his was an altogether different
phenomenon from normal insulation.

He supposed some geological freak had formed the mineral. Venus was a
strange planet anyway. But that didn't matter. The important thing now
was to get to know this process. He went off into a happy mist of
quantum mechanics, oscillation theory, and periodic functions of a
complex variable.

Karen and Isaacson exchanged a slow smile.

* * * * *

Sophoulis and his people had done heroic work under adverse conditions.
A tentative theory of the mechanism involved had already been
formulated, and the search had started for a means to duplicate the
super-dielectricity in materials otherwise more suitable to man's needs.
But as he grew familiar with the place and the job, Lancaster wondered
just how adverse the conditions really were.

True, the equipment was old and cranky, much of it haywired together,
much of it invented from scratch. But Rakkan the Martian, for all his
lack of formal education, was unbelievably clever where it came to
making apparatus and making it behave, and Friedrichs was a top-flight
designer. The lab had what it needed--wasn't that enough?

The rest of Lancaster's crew were equally good. The Dufreres were
physical chemists _par excellence_, Isaacson a brilliant
crystallographer with an unusual brain for mathematics, Hwang an expert
on quantum theory and inter-atomic forces, Karen an imaginative
experimenter. None of them quite had the synthesizing mentality needed
for an overall picture and a fore-vision of the general direction of
work--that had been Sophoulis' share, and was now Lancaster's--but they
were all cheerful and skilled where it came to detail work and could
often make suggestions in a theoretical line.

Then, too, there was no Security snooping about, no petty scramble for
recognition and promotion, no red tape. What was more important,
Lancaster began to realize, was the personal nature of the whole
affair. In a Project, the overall chief set the pattern, and it was
followed by his subordinates with increasingly less latitude as you
worked down through the lower ranks. You did what you were told,
produced results or else, and kept your mouth shut outside your own
sector of the Project. You had only the vaguest idea of what actually
was being created, and why, and how it fitted into the broad scheme of
society.

Hwang and Rakkan commented on that, one "evening" at dinner when they