st a ring of lead, but the resistance was so low that the
current kept on flowing. They even managed to get six hundred amperes
through a piece of lead wire no bigger than a pencil lead.

"I don't know why they didn't go on from there, but they didn't.
Possibly it was because they didn't have the insulation necessary to
keep down the corona effect; in a high-density current, the electrons
tend to push each other sideways out of the wire.

"At any rate, I tried it, using _lux_ metal as an insulator around the
wire."

"Hold it!" Fuller interrupted. "What, may I ask, is _lux_ metal?"

"That was Wade's idea," Arcot grinned. "You remember those two
substances we found in the Nigran ships during the war?"

"Sure," said Fuller. "One was transparent and the other was a perfect
reflector. You said they were made of light--photons so greatly
condensed that they were held together by their gravitational fields."

"Right. We called them light-metal. But Wade said that was too
confusing. With a specific gravity of 103.5, light-metal was certainly
not a light metal! So Wade coined a couple of words. _Lux_ is the Latin
for light, so he named the transparent one _lux_ and the reflecting one
_relux_."

"It sounds peculiar," Fuller observed, "but so does every coined word
when you first hear it. Go on with your story."

Arcot relit his pipe and went on. "I put a current of ten thousand amps
through a little piece of lead wire, and that gave me a current density
of 10^{10} amps per square inch.

"Then I started jacking up the voltage, and modified the thing with a
double-polarity field somewhat similar to the molecular motion field
except that it works on a sub-nucleonic level. As a result, about half
of the lead fed into the chamber became contraterrene lead! The atoms
just turned themselves inside out, so to speak, giving us an atom with
positrons circling a negatively charged nucleus. It even gave the
neutrons a reverse spin, converting them into anti-neutrons.

"Result: total annihilation of matter! When the contraterrene lead atoms
met the terrene lead atoms, mutual annihilation resulted, giving us pure
energy.

"Some of this power can be bled off to power the mechanism itself; the
rest is useful energy. We've got all the power we need--power, literally
by the ton."

Fuller said nothing; he just looked dazed. He was well beginning to
believe that these three men could do the impossible and do it to order.

"The second