"But what hope is there?" I asked. "These Neptunians have only reprieved us for the moment from death, for their own purposes. Death will be ours before long, and in the meantime who could escape from this place?"
I swept my arm around the cell-compartment, and Marlin considered the place with me as silently and almost as hopelessly as myself. For it was, truly, a prison inescapable into which we had been thrust. The square little compartment's walls were diamond-hard, of that impenetrable black stone-like substance, and they towered two hundred feet above us. There were in them no windows, the only light that reached us being the dusky illumination that came down to us from the compartment's roofless top, far above. That illumination was but small indeed, for the cell-compartment lay in the same twilight band as the great Council Compartment, that band of twilight lying between Triton's dark and sunward sides. By it we could see, however, that the black walls about us were quite vertical and smooth, and that the only break in them was that of the low door-opening, closed now by the smooth, black slab across it.
It was, indeed, a prison from which no efforts of ours, it seemed, could win us free. For even were we to escape from it, we knew, we would but find ourselves in the great compartment-city that covered all Triton, thronged with the Neptunians' countless millions. And even that city, in turn, was held beneath the giant metal roof that shielded and enclosed all Triton, so that never, indeed, it seemed, could we hope to be clear of the big moon-world and escape back across the solar system to Earth, to tell the peoples of Earth from what strange source was coming that colossal force-ray that was spinning the sun on to division and doom. Yet, despite that, Marlin and I paced ceaselessly about the little cell in a vain endeavor to formulate some plan of escape.
Our first action was to remove from our feet the heavy-weighted little disks which the Neptunians had fastened upon them, and with those removed we found that we could jump a score of feet upward in our little cell, due to the lesser gravitational power of Triton compared to that of Earth, sailing slowly upward and falling as slowly. Yet this increased agility seemed of no avail to us in escaping, since there were no breaks in the surface of the cell's smooth, towering walls by which we might have been able to jump higher. So, after some futile attempts, we rested upon the cell's floor again, re-attaching to our feet for convenience sake the super-heavy little disks, that increased our weight to its normal Earth-figure.
"It's useless, Marlin," I said, as we sat here, resting after our efforts. "We can never get out that way—or any other, I think."
"Keep steady, Hunt," he told me. "We can't do anything now, it's clear, but a chance will come."
"It had best come soon, then," I said. "For with but eighty-odd days left before the end, I see small hope."
He did not reply to that, and I think that the gloom of utter despair that had settled upon me weighed upon him also. They were hours in which there was no change. The twilight that existed here on this band of Triton's surface never changed; its dusk never lightened or darkened. The only sounds to be heard, too, were the occasional staccato voices of the half-dozen Neptunian guards outside, or the answering snapping speech-sounds of other Neptunians, that seemed to be confined in cells like ourselves. Later we were to learn that despite their super-intelligence, perhaps because of it, the Neptunians were afflicted now and then with a brain disorder in which it seemed that a part of their mind's mechanism would cease to function for a time, during which time they were confined in these cell-compartments about us. Save for the staccato speech of these and the guards, and the dull, dim, distant roar of clanking and humming and hissing mechanisms that came to us from Triton's sunward side, there was no sound in our cell except when cylinders throbbed by overhead.
In those hours the door of our cell never opened, and we found that our food and water were supplied to us inside the cell itself. There were in its wall two metal taps, one of which yielded clear water, that tasted flat and chemical to us. The other gave forth a thick, viscous white liquid, which we recognized after a time as a liquefied preparation of the white vegetables and fruits we had seen grown so rapidly. This preparation or liquid was apparently pumped through the compartment-city like the water. Thus there was no need for the guards to enter our cell. It was a number of hours later that there came an interruption to the monotony of eventlessness of our time, which roused us somewhat from the gloomy apathy of spirit into which we had fallen.
Without warning there sprang into being all about us an intensely brilliant flood of pure white light, that bathed all things about us in its blinding glare for the moment and then swiftly moved away toward the dark side of Triton. We were stupefied by its appearance thus, and then remembered suddenly the great band of brilliant light that we had seen appear and move swiftly, completely around Triton, marking the end of a ten-hour period and the signal for the sleeping millions of Neptunians on Triton's dark side and the busy millions on its sunward side to change places upon this strange world. Surely enough, in a few moments, the brilliant band of light had swept upon us from the sunward side, having traveled completely around Triton, and dwelling for a moment again upon us, had snapped out of being. That great brilliant band of light, as we were to learn, was produced by great projectors at Triton's two poles, and whirled around it by the turning of those projectors. Now as its brilliant signal swept around the big moon-world, we could hear the countless hordes of the Neptunians shifting from dark side to sunward, and from sunlit side to dark, while overhead there throbbed and shot this way and that innumerable cylinders.