Whitely--cool and detached and steady, stirred to passion by nothing save some unprecedented physical phenomenon, considering with curious, impersonal eyes each new peril that had confronted us; and Randall--with his sunny hair and eager young courage and unfailing sense of fun; it was as though they had risen before me in that moment, when we saw at last what death had overtaken them and our space-flier there in the chill clouds of mighty Neptune. I felt Marlin's steadying hand on my shoulder and knew that he was sounding similar depths of despair. For with Whitely and Randall gone, with our space-flier and with ourselves captured and held by these monstrous disk-bodied Neptunians who yet seemed not of Neptune, our chance to halt the great doom-ray that was radiating toward the sun, our chance even to return to Earth with word of the position and nature of that ray's source, was gone also! Through the despair that had sunken upon me I was aware, in a moment, that the throbbing of the cylinder's great generators had waxed again in intensity. Already the three Neptunians, who had reported the destruction of the space-flier, had returned to their own cylinder, which had separated from ours, and now the whole eleven cylinders, our own in the lead, were racing forward once more, were shooting forward between the great vapor-masses above and the vast metal roof below. At immense and mounting speed they shot forward, a dull roar of whistling air coming to us from without, and in a moment the pale, dim light about us had begun to change to dusk, to darkness, as we shot on. For the eleven cylinders were racing around the surface of Neptune toward the side of it _away_ from the sun at the moment, and as they entered the shade of that side they were plunging through the eternal night. But as the cylinders shot on they seemed to need no light or star to guide them through the deep darkness, though all that was visible was an occasional glinting of the great metal roof below. On we shot through that deep darkness and there rose in me a sudden thought that roused me a little from the despair that held Marlin and me. Could it be that upon that other side there still remained a remnant of their race? A remnant of the race, that once had built the mighty compartment-city that covered all Neptune and the vast roof that shielded it, but that now occupied but a small part of the huge city? Was it from Neptune's other side, then, that the giant force-ray had stabbed toward the sun? Yet how _could_ that be so, how could that great ray be shot out from any point of Neptune unceasingly as it was, when each twenty hours the great planet turned on its axis, when for half of that twenty hours whatever point that was the ray's source would be turned _away_ from the sun instead of _toward_ it? * * * * *