This sleep-compartment, though, was not empty like those upon Neptune, for in its hundreds of shelf-openings, its great pigeon-holes, there slept hundreds upon hundreds of the disk-bodied Neptunians! Their seven short limbs folded up around their disk-bodies, they reposed in those openings with their bulging, glassy eyes as open as ever. It was evident they all were sleeping, since the dimness of the day upon Neptune had made lids for those eyes unnecessary in the evolution of their strange race. And eery was that sight to Marlin and myself, as we stepped silently into and across the great sleep-compartment. For it seemed to us that the hundreds of Neptunians reposing thus in those wall-openings were regarding us fixedly with their great multiple eyes, watching us as we moved across the compartment. None stirred, though, as we made our way across it to the opposite door, and moved into the next, which we found to be another sleep-compartment also, its wall-openings, too, holding hundreds of the sleeping monsters.
Through a dozen such sleep-compartments we went, moving with infinite quiet and care, lest any of those sleeping thousands about us be aroused by any sound. And almost it seemed to Marlin and me as we crept on that that hope was ended in any case, since so far we had found none of the landing-compartments for which we searched, none of the cylindrical fliers in which alone we could escape. We had passed through other compartments that held the great heat-radiating globes, now, great glowing globes whose intense heat was not radiated out horizontally at all, but sent up in vertical heat-currents, which by convection in some way warmed all Triton's atmosphere. Past these and through still more sleep-compartments we went, pausing now and then as from the distance in the dark side there reached us a few staccato voices; still we came not upon any of the landing-compartments for which we searched.
Despair was growing in me as we crept on through the sleep-compartments, through the thousands of slumbering Neptunians. For soon would come the signal that would awaken all those Neptunians about us, I knew, and unless we found a landing-compartment, a cylinder that we might steal before then, all was lost. Even with such a cylinder, indeed, little enough hope was ours, since we dared not attempt to get to the twenty controls of the great sun-ray across the swarming sunward side. Our greatest hope would be to escape from Triton in it, if possible through the great roof that surrounded Triton, but even that hope seemed a futile one now, since, as we went on and on through the dense darkness of this sleeping side of Triton, we were moving still through a maze of sleep-compartments, groping blindly through the vast checkerboard maze of intersecting, towering walls. And as we came into still another of the sleep-compartments, with its massed sleeping Neptunians in the wall-openings around it, I halted beside Marlin, twitched his sleeve.
"Marlin!" I whispered. "That signal will be coming soon—this dark side's sleeping millions will be waking around us, and we've seen no sign of cylinders yet!"
"We must go on, Hunt!" he whispered tensely. "It's our only chance now—to get to one of the cylinders before they awaken!"
"But if we were to head in a different direction—" I began, then was abruptly silent, stiffening suddenly, as Marlin did, beside me.
For there across the dark compartment from us it had seemed to us that one of the sleeping Neptunians in the wall-openings had moved! Fixedly, in that moment, we stared toward it, its own great glassy eyes staring back toward us like those of all the other sleeping monsters. Was the creature asleep or waking? The question burned in our brains at that moment as Marlin and I stood there motionless, gazing toward the Neptunian. It was but the merest moment, though, that we gazed thus at the thing transfixed, for in the next instant it and the one in the opening beside it, roused by its own movement, had moved again, and then with their low staccato cries of surprise sounding together as one, the two Neptunian monsters had leaped down to the compartment's floor from their openings and were confronting us!
CHAPTER XII
Through the Roof