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Morelli was a stockily built, energetic, and purposeful man, endowed, as had
been evident from his image on the Infonet screen, with a swarthy complexion
and deep-brown eyes that had evidently been handed down to him along with his
name. By midmorning Aub and Clifford were seated in his spacious and
comfortable office overlooking the lake, while Morelli told them something
about the kind of work that he and his researchers had been engaged in for the
past few years. He had described to them how, through the 1990s, he had worked
in many areas of particle physics, his main specialty being the phenomenon of
particle-antiparticle annihilation. Near the end of that decade he had
discovered to his astonishment that he could set up an experimental situation
in which particles could be induced to self-annihilate -- to vanish without
the involvement of any antiparticle at all. Even after Morelli had spent some
time explaining how this was achieved, Aub still found it amazing.
Aub leaned back in the deep armchair and gazed at Morelli with unconcealed
awe. "I still can't get over it," he declared, shaking his head.
"You mean you can actually produce conditions in a lab that cause particles to
vanish -- not just to annihilate mutually with an antiparticle -- to do so on
their own? I've never heard of anything like that."
Morelli looked back across his desk with evident amusement. "Sure we can," he
said, as if making light of it. "We do it every day. After lunch I'll take you
to have a look at how we do it."
"But it's fantastic," Aub insisted. "Nobody at Berkeley ever talked about that
kind of thing. I never read about it...How come the results have never even
been published? Surely that kind of thing should have been published all
over."
"I was working in a government-controlled research program at the time,"
Morelli explained. "The whole project was subject to strict security. The
details are no doubt filed away somewhere where nobody can get at them...you
know the way it is."
"And yet you can work on the same kind of thing here at ISF...where you're not
under federal control." Clifford spoke from a chair beneath the window. "Seems
kind of...strange."
Morelli pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, apparently weighing his reply
before speaking. "Well we don't exactly go out of our way to broadcast what
we're doing here.
That was the first thing that I learned when I made the move -- if you want to
be left alone these days, don't attract attention."
"But people can just walk in and out of this place," Clifford said in mild
surprise. "I'm amazed word never leaked out. I mean...what about the people
who work here; they never talk to anybody outside?"
Morelli smiled the curious smile of somebody who knows more than discretion
permits him to say.
"You know, in World War lithe English sometimes sent absolutely top-
secret information through the ordinary mail, especially when they knew that
the enemy was making great efforts to get their hands on it. It's a funny
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thing, but when something's sitting there right under somebody's nose and
there's no attempt made to hide it, he often walks right on by -- particularly
if he's been conditioned to be neurotic about security. I suppose you could
say that we operate along that kind of principle...in an informal kind of way.
As for the people here..." Morelli shrugged as if to indicate that the point
did not require elaboration. "Oh, they're pretty smart. If they weren't, they
wouldn't be here." After a pause he added in a quiet voice: "You'd be
surprised at some of the work that goes on around the world inside ISF."
Clifford got the message that further questions on that subject would not be
in order. It was time to get back to the main topic of conversation.
"You were starting to tell us about your experiments here," he said.
"Right." Morelli sat forward and cleared a space in front of him for his arms.
"We've been running experiments on induced annihilation on a large scale for
about a year now. The building you came past after you landed -- you may have
noticed the big storage tanks by the wall outside it -- houses the equipment."
"The whole building?" Aub asked.
"Yes, it's pretty big machinery; as I said, we're working on large-scale
annihilation here, not just small lab tests. Anyhow, the setup is essentially
as I described a few minutes ago -- we project a beam of particle matter into
a reaction chamber where the annihilation takes place...induced by the
principles I've described. Our main work at present is to measure everything
associated with the process and to try to understand the physics of it better.
I won't go into too many details right now -- you'll see it all for yourselves
before you go." Then he grinned. "You can see how hung-up we are about
security."
"What kinds of things are coming out of all this?" Clifford asked.
"This is where I think you'll start to get interested, Brad," Morelli replied.
"And Aub, of course. You see, since we've been running large-scale tests,
we've discovered a remarkable thing -- we can generate a gravity field
artificially!" He paused and looked from one to the other to invite comment.
"You mean that when you annihilate large numbers of particles, you detect a
gravity field?" Clifford spoke slowly and thoughtfully; the implication was
immediately clear. Aub stared incredulously at Morelli for a moment and then
swung sharply round to face Clifford.
"Hey, Brad!" he exclaimed. "That's fantastic. It's just what you'd expect from
your theory. It's a part of it that we didn't even think there was any way to
test." He gestured toward the professor. "And he's, already tested it!"
Morelli quickly confirmed what Aub was saying. "The particle beam is induced
to annihilate inside a fairly small volume in the reaction chamber.
When we wind the beam up to a relatively high intensity, we detect a well-
defined gravity field around the annihilation volume. It's exactly as if there
was a large, concentrated mass present there...which, of course, there isn't.
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