er if he isn't making one right now. Oh, well.
Give me another beer."

They talked on indifferent subjects till Karen said it was her bedtime.
Lancaster escorted her to her apartment. She looked at him curiously as
he said good night, and then went inside and closed the door. Lancaster
had trouble getting to sleep.

* * * * *

The corrected equations provided an adequate theory of
super-dielectricity--a theory with tantalizing hints about still other
phenomena--and gave the research team a precise idea of what they wanted
in the way of crystal structure. Actually, the substance to be formed
was only semi-crystalline, with plastic features as well, all interwoven
with a grid of carbon-linked atoms. Now the trick was to produce that
stuff. Calculation revealed what elements would be needed, and what
spatial arrangement--only how did you get the atoms to assume the
required configuration and hook up in the right way?

Theory would get you only so far, thereafter it was cut and try.
Lancaster rolled up his sleeves with the rest and let Karen take over
the leadership--she was the best experimenter. He spent some glorious
and all but sleepless weeks, greasy, dirty, living in a jungle of
haywired apparatus with a restless slide rule. There were plenty of
failures, a lot of heartbreak and profanity, an occasional injury--but
they kept going, and they got there.

The day came--or was it the night?--when Karen took a slab of darkly
shining substance out of the furnace where it had been heat-aging.
Rakkan sawed it into several chunks for testing. It was Lancaster who
worked on the electric properties.

He applied voltage till his generator groaned, and watched in awe as
meters climbed and climbed without any sign of stopping. He discharged
the accumulated energy in a single blue flare that filled the lab with
thunder and ozone. He tested for time lag of an electric signal and
wondered wildly if it didn't feel like sleeping on its weary path.

The reports came in, excited yells from one end of the long, cluttered
room to the other, exultant whoops and men pounding each other on the
back. This was it! This was the treasure at the rainbow's end.

* * * * *

The substance and its properties were physically and chemically stable
over a temperature range of hundreds of degrees. The breakdown voltage
was up in the millions. The insulation resistance was better than t