Nor did I need to complete it, for as Marlin and Whitely and I stared back to where the sun's disk sent its light bravely out across the unthinkable reaches of space that separated us from it, our thoughts were all on those three planets, on Uranus and Venus and Mercury, and on those others, Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, that we had passed. What wonders, unknown to us, might not exist upon any of those worlds? But they were wonders barred to us for the time, since time was the one thing of which we had the least, in our great rush outward to the sun's outermost planet, in our desperate race outward to attempt to save our own Earth from the doom that hovered over it. For still that doom cast its shadowing wing darkly over Earth, still Whitely's instruments informed us that the giant force-ray from Neptune was stabbing back toward the sun, turning the sun ever faster at the same remorseless rate. So that it was toward Neptune, after minutes, that we turned, taking our places in our chairs beside Randall, at the controls, and gazing with him toward the planet far ahead that was our goal. And now that we had crossed the orbit of Uranus, some two-thirds of our colossal journey's length lay behind us, and Neptune was becoming ever brighter ahead, its pale-green spot of light having become almost as brilliant to our eyes as Saturn, behind us. As we viewed it through our telescope, too, we could make out the tiny light-point of Triton, the single moon of Neptune. Somewhat larger than our own moon was Triton, we knew, and we could see through our glass what had long been known by Earth's astronomers, that this single moon of Neptune's revolved about it in a plane sharply slanted or inclined to the plane of Neptune's equator, to the general plane of the ecliptic or solar system. And close indeed seemed the light-point of this single moon to Neptune, since we knew that it was at almost the same distance from the great planet as our own moon is from Earth.