Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

I thought about that strand of my mother’s hair.

With the light still on, I went back to bed, but it was even harder to fall asleep. It would be a long night, so I simply got up, opened one of the boxes, and went on reading Zhang Bin’s calculations. After I got through a dozen pages, a page caught my eye: half of the derivations on the page had been crossed out with an X written in ink a different color from the original manuscript. In the white space on the page, a simpler formula had been written, obviously in place of the part that had been crossed out. The formula and the X were written in identical ink. What attracted my attention was the formula’s handwriting, delicate and graceful, clearly distinct from Zhang Bin’s original. I took out the notebook of alternating burnt pages he had given me, carefully opened it, and compared the handwriting to the formula.

It was an unbelievable outcome, but one that I had expected. Zhang Bin was a meticulous man, and each set of calculations was dated. The date on this portion was April 7, 1983, twelve years after his wife’s death.

But this was Zheng Min’s handwriting.

I looked closely at the simple formula, which applied to boundary conditions for low-dissipative-state plasma, and realized it replaced the cumbersome crossed-out derivations with a plug-in parameter obtained by a Mitsubishi Electric lab in 1985 while researching the use of plasma streams as a rotor replacement in high-efficiency generators. The project ultimately failed, but one of its by-products was a plasma parameter that had subsequently been widely adopted. But that was after 1985.

At once I opened up the as-yet-unopened boxes and skimmed the other notebooks. I discovered five manuscript pages with edits in the same hand, and I would probably find more if I looked more thoroughly. In each of them, Zhang had done his calculations no earlier than the 1980s.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, quiet enough to clearly hear the beating of my heart. My eyes fell on the laptop on the desk. I turned it on, and opened up the scanned photo of Zheng Min saved on the hard drive. I’d scanned it using the highest resolution available, and now I inspected it carefully, trying to hide from the lifelike gaze of the photo’s subject. There seemed to be something there, and so I hurriedly started up a photo editor. I had lots of them installed on this machine because I often had to process a large quantity of lightning photographs; the one I fired up this time could automatically convert black-and-white photos to color. In no time the software had completed the conversion, and although the color was somewhat distorted, it gave me what I wanted. People always look younger in black and white. In this photo, taken a year before Zheng Min was killed, the color revealed the truth that had been hidden by the monochrome: the Zheng Min portrayed in the photo was far older than the age she had been when it was taken.

She wore a white lab coat. The left breast pocket contained a flat object. The pocket fabric was thin enough that it revealed the shape and some of the details of the object within. It caught my eye immediately, and so I cropped that part of the image and opened it in another image program to try and extract more detail. I was fairly adept at this, due to my frequent processing of fuzzy lightning photos, and I soon exposed the outline and details of the object.

What I now saw clearly was a 3½-inch diskette.

It was not until the ’80s that 5¼-inch disks became widely used in China, and 3½-inch disks were adopted even later than that. It should have been a roll of black punch tape in her pocket.

I ripped out the computer’s power cord, but forgot that it was still powered by a battery, so I had to move the mouse with a trembling hand to shut it down. I closed the case immediately after I clicked the button. It felt like Zheng Min’s eyes were piercing the closed computer case to look at me, and the silence of the night clutched me in its giant icy hand.

When I informed Gao Bo of my decision to follow him to the Lightning Institute in Beijing, he said, “Before you make your final decision, I need to make one thing clear: I know that your head is filled with ball lightning, and even though our starting points are different, I’m optimistic about the project too. But you ought to be clear that at the beginning, I can’t put a ton of the Institute’s resources into your project. Do you know why Zhang Bin failed? He buried himself in theory and couldn’t dig out! Still, you can’t blame him, given the limitations of his situation. If the past two years have given you the impression that I ignore experimentation, you’re wrong—I didn’t consider experiments for your PhD because they would have had too high a cost and would have been impossible for us to do well. Inaccurate or false results would have dragged down the theory, and in the end neither theory nor experiment would have amounted to anything. I recruited you so you can do ball lightning research—there’s no question about that—but you must acquire all the necessary experimental fundamentals before you can start in earnest. The three things we need now are money, money, and more money. You’ve got to work with me to get money, understand?”

These words showed me a new side of him. I now saw that he was one of those rare people with a nimble academic mind who was also grounded in the real world—perhaps a characteristic of people who came out of MIT. I was thinking along the same lines: establishing a basic experimental facility was essential for studying ball lightning, since artificially generating it would signify success. These facilities ought to include large lightning simulators, complex magnetic field generators, and even more complex sensing and detection systems, which would require a truly frightening budget. I wasn’t entirely stuck in my books, and I knew that realizing this dream would have to start with small steps.

On the train, Gao Bo brought up Lin Yun. It had been two years since Mount Tai, but she had never left my mind, although my focus on ball lightning had kept my thoughts of her well under control. The time I spent with her on Mount Tai was the most treasured of my memories, and it often emerged when I was fatigued, soothing me like soft music. Gao Bo had said once that he envied me in this state, enjoying an emotional life with the detachment necessary to avoid getting pulled in.

He said, “She told you about a lightning weapons system. That interests me a lot.”

“You want to do defense projects?”

“Why not? There’s no way the military has perfected lightning research, so they’ll look to us sooner or later. Projects like that have a stable source of funding, and a very promising market.”

Since parting, Lin Yun and I had had no contact. She had given me a mobile number, so Gao Bo told me to get in touch as soon as we reached Beijing.

“You’ve got to figure out the state of the military’s lightning weapons research. Remember, don’t ask her for details outright. You could ask her to dinner or to a concert or something, and then when you’re on good terms…,” he said, looking like a wily old spymaster.

In Beijing, I called up Lin Yun even before settling down. When her familiar voice came on the phone, I felt an inexpressible warmth, and I could hear that she felt pleasantly surprised when she heard it was me. I ought to have suggested meeting up at her workplace, as Gao Bo had instructed, but before I could bring myself to ask, she unexpectedly invited me over.

“Come find me at New Concepts. I’ve got something to discuss with you!” She gave me an address on the outskirts of the city.

“New Concepts?” What sprung to mind was L. G. Alexander’s English-language textbook.