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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 II the 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 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.
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"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."
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