, confused mass toward the vast metal roof of great Neptune below! And as our great ray, traveling across their mass, drove them thus downward with colossal power, we saw a moment later the cylinders of that mass crashing downward against that roof, shattering into crumpled, wrecked masses of metal upon the mighty structure, annihilated with all inside them on that roof as our great ray drove them down against it! Half at least of that mass of cylinders perished thus in the first crash downward and before the rest could gather again to whirl up to the attack, our great ray was playing upon them also, crashing them down upon the great roof of death, until in only a moment more but a half-dozen of the cylinders remained intact! And these, as their fellows crashed to death beneath us, were gathering and speeding away from this death that smote from above, were going back toward the dull-gleaming disk of Triton! Marlin and Whitely and Randall and I were all crying out in that moment as the surviving cylinders flashed away in flight, and then Marlin and I had turned toward our two friends. "Whitely--Randall--!" Marlin was saying. "You escaped those Neptunians that first discovered us, then? We saw the fragments of wreckage your pursuers brought back, and Hunt and I never dreamed you might still live!" "It was a trick that enabled us to escape," Whitely explained. "When they discovered us there beneath Neptune's roof--chased us up through that roof and up into the great cloud-belts, I saw that we could not long escape those pursuing cylinders. So, while Randall drove the flier through the mists and while they searched in those mists for us, I battered and broke with blows of a large tool some of the spare plates and instruments we carried. Then, as they came closer to us, their force-rays slicing through the mists in search of us, I cast those fragments loose from the flier, and when they struck against the pursuing cylinders in the mists, when those cylinders saw the wrecked fragments, they had no doubt but that their force-rays had struck us somewhere in the cloud-layer and annihilated us. We lay in the shrouding mists until we saw them returning toward Neptune's surface. We realized then that you two had been captured by whatever manner of creatures these Neptunians were, and saw the cylinders, with you in one of them, going down beneath Triton's roof. For days, therefore, Randall and I waited around Triton's surface, hoping against hope to get down inside in some way and find you, and had almost given up hope, when we saw the cylinder you had stolen racing up from Triton, and were able to save it and you from the pursuing cylinders."