I understand," Atwood said at last. "Queerly enough, I came here to get some of that Xarite, as we call it on Earth. It is needed there."

"In the God-realm they need—"

"Yes," he hastily agreed. "Anyway—Oh, well, never mind that."

His thoughts went back to the letter he had received from his father who had died suddenly. Young Atwood had been taking a post-graduate science-medical course in the great Anglo-American University in London. His father's death had brought him hastily back. And the bank had given him the letter which his father had left for him.

"My dear Son:" the letter began. "I am preparing this data for you so that if anything should happen to me before my work is done, you will be able to carry on for me. I haven't been able to tell you—it has had to remain a secret. I have been working with a Dr. Georg Johns, astronomer and physicist of Boston. As you know, all my life, Roy, has been devoted to the discovery of the cause of poliomelitus—"

The dread infantile paralysis. Dr. Atwood, ten years ago, had propounded the theory that it was a sub-microscopic spore so small that even the giant electro-microscopes could not detect it. So small that it was non-filterable—no filter had ever been devised that could trap it, despite the claims of having done that which other medical men had made.

Surely that was a negative result indeed. But, then, Dr. Atwood had discovered, in the ore of Xarium, which existed in very small quantities on Earth, a product which he had named Xarite. He had spent a considerable fortune doing it—the resolution of many tons of Xarium, refined down into an almost microscopic quantity of an electroidally active substance. And with it, for a year he worked miracles. As though by magic the emanations from his tiny Xarite tube, magnified and projected in the fashion of radiotherapy treatments, had cured victims of the dread disease.

But the triumph was short-lived. The Xarite tube exhausted itself. And on Earth, the scarcity of the ore of Xarium was such that to secure another grain of Xarite seemed practically an impossibility. And then the death of Dr. Atwood had come, and Roy had gotten the letter. His father had secretly been working with Dr. Johns. Together, with Dr. Johns' huge electro-spectroscope, they had discovered the existence of Xarite on Planetoid 150. And had kept it secret. With the era of Interplanetary adventure now at hand, both the physicians feared that the Xarite treasure might 

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