for example , the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry , which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation ( a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries , and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war ) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck .