Лю Цысинь - Ball Lightning

Zhao Yu slammed his glass on the table. “Zhang Hefu?”

“Right, yes. That’s the name. I looked after him for a couple days at Tai’an Hospital, and after he left, he wrote a letter to thank me. I think it came from Beijing. Then we lost contact, and I don’t know where he is now.”

Zhao Yu said to Lao Wang, “He’s in Nanjing. He’s a professor at my old university.” He turned to me. “He was our advisor.”

“What?” My glass nearly dropped out of my hand.

“Zhang Bin used to go by that name, but he changed it during the Cultural Revolution because it sounded too much like Khrushchev.”

Zhao Yu and I sat for a long time without saying anything, until finally Lao Wang broke the silence: “It’s not really all that coincidental. You’re in the same field, after all. He was a fine young man, that one. With his legs hurting so bad he bit through his lips from the pain, he just lay in bed reading. I tried to get him to rest for a while, but he said that from then on, there was no time to waste, because his life had just acquired a purpose. He was going to study it, and he wanted to generate it.”

“Study and generate what?” I asked.

“Rolling lightning! The ball lightning you were talking about.”

Zhao Yu and I stared at each other.

Not noticing our expressions, Lao Wang continued, “He said that he would devote a lifetime to its study, and I could tell that what he had seen on the mountain peak had him fascinated. People are like that—they sometimes become fascinated with something without knowing it and are unable to get rid of it their entire life. Take me: twenty years ago I went out to get some wood for the cooking stove and pulled out a tree root. When I was about to toss it into the fire, I thought it looked a little bit like a tiger, and then after I polished it up and set it down, it really looked rather nice. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with root carving, and that’s the reason that I’ve stayed on the mountain, even when I retired.”

I noticed that Zhao Yu’s room did indeed have lots of root carvings of various sizes, which he told me were all Lao Wang’s pieces.

We did not speak of Zhang Bin after that. Although we were thinking about him, it was not something easily put into words.

After dinner, Zhao Yu took me for a nighttime tour of the meteorology station. When we passed the only lit window in their small guesthouse, I stopped short in surprise, for in the room was the white-clothed girl. She was alone and apparently lost in thought as she paced back and forth in the middle of the room between two beds and a desk covered in open books and papers.

“Hey, be polite. Don’t peep through other people’s windows.” Zhao Yu gave me a push from behind.

“I saw her on the way up here,” I explained.

“She’s here to arrange for lightning monitoring. The Provincial Meteorological Bureau notified us before she arrived, but didn’t say where she’s from. It’s got to be some big work unit. They’re going to ship equipment to the peak by helicopter.”

There were thunderstorms the following day, as it turned out. The way thunder rocked the peak was an entirely different experience from what I’d been through on the ground, as if Mount Tai was a lightning rod for the earth that attracted a universe worth of lightning. Sparks flashing from the rooftops made you tingle all over. With hardly any gap between lightning and thunder, massive rumbles shook every cell in your body until you felt that the mountain beneath your feet had been blown to bits and your soul displaced, flitting terrified between the dazzling bolts with no place to hide…

The woman in white stood at the edge of the corridor, wind whipping at her short hair and her slender form frail looking against the web of lightning that flickered within dense black clouds. She presented an unforgettable picture as she stood motionless amid the terrible thunder.

“You’d better stand over here. It’s dangerous, and you’ll get soaked!” I called to her.

She shook out of her lightning reverie and retreated two steps. “Thanks.” She turned to look at me, and beamed. “You may not believe it, but it’s only at times like these that I feel any sense of security.”

Strange: normally you had to shout to be heard through the thunder, but even though the woman spoke softly, her gentle tones somehow penetrated the peals of thunder so that I was able to hear her words clearly. The mysterious woman captivated me even more than the lightning.

“You’re something else.” I gave voice to my thoughts.

“So you’re into atmospheric electricity,” she said, ignoring my words.

By now the thunder had died enough that we could talk freely. I asked, “Are you here to monitor lightning?” I phrased my question carefully, because from what Zhao Yu had said, I got the feeling her background was off-limits.

“That’s right.”

“What aspects?”

“The formation process. I don’t want to insult your profession, but even now there’s debate within the field of atmospheric physics over basic things like how lightning is formed in thunderclouds, and how a lightning rod works.”

I realized that even if she did not work in atmospheric physics, she had at least dabbled in it. Like she said, there was no satisfactory theory for the principle of lightning formation in thunderclouds, and although every schoolchild knows that lightning rods protect against lightning, the underlying theory was not well understood. In recent years, precise calculations of the charge carried by the metal tip of a lightning rod showed that it was far too low to neutralize the charge that builds up in a thundercloud.

“So your research is very basic.”

“Our ultimate goals are practical.”

“Based on research on the lightning formation process? Hmm. Lightning elimination?”

“No. Artificial lightning.”

“Artificial… lightning? What for?”

She smiled sweetly. “Guess.”

“Manufacturing nitrogenous fertilizer?”

She shook her head.

“Patching the ozone hole?”

Again, she shook her head.

“Using lightning as a new power source?”

Once again, she shook her head.

“No, it couldn’t really be a power source because creating lightning would consume even more power. So there’s only one thing left—”

Jokingly, I said, “Killing people with lightning?”

She nodded.

I laughed. “Then you’ve got to solve the targeting problem. Lightning follows a fairly random broken line.”

She sighed slightly. “We’ll worry about that later. We haven’t even figured out how to produce it yet. But we’re not interested in how lightning is formed in thunderclouds. What we want is the rare lightning that forms on cloudless days, but observing that is even more difficult…. What’s wrong with you?”

“You’re serious!” I said, stunned.

“Of course! We’ve predicted that the most valuable use of this project will be the construction of a high-efficiency air defense system comprising a vast lightning field blanketing a city or some other protected target. Enemy planes will attract lightning when they enter, and under those circumstances the targeting issue you mentioned becomes unimportant. Sure, if land is used as one of the poles, then you could also hit land targets, but there are additional problems with that…. We’re really only performing a feasibility study for the concept and are looking for inspiration in the most basic areas of research. If it turns out to be feasible, we’ll turn to professional organizations like your own for the implementation specifics.”

I exhaled. “Are you in the army?”

She introduced herself as Lin Yun, a doctoral student at the National University of Defense Technology, who specialized in air defense weapons systems.