"For the first, ordinary atomic energy wouldn't do. It's not controllable enough and uranium isn't something we could carry by the ton. So I began working with high-density currents. "At the temperature of liquid helium, near absolute zero, lead becomes a nearly perfect conductor. Back in nineteen twenty, physicists had succeeded in making a current flow for four hours in a closed circuit. It was just 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 thing," Arcot continued, "was, as I said, a way to store the energy so that it could be released as rapidly or as slowly as we needed it.