CHAPTER IX

Before the Council

"Prisoned here on Triton--and Whitely and Randall dead! It's the end, Hunt--for us, and for the Earth!"

Marlin's voice was but echoing my own thoughts in that moment, and darkly I nodded. "The end--yes. And less than twelve weeks before that end comes, before the sun's rotatory speed reaches its critical point, before it divides into a double star. We've found the source of the great ray from Neptune, and we're helpless."

"Yet the World President--the World Congress----" Marlin seemed to be thinking aloud. "They sent us out to dare all for Earth, and until Earth is destroyed or we are dead we can't give up hope."

"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.

Swiftly as before that great change was accomplished, and then, as there began again the dull clamor of activity upon the sunward side, Marlin and I turned from our listening attention. But at that moment we heard a staccato rattle of speech outside our door, and an instant later the great black slab of that door slid sharply upward and three Neptunians moved inside the cell. The foremost one of these bore on the metal armor of his great green disk-body a crimson circle that marked him as one of the Neptunian officials. The other two were apparently guards brought in as a precautionary measure, their force-ray tubes unsheathed and leveled unhesitatingly upon us. The Neptunian official carried in his grasp a small octagonal object or mechanism with a simple button-control, which we gazed at curiously. He touched the button-control of it, and there sounded from it a series of swift, sharp snaps of sound exactly like those of the Neptunians' staccato speech. Then, speaking aloud himself, he motioned from himself to us, and then to the mechanism.

It was Marlin who first understood his purpose. "The Neptunian language!" he exclaimed. "This one has come to teach it to us, to make it possible for them to communicate with us."

"But the mechanism?" I said. "What is its purpose?"

* * * * *

Marlin stared at it a moment, then reached forth and touched its round button-control, bringing from the mechanism an irregular succession of snaps of sound. "It's for us!" he said suddenly. "They know that with our different bodies we can't make the sharp, snapping sounds that are their speech, so have brought this mechanism to us to serve us as an artificial voice!"

The Neptunian official, as though he had understood us, motioned again to the mechanism and then from himself to us, at the same time uttering a few speech-sounds as though in explanation. It was plain, indeed, that his object was to teach us the strange Neptunian speech. Pointing to himself, and to the two guards, he uttered a succession of five sound-snaps, irregularly spaced, over and over again, until it was evident that they represented the name of the Neptunian races. Then Marlin and I attempted with the little speaking mechanism to reproduce those five snaps of sound, and after experimenting for a time with the mechanism's button-control we succeeded. That done, the Neptunian pointed to us and uttered another short succession of sounds, another word, which we then learned to utter on the mechanism also.

Thus, for hour upon hour, the Neptunian continued with us, teaching us word after word, in their strange staccato language. That language, we found, seemed very much like a communication code of dots and dashes, all its sounds or sound-snaps being of the same pitch, there being no raising or lowering of the voice, while for each word there was a certain combination of the sharp sounds. Quickly, too, after a time, we began to understand and learn that strange language, and though never could our own vocal apparatus have produced the clacking bursts of sharp sound which were their speech-sounds, we learned to manipulate easily the little mechanism that spoke to them for us. Hour followed hour and day followed day, until we became so proficient in the knowledge and expression of their words as to be able to communicate effectively, though haltingly, with the great disk-bodied Neptunian who was teaching us.

Yet we found that that ability served us nothing. For though we plied the Neptunian with innumerable questions concerning the great mysteries that we had come through and that lay about us, he would answer nothing. What great chain of events had it been that had made of mighty Neptune's colossal compartment-city a silent desert of death, and that had sent all the Neptunians crowding upon Triton? What was their purpose in directing their mighty force-ray toward the sun, turning the sun ever faster to accomplish its division into a double star? Why, too, had they sent a second great force-ray out in an opposite direction from the first, passing out into the vast void of interstellar space? These questions we put many times to the great Neptunian who taught us, but the big, green-bodied disk-monster simply contemplated us as though unhearingly with his bulging, glassy eyes, and went on with the teaching of their strange speech.

So days followed days while we slowly progressed in our learning of the Neptunian speech, days in which the despair that had gathered in our hearts grew darker and darker. For at last, when more than a score of Earth-days had passed, we realized that all was hopeless indeed, that even had we chanced to escape, even had we still our space-flier that had been destroyed with Whitely and Randall, we would hardly have time enough to return from Neptune to Earth and bring back the fleet of space-fliers that were being prepared on Earth. Not much more than a half-hundred days, indeed, remained before that last day that would see the sun splitting at last to engulf almost all its planets, for with each day, we knew, the giant force-ray of the Neptunians emanating from Triton was turning the sun faster and faster.

Twice, indeed, I almost made a wild attempt to overcome our Neptunian teacher and guards, but was held back by Marlin, who knew as well as I that instant death only could result from such an attempt. And as those days passed, as with each ten hours the great band of light went around Triton and the millions of Neptunians on dark and sunward sides interchanged, I came to look on death as a release from the agony of suspense and torture in which we were. I think that not much longer could either Marlin or I have endured the terrible torture of that imprisonment, when there came at last a break to it, on the twenty-second day of our captivity.

On that day, as we waited in the unchanging twilight for the coming of our Neptunian teacher and his two guards, we were astonished when the door slid up to find facing us outside a different Neptunian official, of the same insignia of the crimson circle, with four guards behind him instead of two. He did not speak to us, but motioned us silently to move outside, and as we did so he gestured to Marlin to take with us the small speech-mechanism by which we were able to converse with the Neptunians. Then, guarded closely before and behind, our attempted escape in the cylinder having kept the Neptunians extremely watchful of us ever since, we were marched out of the long oblong compartment of the cells and across others toward the great circular Council Compartment! Into it we were marched, and found that, as before, there sat around the great ring-table the thirty silent members of the Council, the great metal globe still on its pedestal at their center. They did not turn toward us as we entered and halted beside them, but the great globe did, turning first the single gleaming eye upon us by means of which, we knew, all the massed minds of the thirty members of the Council were receiving a visual impression of us.

Then the globe turned swiftly so that its speech-opening faced us, and it spoke to us, spoke as the assembled minds of the thirty, with all emotions removed and with all thoughts synthesized by its mechanism. "You are the two creatures captured upon our world?" it asked. "And you have been taught our language as we ordered?"

Marlin pressed the button of the little mechanism in his grasp, speaking back in the same snapping speech-sounds by means of it. "We are those two," he said simply.

The globe was silent a moment, then spoke on, the thirty whose minds spoke through it never turning. "When you two were captured upon our great world, others, no doubt like you, were discovered in a space-vehicle which, it was apparent, was operated by the same principle of force-rays which we of Neptune (it was their own word-equivalent for the name of the planet) have long used in our own space-vehicles, and in other ways. That vehicle and those inside it, it has been reported to us, were destroyed by those who discovered it, but we desire to know from whence it and you two came, and in what way you were able to reproduce the force-rays which we of Neptune have long used. From the structure of your bodies it is apparent that you come from a small planet, in all probability the second or third of the sun's worlds. But from which, and why, have you come here?"

Marlin did not answer for some moments, then spoke back through the little mechanism he held. "It is from the sun's third world, indeed, that we have come," he said. "And we have come here, have plunged out through the void to this, the sun's outermost world, to find out why you of Neptune are loosing doom on the solar system with that great force-ray of yours that spins the sun ever faster, and to use all our power to halt that doom!"

* * * * *

In that tense moment a thrill of irrepressible pride shot through me, even in the dark peril in which we stood, at Marlin's words. For they were not his alone; they were the words of Earth, the words of Earth and all its races to Neptune and all its hordes! And at that bold defiance, flung across the void from world to world and issuing here from Marlin in the very face of this supreme Council of the Neptunian rulers, of this great globe-mechanism that held their gathered, synthesized minds for the time being, an order to the guards behind us for our instant death would not have surprised me. Yet here again we were given proof of the difference between the mind-workings of the Neptunians and ourselves. It was evident that the human passions of hate and anger held small place in their cold, machine-like minds, for the great globe that spoke for the minds of the assembled thirty was silent for a time, and when it did speak it seemed not to regard the passion of Marlin's words.

"When you speak of halting the doom that confronts your world," it said, "it is apparent that you do not know the necessity of that doom, the great necessity which has caused our races of Neptunians, under the direction of the Council of Thirty, to loose that doom upon the solar system. Learn now, therefore, that it is to save our own world, our own races, that we are loosing this death upon the sun's other worlds and peoples!"

The great globe again was silent for a moment, the thirty members of the Council silent around it as their assembled minds poured their thoughts into its mechanism, to be released in a single voice. Marlin and I stood there at the great ring-table's edge, and surely no stranger scene could have been imagined than that, with the great circular compartment's towering black walls around us, the twilight that reigned above and around, the thirty silent disk-bodied Neptunians and our own disk-bodied guards, and the great, enigmatic globe-mechanism before us, that spoke and listened as a living thing, representing the massed minds of the thirty. And now that great globe was speaking to us again, in the staccato Neptunian speech.

"It is most wise, perhaps," it said, "that you two of another world learn now what colossal forces and necessities lie behind the loosing of that great doom which you come to strive vainly against. It is most wise that you learn now how useless it is for you or any of your world to oppose yourselves to the plans of us Neptunians. For we of Neptune are of an ancient power and might, beside which you of the inner planets are as newcome children. And lest you doubt that power, lest you doubt the colossal forces that we of Neptune have called into being and use for our own purposes, we of the Council tell you now what mighty past is ours.

"Oldest of all the eight worlds of this solar system, indeed, is our world of Neptune. This you must know, indeed, if your scientists know aught of the formation of the sun's planets. For those eight planets were formed unthinkable eons ago, out of the fiery sun itself. Up to that time the sun had moved through space entirely without planets, one of the countless stars of this galaxy of stars, all moving through the void in differing directions. One of these other stars chanced to be moving in the general direction of our own star, our own sun, and their mutual attraction for each other drew them closer together, until at last they passed each other closely, perhaps even touched each other, their nearness to each other causing by gravitational attraction huge masses of the flaming gaseous substance of each to break loose. Thus the space between the two passing suns was filled with those great flaming masses, and as they separated, each by its gravitational power drew a share of those fiery masses with it on its path through the void.

"Thus when the two suns receded from each other once more, each carried with it a rough half of the fiery masses that had been torn from each. As the sun moved on through space with these fiery masses about it, the greater part of them dropped back into the sun. The flaming masses that remained, however, had been thrown by the cataclysm into a swift motion, which by the sun's attraction had been converted in the case of each flaming mass into a circular or elliptical orbit around the sun. And since the speed of each flaming mass just balanced with its centrifugal force the pull of the sun inward, they continued in those orbits for age on age without perceptible change. The solar system, then, had become stable.

"Thus the sun was moving out through space with eight great flaming masses of matter revolving around it, in addition to a number of great clouds or aggregations of smaller fragments. These eight flaming masses became in time the sun's eight worlds, a solid crust forming first on one and then on another of them. The outermost of these great fiery masses was that which in time was to become the planet Neptune. It had been one of the first of the great fragments of the two suns torn loose by their encounter, and being one of the first had been hurled out to a greater distance than any of the others. And being the first, too, it had had more time to cool, its solid crust had formed earlier on it, and thus Neptune was in fact the oldest of the sun's planets to form as a solid-surfaced world. Neptune, too, is composed of much lighter materials than the denser inner planets, and the reason for that is, that it was the lighter matter of the two suns that had naturally been sent flying forth from them in their encounter; and thus the outer planets, the four great outer worlds, being of the sun's lighter matter, are all much less in density than the four smaller inner worlds, which were thrown forth later from the sun's heavier matter, and thus in smaller masses.

"So out of the great irregular-shaped outermost mass of flaming gases had been formed the great planet Neptune and its smaller moon of Triton. And as Neptune's surface solidified, as the great masses of water-vapor and air that made up its dense and immense atmosphere ensheathed it, it became a habitable world, one fit for life and the continuation of life. For though small heat came to distant Neptune across the great void of almost three billion miles that separated it from the sun, the sun giving it indeed a heat hardly perceptible, yet there was heat enough for the great world in its own fiery interior. For so great in size was Neptune that, though a solid crust had formed upon it, there still lay beneath that crust the vast raging fires of its interior, and those fires' heat was so great that they kept the surface of Neptune and the dense atmosphere above that surface warmed constantly. And Triton had an atmosphere also and interior warming fires.

"Thus great Neptune, though farthest of all planets from the sun, became habitable the earliest of all. And since, wherever a world is found on which life is possible, life sooner or later will arise, so it arose on Neptune. Race upon race of living creatures rose upon it, and race after race vanished, annihilated by changing conditions on its surface which they could not withstand. It was not until we disk-bodied Neptunians evolved upon the great world's surface, indeed, that there came a permanent form of life upon it. For we, whose disk-bodies owed their squat, flat shapes to the gravitational power of Neptune, so much greater than that of your inner worlds, had in larger measure that spark of intelligence which the other creatures had lacked. And with that gleam of mind, of intelligence, we were able to withstand the changing conditions on Neptune's surface by adapting ourselves to those conditions, growing ever in numbers and spreading out over our world's surface, until at last we swarmed in millions upon it and were rising into greater and greater comprehension of the universe about us, into greater and greater intelligence and power.

* * * * *

"Great buildings we built upon Neptune's surface, and deep we tunnelled below its surface, also. Through breaks in the great cloud-screen about our world we looked forth and saw with our instruments the other planets that moved about our sun, and looked forth also into space and saw the hosts of other suns that moved at vast distances from our own. Our eyes were accustomed to the dim Neptunian day, our bodies to its great gravitational power, and it was our home-world. Yet by this time so vast had become our numbers that millions of us were crowded too closely together, and desired to migrate to Triton, our moon, and settle there. And though we had never yet been able to sally forth from the surface of our own great world of Neptune, we found the way to do so then.

"That way was given to us by the discovery by our scientists of a new force-vibration, one that lay in wavelength between the light vibrations and the higher electrical vibrations. This force-vibration, they found, exerted a definite pressure or force upon any object struck by its waves, just as the light rays themselves exert a definite, though far smaller, pressure upon whatever matter they strike. With this new force-ray, therefore, we planned to propel vehicles through space, and we constructed great cylindrical vehicles which were to hurtle out into space by generating inside them a great force-ray which would be shot back against a world and thus propel them by repulsion away from that world. These cylinders were made and tested, and since they worked perfectly, we constructed many of them, enough to take out all the millions of our surplus population to Triton. And so in those cylinders those millions of Neptunians went hurtling out to Triton.

"They found, as our observations had shown us, that Triton had a good atmosphere, and that it was swarming already with many forms of life, some of them unutterably grotesque, and none of more than the lowest intelligence. Using weapons of concentrated force-rays, which clove through all they touched, our millions of Neptunians proceeded to annihilate all life upon Triton, and with that accomplished, proceeded to build for themselves structures and cities like those on Neptune. They found that Triton was a perfectly habitable world for them save for two considerations. One of these was the lesser gravitational power of it, which made it extremely inconvenient for them to move on it with their Neptunian muscles. They solved this problem by attaching to their limbs small and unobtrusive disks of an extremely heavy metal which we could make by the artificial massing of atom-protons without electrons. These disks increased their weight to such a point that they could move as freely and conveniently on Triton as on Neptune.

"The other problem facing them on Triton was the fact that it turned one face always toward the sun. Its rotation on its axis, indeed, was of just enough speed to counteract its revolution around Neptune and Neptune's own revolution around the sun, the sum total of its movements resulting in this keeping of one side always toward the sun, with that side always palely lit by the sun and the other always in darkness. Even when Triton was behind Neptune, invisible perhaps from your own world by reason of the edge of Neptune's great atmosphere projecting up to hide it somewhat, Triton's orbit was so slanted or inclined toward the plane of the solar system that the sun was always in sight of its sunward side, though dimmed a little when the edge of Neptune's atmosphere was between them. The Neptunians who had gone to Triton were accustomed to Neptune's alternating day and night, of approximately ten hours each, and so they solved the problem by living upon the sunlit side of Triton for ten hours, for a day, and then passing to the dark side for ten hours of night.

"Thus they had conquered all the inconveniences that had faced them in settling upon Triton, and so upon Triton as upon Neptune were Neptunians and their cities. The civilization of both Neptune and its circling moon seemed secure and unchangeable, indeed; a civilization that existed upon our world and its moon when all the other planets of the solar system held only the lowest forms of life, if life they held at all. Easily could we of Neptune have ventured into the sun's other worlds had we wished, in our space-cylinders, but we had no desire to do so, having learned all that we wanted of those worlds by observation with our instruments, and being content to remain safe upon our great world of Neptune and smaller moon-world of Triton. And safe we remained there, for ages, yet, during all those ages, there was coming closer toward us a great crisis which we had long before foreseen, yet which we had considered so remote a peril as to give it no attention.

"But now that peril had become close, and great. And it was none other than the extinction of all life on both Neptune and Triton that faced us, due to their steady cooling. For all worlds, however fiery their interior cool in time and die. And steadily, surely, the interior fires of both Neptune and its moon had been cooling and the substance solidifying. Already they had cooled so far that the surface of Neptune was much colder than ever before, and that of Triton also, and with each passing century that cold was increasing. It would be a matter of time only, it was plain, before both Neptune and its moon would lie utterly without life, a terrible frigidity reigning upon each, all life perished from them in that bitter cold. For though worlds nearer the sun might exist by means of the sun's heat, though life on them could cling to existence through the sun's warmth, Neptune and its moon were so unthinkably distant from the sun that almost no heat reached them from it, and as their interior fires cooled, they must inevitably become so cold as to annihilate all life upon them!

"It was evident that some great plan must be adopted that would prevent this condition, and such a plan was quickly decided upon. This plan was to enclose both Neptune and Triton with great roofs of metal that would hold in them the heat that was being radiated out, and that would make it possible to aid the failing heat of the two worlds by artificial means. It would be a gigantic task to place those great roofs about Neptune and Triton, but we set to work upon it and for years upon years all the energies of the Neptunians were centered upon the construction of those roofs. We had established vast workshops in which the plates of metal that were to form the great roofs were turned ceaselessly forth, and these in turn were joined together to make the great roof of giant Neptune.

"It had been decided that that great roof that was to enclose Neptune would have no supports whatever. For that roof was to be in effect a gigantic spherical shell enclosing Neptune, and as such it would float in space around Neptune without touching it at any spot, since the attraction of Neptune upon the roof would be the same in all parts; thus it would not be pulled to this side or that, and would not touch the great planet in any place. The small attraction of the sun and the other heavenly bodies on the free-floating spherical enclosure was nullified by an automatic force-ray pressing against the inside of the roof in the right direction, and thus the giant spherical shell could enclose Neptune, and could float about it, moving with it through space, without touching it at any point!

"The metal plates, that had been joined together to make the vast spherical shell, were of a strength to resist all stresses, and they had been specially treated by a crystallizing process that gave them a unique property. This was the property of admitting all heat and light vibrations from above through them, but repelling those from below. Thus when the great roof was in place around Neptune, enclosing it completely, the sun's light and heat penetrated down to it through the roof without check, making the roof seem transparent from below. But no light or heat vibrations could pass up through the roof from beneath, so that it appeared quite opaque from above. Thus what light and heat the sun furnished were not lost, and Neptune's day not darkened. But very little of that heat of Neptune itself could be radiated outward into space.

"With the great roof in place around Neptune, and with openings that could be opened and closed at will provided in it, for entrance to or exit from Neptune, a similar roof, though far smaller, was constructed around the smaller globe of Triton. With those great enclosures thus shielding Neptune and Triton, therefore, their cooling was slowed, and it seemed to all that the expedient of the great roofs had warded off the menacing cold that had threatened to extinguish all life on Neptune and Triton. Strange new cities were built on Neptune and Triton, great compartment-cities that needed not roofs with the great roof above them. New methods were found of producing vast food supplies for the crowding millions of Neptunians, by stimulating with electrical force and chemicals the growth of vegetation to an unthinkably swift rate. Thus we Neptunians, in our giant enclosed world of Neptune and in our enclosed moon, Triton, had checked the colossal peril that had threatened us and could continue to live safely upon Neptune and its moon for age upon passing age!"