densers made possible by a genuinely good dielectric material. Given
that, you could do fantastic things in electronics. Most significant of
all was the matter of energy storage. If you could store large amounts
of electricity in an accumulator of small volume, without appreciable
leakage loss, you could build generators designed to handle average
rather than peak load--with resultant savings in cost; you could build
electric motors, containing their own energy supply and hence
portable--which meant electric automobiles and possibly aircraft; you
could use inconveniently located power sources, such as remote
waterfalls, or dilute sources like sunlight, to augment--maybe
eventually replace--the waning reserves of fuel and fissionable
minerals; you could.... Lancaster's mind gave up on all the
possibilities opening before him and settled down to the immediate task
at hand.

"The original mineral was found on Venus, in the Gorbu-vashtar country,"
explained Karen Marek. "Here's a sample." She gave him a lump of rough,
dense material which glittered in hard rainbow points of light. "It was
just a curiosity at first, till somebody thought to test its electrical
properties. Those were slightly fantastic. We have all chemical and
physical data on this stuff already, of course, as well as an excellent
idea of its crystal structure. It's a funny mixture of barium and
titanium compounds with some rare earths and--well, read the report for
yourself."

Lancaster's eyes skimmed down the sheaf of papers she handed him. "Can't
make very good condensers out of this," he objected. "Too brittle--and
look how the properties vary with temperature. A practical dielectric
has to be stable in every way, at least over the range of conditions you
intend to use it in."

She nodded.

"Of course. Anyway, the mineral is very rare on Venus, and you know how
tough it is to search for anything in Gorbu-vashtar. What's important is
the lead it gave Sophoulis. You see, the dielectric constant of this
material isn't constant at all. It _increases_ with applied voltage.
Look at this curve here."

Lancaster whistled. "What the devil--but that's impossible! That much
variability means a crystal structure which is--uh--flexible, damn it!
But you've got a brittle substance here--"

According to the accepted theory of dielectricity, this couldn't be.
Lancaster realized with a thumping behind his veins that the theory
would have to be modified. Rather, t