Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

“You’re growing to dislike me as we work, aren’t you?” Lin Yun asked me.

“Do you know what you’re like?”

“Try me.”

“You’re like a ship on the night sea making its way toward a lighthouse. Nothing in the world has any meaning for you but that flashing lighthouse. Nothing else is visible.”

“How poetic. But don’t you think you’re describing yourself as well?”

I knew she was right. Sometimes what we find hardest to tolerate in others is our own reflection. Now I recalled that one late night in the library in my first year of university, when the pretty girl asked me what I was looking for. Her expression, still clearly imprinted in my memory, was the face of someone looking at something strange. I felt certain that there was a boy who had looked at Lin Yun that way…. We were people untethered to our time, and untethered to each other, and we would never have a way to merge.

The small military transport plane landed, and Zhang Bin walked out of the tail hatch accompanied by Colonel Xu and another officer from the base. Zhang Bin looked far better than I had imagined, better even than how he had seemed at the university when we parted the previous year, not like he had a terminal illness. When I mentioned this to him, he said, “I wasn’t like this two days ago. But when I got your call, I halfway recovered.” He pointed at the four steel barrels that were being unloaded from the plane. “That’s the paint you wanted.”

Colonel Xu said, “We estimate that it will take a barrel and a half to paint a helicopter, so that’s certainly enough for two!”

Before getting in the car, Zhang Bin said, “Colonel Xu has already told me about your idea. I can’t comment on it at the moment, but I have a feeling that this time you and I might see ball lightning again.” He looked up at the clear post-rain sky and let out a long breath. “How wonderful that would be.”

Back at the base, we worked through the night to run some simple tests on the paint, and discovered that it was an excellent shield against lightning. Then, in the space of just two hours, we covered the two helicopters in the black paint.

The second discharge test was carried out before dawn. Before the pilots took off, Zhang Bin said to the aviator with the bandaged hand, “Fly without worries, kid. There won’t be any problems.”

Everything went smoothly. The two helicopters reached five thousand meters and ignited the arc, and then flew with it for ten minutes before landing, to applause from us all.

During the flight, the arc covered an area more than a hundred times larger than Base 3141, but this number was minuscule next to the huge area that needed to be swept.

I told Zhang Bin that the large-area airborne scan would commence in two days.

He said, “Remember to call me over!”

Watching him leave in the car, I felt a hollow emptiness I had never felt before. Facing the two helicopters and their now-still rotors, I said to Lin Yun beside me, “We’ve placed our bets before the natural world. Are we going to lose everything? Do you really believe the net will excite something in the air?”

Lin Yun said, “Don’t overthink it. Let’s just see what happens.”

The first scan began in the evening two days later. The two helicopters were on an even line with each other, Zhang Bin and I in one, and Lin Yun in the other. The weather was excellent, the stars glittered in the night air, and the lights of the capital were dimly visible on the distant horizon.

The two helicopters slowly drew closer to each other. At first, Lin Yun’s helicopter was only locatable by its navigation lights, but as it closed the gap, its outline began to stand out against the night sky, and I could gradually make out the serial number and Ba Yi insignia of the PLA. Eventually, even Lin Yun and the face of the aviator, lit red by the instrument panel, were clearly visible.

After a crisp crack , the helicopter was suddenly lit by a blinding blue light that filled our cabin as well. The narrow distance between the two craft meant we could only see a small portion of the arc connecting the electrodes beneath the fuselage, but we still had to avert our eyes from the blue glare. Lin Yun and I waved at each other across the blue-filled space.

“Put on eye protection!” the aviator shouted, reminding me that, during the week of installations and adjustments, the arc had already turned my eyes red and watery. I looked over at Zhang Bin, who wasn’t wearing goggles, or even looking at the arc at all. He was watching the light shining on the cabin ceiling, as if waiting, or deep in thought.

The moment I put on the goggles, I could see nothing but the electric arc. As the helicopters gradually separated, the arc lengthened. It was a wonderfully simple universe I saw through my goggles, just endless black emptiness and a long electric arc. In fact, this universe was the actual context for our search, a shapeless cosmos of electromagnetism within which the physical world did not exist. All was invisible fields and waves…. What I saw drained away the last of my confidence. It was hard to believe, looking at this scene, that there was anything else in this jet-black universe apart from the electric arc. To escape that feeling, I took off the goggles and, like Zhang Bin, confined my gaze to the cabin. The physical world illuminated by the electric light made me feel a little better.

Now the arc was one hundred meters long. It began to move with the helicopter formation as we accelerated toward the west. I wondered what people on the ground would think at the sudden appearance of this long electric arc against the starry night sky. What would they imagine it to be?

We flew for half an hour, during which time we remained silent apart from short radio communication between the aviators. Now the arc had swept a space more than a thousand times the total space covered by all artificial lightning generated in history, but we had found nothing.

The arc was gradually dimming, the superconducting batteries nearly spent. Lin Yun’s voice came over the earpiece: “Attention. Extinguish the arc, disengage, and return to base.” In her voice I sensed a note of consolation for us all.

If there was one ironclad rule in my life it was this: if you expect to fail, then you will. There was, of course, almost a month of midair searching to come, but I’d already anticipated the final outcome.

“Professor Zhang, we might be wrong.” During the whole flight, Zhang Bin had hardly looked outside the cabin, remaining deep in thought.

“No,” he said. “I am more convinced than ever that you’re correct.”

I exhaled softly. “I don’t really have much hope for the next month of searching.”

He looked at me. “It won’t take a month. My intuition tells me that it ought to appear tonight. Can we recharge back at base and then fly out again?”

I shook my head. “You’ve got to rest. We’ll see about tomorrow.”

He murmured, “It’s weird. It ought to have appeared….”

“Intuition isn’t reliable,” I said.

“No. In more than three decades this is the first time I’ve had this feeling. It’s reliable.”

Then the voice of an aviator spoke in our earpieces: “Target located! About one-third of the way from Arc 1.”

Trembling, Zhang Bin and I pressed ourselves against the window. There, thirteen years after my first sighting, and more than forty years since his, we saw for a second time that life-changing ball lightning.

It was orange in color and pulled a short tail behind it as it drifted in a fluctuating path in the night sky. Its path showed that it was utterly unaffected by the strong wind at this high altitude, as if it had absolutely no interaction with our world.