And that excitement intensified when he told of what else we had found at Triton, of the other giant force-ray stabbing out from its other side toward a distant star of Sagittarius, of our captivity there and our learning of the Neptunian tongue, our being brought before the great Council of thirty of the Neptunian races. I saw the hundreds before us listening with abated breath as he told them that gigantic epic of the solar system's past that had been told us by the great globe-mechanism of the Council, that story of the Neptunians' past history and of the great doom of increasing cold that had driven them from Neptune to Triton and that now had caused them to seek to split the sun itself to thwart that doom. How they had sent out toward that star in Sagittarius another great force-ray years before, to brace Triton against the back-pressure of the sun-ray and to keep it from being hurled out into the great void, how they had finally sent out the great force-ray toward the sun also, turning the sun ever faster toward the doom of all the other planets, planning to wreck the universe to save their own race. These things he told them through the hushed silence that again had replaced their stir and murmur of excitement. But excitement held them again when he told how he and I, desperate at the doom we saw hanging thus over Earth, had made our wild attempt to escape from Triton, had dared to cross its surface and had stolen a cylinder, crashing up through the great roof and out from Triton in that cylinder with their pursuit close behind us, how we had been saved from that pursuit by Whitely and Randall in the space-flier, who, although we had thought them dead, had managed to elude their own attackers by a ruse and had hovered near Triton in hopes of saving us; how in the space-flier we had fled back from Triton over Neptune and had smashed our pursuers, while we and they were over Neptune; these things, his voice deep now, he told to the hundreds of his listeners. And then, swaying a little from sheer utter weariness of body and spirit, Marlin told them how we, knowing that never alone could we halt or even reach that giant ray driving from Triton toward the sun, had headed back for Earth at the utmost speed of which we were capable, had flashed back like some great messenger-meteor through the solar system to Earth to carry to the peoples of Earth word of what we had found, to gather the forces of Earth and head back to Neptune with them for a last gallant attempt to halt that mighty ray of doom! When Marlin's voice had ceased, when he had stepped unsteadily back from the platform's edge, his words seemed reverberating still through the hushed silence that prevailed among the twelve hundred massed members of the World Congress. Then again the World President, his own face as set and strange now as those of the massed members before him, was stepping forward to face them.