I had never seen Dr. Livingston so excited. He was a small man, forty perhaps, though he looked somewhat older with his thin face and his shaggy, longish iron-gray hair. He had no family; he lived here alone, with only one deaf old woman for his housekeeper. We were in his chemical laboratory now—a littered room on the ground floor of his home, which was a few miles out in the country from a small town of the Maine coast. We were building the Planeteer here, in a big impromptu frame hangar which was set on the wooded hilltop a hundred yards or so from the house.

But work on the Planeteer had ceased. Our two assistants who had been engaged with me now, like myself, were laid off. There was no one here tonight save Livingston and me and the old woman who now had gone to her room upstairs.

"We've got to be absolutely secret," Livingston said. He lowered his voice and flung a glance at the window oval where the moonlight was gleaming with a silver sheen. "There's big money involved in this. I'm going to trust you, John, but no one else."

"What is it?" I murmured.

A little half-smile of excited triumph was playing about his thin lips. "Let me ask you," he said, "have you ever heard of Xalite?"

"Well—just vaguely."

"The new element which was discovered a few years ago. I needn't explain its technical uses—"

"A germ-killer," I said. "I remember hearing a technological newscast—you bombard diseased tissues—"

"Exactly. To kill certain virulent germs without injuring the living human tissue. And they're thinking now they could use it in the new atomic engines—perhaps the one thing which would make them really commercially practical—"

"Except that Xalite costs about ten thousand gold-dollars a grain," I observed.

"Quite so. As a matter of fact, what little was discovered here on earth is now in use. No more can be found—and it's an unstable element. Within another year we will have no Xalite." He paused, and then abruptly he added, still more softly,

"I've discovered an unlimited quantity, John. Xalite in quantity beyond anyone's wildest dreams—"

"Where?" I gasped.

"Not here on earth. Don't you see how it fits with our plans for the Planeteer?"

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