* * * * * Over the huge compartment-city our four cylinders flashed, then slowed and halted, as up from another point in it rose four more cylinders, the four that we had seen land in a different part of it, and whose occupants had discovered and captured us. Then all of the eight great cylinders, our own in the lead, were rising sharply upward, up toward the opening in the vast roof above, through which we had seen them come. As they shot up toward it, Marlin and I, glancing down and backward, could see, even as we had seen from our space-flier, the vast extent of the dead and deserted compartment-city, with its mechanisms and huge globes and high black intersecting walls lying now in such dusty silence and death. Yet it was only for a moment that we glanced back toward it, for now our eight cylinders were flashing up through the round opening in the huge roof, and out over that vast roof, seeming solid metal from above, that covered all of mighty Neptune. And as we flashed over it, now, I found for the first time opportunity to whisper to Marlin, beside me. "They're leaving Neptune!" I whispered. "Where can they be going, Marlin? And what has happened to Whitely and Randall?" He shook his head, answered in the same low tones. "Whitely and Randall have escaped, I hope. They had a small start on their pursuers--they may have eluded them here above Neptune----" We were abruptly silent as the guards glanced suspiciously toward us with their bulging multiple eyes. And as the great cylinder and those behind shot on, the huge metal roof of Neptune below and the vast vapor-masses of its dense atmosphere stretched above us, I wondered if ever men had found themselves in the position that now was ours. Captured by monstrous disk-bodied beings of horror unutterable, flashing with them above the vast roof that sheathed Neptune and its dead, deserted and colossal compartment-city, to a destination of which we could not dream! And as that thought passed, another came, and I remembered the great mission that had brought us out here to the terrors of mighty Neptune, our great flight outward to find and put an end to the huge force-ray that was stabbing across the solar system and turning the sun ever faster, with every day bringing it nearer to the division that meant doom for almost all its universe. What chance was ours to accomplish that mission now, separated and captured as we were, not knowing even from what source the great ray was issuing, from what strange place these disk-bodied beings had come and to which they were now returning?