“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.
“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. In other words, the process simulates the gravitational effect of mass.”