"Dead!" Randall's cry expressed in that instant the stupefaction of all of us. "A dead world!" "Neptune--a dead world!" A dead world! For truly it seemed a dead world that lay there in the dim pale light beneath us! A world whose strange contiguous compartments stretched away from horizon to horizon to form the colossal city above which we hovered, but a world, a city, in which was no single discernible thing of life! The endless black-walled compartments, the strange-shaped structures and mechanisms, the great enigmatic globes--all these things lay beneath us in a silence and a death that were stunning to our senses! Lay beneath us as though death had reached out of the unknown to annihilate suddenly all living things upon this alien world, leaving in it only the cold and the silence and the death that enwrapped it now! Neptune--we had flown across the awful void toward it for week upon week, prepared to find within it any strange beings, any alien and terrible form of life, but never had we been prepared to find it without any life whatever--an utterly lifeless world! As we stared down toward it in utter silence it seemed to me that my brain was spinning from the stupefying shock of amazement that was ours. For if the world beneath us was truly a dead one, if Neptune lay now without life, its colossal compartment-city entirely lifeless, whence came that giant force-ray that was stabbing across the solar system from Neptune to turn the sun ever faster toward its division? Whence came that doom which was being loosed upon our Earth and upon all the solar system, almost, by that gigantic ray? Was that great ray, after all, only some incomprehensible freak of natural forces, impossible to withstand, and had Neptune, once the home of some alien, mighty civilization, lain for eons in silence and death? Had our desperate mission which alone held a chance for Earth, our terrific race out through the unthinkable reaches of the solar system's spaces toward its outermost planet, been in vain? Marlin must have felt something of the same despair in that moment, but his strong face betrayed no trace of it as he turned to us. "It's evident that this vast compartment-city, this whole world, perhaps, is deserted," he said. "But where does the great ray come from?" Whitely shook his head, glancing at his instruments. "Impossible to say," he said. "The recording-instruments here show only that we are close to the great ray's source, that that source is in the region around Neptune. But the emanations or reflections from it striking the instruments are so powerful as to make it impossible to determine the ray's source exactly." "But the city beneath!" I cried. "Even if it is dead, deserted, we might be able to find in it some clue to what has happened here, some idea of what manner of creatures the Neptunians were, and perhaps some clue to the great ray's source!"