“I thought you would,” Dangle answered with his ready smile. “Well, Schulz began by telling Price that he knew he wasn’t going to live. Then he went on to say that he felt it cruelly hard luck, because he had accidentally come on a secret which would have brought him an immense fortune. Now he couldn’t use it. He had been going to let it die with him, but he remembered what he owed to Price and had decided to hand over the information to him. ‘But,’ he said, ‘there is one condition. You must first swear to me on your sacred honor that if you make anything out of it you will, after the war, try to find my wife and hand her one-eighth of what you get. I say one-eighth, because if you get any profits at all they will be so enormous that one-eighth will be riches to Magda.’ “I could see that Price thought he was delirious, but to quiet him he swore the oath and then Schulz told of his discovery. He said that before he had been given charge of the U-boat he had served for over six months in the Submarine Research Department, and that there, while carrying out certain experiments, he had had a lucky accident. Some substances which he had fused in an electric furnace had suddenly partially vaporized and, as it were, boiled over. The white-hot mass poured over the copper terminals of his furnace, with the result that the extremely high voltage current short-circuited with a corona of brilliant sparks. He described the affair in greater detail than this, but I am not an electrician and I didn’t follow the technicalities. But they don’t matter, it was the result that was important. When the current was cut off and the mass cooled he started in to clean up. He chipped the stuff off the terminals, and he found that the copper had fused and run. And then he made his great discovery: the copper had hardened. He tested it and found it was, roughly speaking, as hard as high carbon steel and with an even greater tensile strength! Unintentionally he had made a new and unknown alloy. Schulz knew that the ancients were able to harden copper and he supposed that he had found the lost art.