Ball Lightning

College

Major courses: Higher Mathematics, Theoretical Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, Principles and Applications of Computers, Languages and Programming, Dynamic Meteorology, Principles of Synoptic Meteorology, Chinese Meteorology, Statistical Forecasting, Long-Term Weather Forecasting, Numerical Forecasting.

Elective courses: Atmospheric Circulation, Meteorological Diagnostic Analysis, Storms and Mid-Scale Meteorology, Thunderstorm Prediction and Prevention, Tropical Meteorology, Climate Change and Short-Term Climate Prediction, Radar and Satellite Meteorology, Air Pollution and Urban Climatology, High-Altitude Meteorology, Atmosphere-Ocean Interactions.

Just five days before, I had taken care of everything in the house and set out for a southern city a thousand kilometers away to go to college. Shutting the door to a now-empty house, I knew that I was leaving my childhood behind forever. From now on, I would be a machine in pursuit of a single goal.

Looking over the list of courses that would occupy me for the next four years, I felt a little disappointed. Many of the things on it I had no need for, and some of the things that I did need—like Electricity and Magnetism and Plasma Physics—were not. I realized that I might have applied to the wrong major, and perhaps should have gone into physics instead of atmospheric science.

So I plunged into the library, spending most of my time on mathematics, E&M, and plasma physics, attending only the classes that involved those subjects and basically skipping all of the rest. Colorful collegiate life had nothing for me, and I had no interest in it. Returning to my dorm room at one or two in the morning and hearing a roommate mumble his girlfriend’s name in his sleep was the only reminder I had of that other mode of life.

One night, well after midnight, I lifted my head out of a thick partial differential equations text. I had assumed that at this time of night I would be the only student left in the nighttime reading room, as usual, but across from me I saw Dai Lin, a pretty girl from my class. She had no books in front of her. She was simply resting her head on her hands and looking at me. Her expression would not have been enchanting to her scads of admirers. It was the look of someone who has discovered a spy in camp, a look directed at something alien. I had no idea how long she had been looking at me.

“You’re a peculiar person. I can tell you’re not just a nerd because you’ve got a strong sense of purpose,” she said.

“Oh? Doesn’t everyone have goals?” I tossed off the question. I may have been the only male student in class who had never spoken to her.

“Our goals are vague. But you, you’re definitely looking for something very specific.”

“You’ve got a good eye for people,” I said blandly as I gathered my books and stood up. I was the one man who had no need to show off for her, and this gave me a sense of superiority.

When I reached the door, she called after me, “What are you looking for?”

“You wouldn’t be interested.” I left without looking back.

In the quiet autumn night outside, I looked up at a sky full of stars. My dad’s voice seemed to carry on the air: “The key to a wonderful life is a fascination with something.” Now I understood how right he was. My life was a speeding missile, and I had no other desire than to hear it explode as it hit its target. A goal with no practical purpose, but one that would make my life complete once I reached it. Why I was going to that particular place, I did not know. It was enough to simply want to go, an impulse that lay at the core of human nature. Oddly, I had never gone to look up any materials related to It. My fascination and I were two knights whose entire lives would be devoted to preparing for a single duel, and until I was ready I would neither think about it nor seek it out directly.

Three semesters passed in the blink of an eye, time that felt like one uninterrupted span, because without a home to return to, I spent all of my holidays at school. Living all by myself in a spacious dormitory, I had few feelings of loneliness. Only on the eve of the Spring Festival, when I heard the firecrackers going off outside, did I think about my life before It had appeared, but that life felt like it was a generation ago. As I spent those nights in a dorm room with the heat turned off, the cold made my dreams especially lifelike.

Although I had imagined as a child that my mom and dad would appear in my dreams, they had not. I remembered an Indian legend that told of a king who, when his beloved consort died, decided to build a luxurious tomb the likes of which had never before been seen. He spent the better part of his life working on that tomb. Finally, when construction was complete, he noticed his consort’s coffin lying right at the center and said: That doesn’t belong. Take it away.

My parents had long since departed, and It occupied every corner of my mind.

But what happened next complicated my simple world.

Strange Phenomena I

The summer after my sophomore year I took a trip back home to rent out the old place so I could afford my future tuition.

It was already dark when I arrived, so I had to feel around to turn the lock and make my way in. Turning on the light revealed a familiar scene. The table that had held a birthday cake during the night of the thunderstorm was still there, with three chairs still sitting around it, as if I had left just yesterday. Exhausted, I sat down on the sofa, and as I took stock of my home, I felt that something was not right. The feeling was indistinct at first, but as it gradually took shape like a submerged reef coming into view during a foggy cruise, I could not avoid it.

At last I discovered the source: it was as if I had left just yesterday.

I inspected the table: there was a thin layer of dust, a little too thin for the two years I had been away.

I went to the bathroom to wash the dirt and sweat off my face. When I turned on the light, I could see myself clearly in the mirror. Too clearly. The mirror should not have been that clean. I distinctly remembered going away with my parents during one summer break when I was in elementary school, and although we were only gone a month, when we came back, I could draw a stick figure in the dust on the mirror. Now, when I made a few strokes on the mirror with my finger, nothing appeared.

I turned on the faucet. After two years, the water from the iron tap should have been rusty, but what flowed out was perfectly clear.

I went back to the living room after washing my face and noticed something else: Two years ago, just as I was about to leave, but before I shut the door, I looked over the entire room on the off-chance that I had forgotten something and had noticed a glass sitting on the table. I thought about turning it upside down so it would not collect dust, but with my luggage in hand it would have taken too much effort to go back, so I dropped the idea. I distinctly remembered that detail.

But now, the glass was turned upside down on the table!

Just then, the neighbors came over to see why the lights were on. They greeted me with the sort of kind words one uses with an orphan who has gone off to college, promising that they would take care of renting the place and, if I could not come back after graduation, help me get a good price for it.

“The environment seems to have improved quite a bit since I left,” I said casually, as talk turned to how things had changed over the past two years.

“Improved? Get your eyes checked! That power plant over by the distillery just started up last year, and now there’s twice as much dust as when you left! Ha! Are things improving anywhere these days?”

I glanced at the table and its thin layer of dust and said nothing. But when I saw them off, I could not help asking whether any of them had a key to the house. They looked at each other in surprise and said they most certainly did not. I believed them, because there had been a total of five keys, three of which still worked. When I left two years ago I took all three: one I had with me now, and two others were far away in my college dorm room.

After the neighbors left, I inspected the windows, all of them tightly sealed with no evidence of break-ins.

The remaining two keys had been carried by my parents. But on that night, they had melted. I will never forget how I’d found those two misshapen lumps of metal among my parents’ ashes. Those keys, melted and resolidified, were sitting in my dormitory a thousand kilometers away, as mementos of that fantastic energy.

I sat for a while before starting to get together the things that would be stored or taken back with me once the house was rented. I first packed my father’s watercolors, one of the few things in the room that I wanted to save. I took down the ones hanging on the walls first, then got others out of a cabinet and packed as many as I could find into a cardboard box. Then I noticed one more painting. It was still lying on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, facedown, which was why I had missed it. When I glanced at it before putting it into the box, it seized my whole attention.

It was a landscape painting of the scenery visible from the door to our home. The surrounding scenery was dull: a few gray four-story walk-ups and several rows of poplars, lifeless from the dust covering them….

As a third-rate amateur painter, my father was lazy. Rarely going out to sketch from the real world, he was content to paint the muddy scenes that surrounded him. He said that there were no flat colors, only mediocre painters. That was the sort of painter he was, but these flat scenes, which acquired another level of woodenness as interpreted through his artless brush, actually managed to capture everyday life in this dingy northern city. The painting I held in my hand was like so many already in the box, with nothing in particular to recommend it.

But I had noticed something: a water tower that was a little more brightly colored than the old buildings surrounding it, standing tall like a morning glory. Nothing special, really, because there was indeed a water tower outside. I looked out the window at the towering structure silhouetted against the lights of the city.

Except, the water tower had not been completed until after I went off to college. When I left two years ago, it had been half-finished and covered in scaffolding.

I trembled, and the painting slipped out of my hand. A breath of cold air seemed to blow through the house on this midsummer night.

I crammed the painting into the box, closed the lid tightly, and then started packing other things. I tried to focus my attention on the task at hand, but my mind was a needle suspended on a filament, and the box was a strong magnet. With effort, I could redirect the needle, but once I let up, it would swing back in that direction.

It was raining. The raindrops tapped softly against the windowpane, but the sound seemed to be coming from the box….

Finally, when I could not stand it any longer, I raced to the box, opened it, took out the painting, and carried it to the bathroom, taking care to hold it facedown. Then I took out a lighter and lit one corner. When about a third of the painting had burned up, I gave in and flipped it over. The water tower was even more lifelike than before, and seemed to poke out of the surface. I watched as it was consumed by flames, which turned strange, seductive colors as the watercolors burned. I dropped the last bit of the painting into the sink and watched it burn out, then turned on the faucet and rinsed the ashes down the drain.

When I turned off the faucet, my eyes were drawn to something on the edge of the sink that I had not noticed when I’d washed my face.

A few strands of hair. Long hair.

They were white hairs, some completely white, so they blended in with the sink, and others half-white, the black portions catching my attention. Definitely not hair that I had left behind two years before. My hair had never been that long, and I had never had any white hair at all. Carefully, I lifted up one long, half-black, half-white strand.

… pluck one, and seven will grow back…

I tossed the hair aside like it burned my hand. As the strand drifted gently downward, it left a trail: a trail made up of the fleeting images of many strands, like a momentary persistence of vision. It did not land beside the sink, but fell only partway before vanishing into thin air. I looked back at the other hairs on the sink: they, too, had vanished without a trace.

I ran my head under the faucet for a long while, then walked stiffly back to the living room, where I sat down on the sofa and listened to the rain outside. It had turned heavy, a storm without thunder or lightning. Rain pounded on the windows, sounding like a voice, or perhaps many people speaking softly, as if they were trying to remind me of something. As I listened, I started to imagine the meaning of the murmuring, which became more and more real as it was repeated:

There was lightning that night, there was lightning that night, there was lightning that night, there was lightning that night, there was lightning that night…

Once again I sat in that house until dawn on a stormy night, and once again I numbly left home. I knew I was leaving something behind forever, and I knew I would never return.

Ball Lightning

Classes in atmospheric electricity started that semester, meaning I would finally have to face it.

The subject was taught by an assistant professor named Zhang Bin. He was about fifty, neither short nor tall, wore glasses that were neither thick nor thin, had a voice that was neither loud nor soft, and his lectures were neither great nor terrible. In sum, as average as a person could be, except for a slight limp in one leg, something you would not notice unless you paid close attention.

That afternoon after class, I was left alone in the lecture room with Zhang Bin, who was gathering his things at the podium and did not notice me. A late-autumn sunset sent its golden beams into the room, and a layer of golden leaves covered the windowsill. Ordinarily cold and detached, I suddenly realized that this was the season for poetry.

I got up and walked over to the podium. “Professor Zhang, I’d like to ask you a question completely unrelated to today’s lecture.”

He looked up at me for a moment before nodding and returning his attention to his things.

“It’s about ball lightning. What can you tell me about it?” I uttered the words that I had kept buried deep in my heart, never daring to speak aloud.

His hands ceased their activity. He looked up—not at me, but out the window at the setting sun, as if that were what I was referring to. “What do you want to know?” he asked after a few seconds.

“Everything,” I said.

Zhang Bin continued to look at the sun as its light bathed his face. It was still quite bright at that hour. Didn’t it hurt his eyes?

“The historical record, for example,” I prompted in more detail.

“In Europe, records exist from as early as the Middle Ages. In China, a relatively clear record was set down by Zhang Juzheng in the Ming dynasty. But the first formal scientific discussion only occurred in 1837, and the scientific community didn’t accept it as a natural phenomenon until the last forty years.”

“Any theories about it?”

“There are many.” After this simple sentence, Zhang Bin was silent. He turned away from the setting sun, but did not resume getting his things together. He seemed deep in thought.

“What are the traditional theories?”

“That it’s a vortex of high-temperature plasma whose rapid internal rotation exerts a force in equilibrium with outside atmospheric pressure and thus can maintain stability for a relatively long time.”

“And?”

“Others believe that it’s a chemical reaction within a high-temperature gas mixture, by which it maintains energy equilibrium.”

“Can you tell me anything else?” Asking him questions was like trying to move a heavy grindstone that barely budged an inch with each push.

“There’s also the microwave-soliton theory, which says that ball lightning is caused by an atmospheric maser with a volume of several cubic meters…. A maser is like a much less powerful laser, which, inside a large volume of air, can produce a localized magnetic field as well as solitons, which then create visible ball lightning.”

“And the latest theories?”

“There are lots. For example, one by Abrahamson and Dinniss at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has gained a fair amount of attention. Their theory says that ball lightning is primarily due to the oxidization of a filamentary network of silicon nanoparticles. There are many more. Some people even believe that it is a cold fusion reaction in the air.”

He paused, but then came out with more information: “In this country, there’s someone at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who has suggested an atmospheric plasma theory. It starts off with magnetic fluid dynamics equations and introduces a vector-soliton resonator model which, under appropriate boundary temperatures, is theoretically able to achieve a plasma vortex in the atmosphere—a fireball—and whose numerical analysis explains both the necessary and sufficient conditions for its existence.”

“And your opinion of this theory?”

He shook his head gently. “Proving the theory requires nothing more than producing ball lightning in the lab, but no one has succeeded yet.”

“Nationally, how many eyewitnesses have there been?”

“Quite a few. I’d say at least a thousand. The most famous was in 1998, when state television was shooting a documentary of the flood-fighting efforts on the Yangtze River and unwittingly recorded ball lightning on film.”

“One last question, Professor. In the atmospheric physics community, are there people who have personally witnessed ball lightning?”

Once again, he looked out the window at the setting sun. “Yes.”

“When?”

“In July 1962.”

“Where?”

“Yuhuang Peak on Mount Tai.”

“Do you know where that person is now?”

Zhang Bin shook his head, then raised his wrist and glanced at his watch: “You should head to the cafeteria for dinner.” Then he picked up his things and left the building.

I caught up to him and finally asked the question that had been in my mind all these years: “Professor Zhang, can you imagine a fireball-shaped object that can pass through walls, and can reduce a person to ashes instantaneously even though it doesn’t feel hot? There is a record of a sleeping couple reduced to ashes in their bed without a single scorch mark on their blanket! Can you imagine it entering a refrigerator and instantly turning all your frozen food cooked and piping hot without affecting the refrigerator’s operation? Can you imagine it burning your undershirt to a crisp without you feeling a thing? Can the theories you’ve mentioned explain all of this?”

“There’s no proof for any of those theories,” he said, without altering his stride.

“Then, if we leave the confines of atmospheric physics, do you think there is any explanation in the rest of physics, or even in all of science itself, for this phenomenon? Aren’t you even the least bit curious? Your reaction is even more shocking than seeing ball lightning itself!”

Zhang Bin stopped and turned to face me for the first time: “You’ve seen ball lightning?”

“…I was just speaking hypothetically.”

I could not reveal my deepest secret to this unfeeling person before me. Society was plagued by stoicism in the face of the profound mysteries of the natural world: its existence was the bane of science. If science had less of that sort of person, who knows, maybe humanity would have reached Alpha Centauri by now!

He said, “The field of atmospheric physics is very practical. Ball lightning is such a rare phenomenon that neither the IEC/TC-81 international standard for protection against lightning in structures nor China’s 1993 Standard for Protection of Structures Against Lightning dealt with it. So there’s really no point in devoting any effort to it.”

There was nothing I could say to a person like Zhang Bin, so I thanked him and left. And, truth be told, even admitting the existence of ball lightning was already a major step for him. Before the scientific community formally recognized its existence in 1963, all eyewitness accounts were judged hallucinations. One day that year, Roger Jennison, a professor of electronics at the University of Kent, personally witnessed ball lightning on an airplane departing New York in the form of a twenty-centimeter-wide fireball that passed through the wall separating the pilot’s cabin and the passenger cabin and down the aisle before disappearing through a wall.

That evening, I performed my first Google search for “ball lightning.” I was not particularly hopeful, but I ended up with more than forty thousand search results. For the first time since deciding to devote my entire life to this thing, I felt like the world was paying attention, too.

Another semester began, and then the sweltering summer arrived. For me, summer had an additional meaning: thunderstorms would appear and bring me that much closer to It.

One day, out of the blue, Zhang Bin came looking for me. The class I had with him had concluded the previous semester, and I had practically forgotten him.

He said, “Chen, I’ve heard that your parents are gone and you’re in a tight spot financially. I’ve got a summer project that needs another assistant. Can you come?”

“What sort of project?” I asked him.

“It’s a parameter determination for anti-lightning equipment for a railroad being built in Yunnan Province. And there’s one additional goal: in the new national standards for lightning protection currently under deliberation, the plan is to replace the ground flash density of 0.015 from the previous standard with one determined according to individual local conditions. We’re doing the observations in Yunnan.”

I agreed to go. Although I was not particularly rich, I could still get by. I agreed because this was my first chance for real hands-on lightning research.

The task force consisted of about a dozen people divided into five teams distributed over a large area, with several hundred kilometers between them. The group I was in had three members apart from the driver and experimental assistants: myself, Zhang Bin, and a grad student named Zhao Yu. When we reached our zone, we roomed at the county-level meteorological station.

The weather was quite good the next morning, so we could start our first day of field work. As we were moving the instruments and equipment out to the car from the room we were using as temporary storage, I asked, “Professor Zhang, what are some good ways for exploring the internal structure of lightning?”

He peered at me intently for a moment, as if aware of what I was thinking. “Judging from the current needs of domestic engineering projects, research on the lightning structure is not a priority. The priority right now is large-scale statistical research.” Whenever I brought up anything even remotely related to ball lightning, he dodged the question. Evidently the man genuinely detested everything that lacked practical value.

But Zhao Yu answered my question: “There aren’t many. Right now, we can’t even directly measure its voltage. We have to calculate indirectly from measurements of the current. The most common instrument for studying the structure of lightning is, well, this.” He pointed to a tubular object sitting in one corner of the storeroom. “This is a magnetic steel recorder, and it’s used to record the amplitude and polarity of the lightning current. The material it’s constructed from has a relatively high residual magnetism, and when the inside lead comes into contact with lightning, you can calculate its amplitude and polarity from the residual magnetism left on the device. This one’s 60Si2Mn spring steel, but there are also plastic tubes, blade-core, and iron-powder types.”

“And we’ll be using it?”

“Of course. Why else would we bring it? But that’s for later on.”

The first stage of our mission was to install a lightning positioning system in the monitoring zone to aggregate signals from a large number of scattered lightning sensors and feed them into a computer that would automatically generate statistics of the number, frequency, and distribution of lightning strikes. It was really only a counting and positioning system and did not involve any physical data, so I was not interested at all. Most of the work consisted of setting up the outdoor sensors, and that was not easy. If we were lucky, we could mount the sensors on electrical poles or transmission towers, but most of the time we had to erect poles ourselves. After a few days, the experimental assistants were complaining incessantly.

Nothing interested Zhao Yu, least of all his major. At work, he constantly procrastinated, and seized every chance he could to slack off. At first he was full of praise for the tropical forest environs, but when the novelty wore off, he seemed dispirited. Still, he was easy to get along with, and we ended up talking quite a bit.

Every evening when we returned to town, Zhang Bin always went back to his room to bury his head in that day’s materials, so Zhao Yu took the opportunity to drag me off for a drink on one of the rustic streets. The electricity was usually off on that street, and the candles that flickered in the wooden buildings took me back to an age before atmospherics, before physics, before even science itself, so that I could forget reality for a moment. One day, as we sat, slightly tipsy, in a small candlelit inn, he said, “The people in the forest would have a wonderful explanation for you if they ever saw your ball lightning.”

“I’ve asked the locals,” I said. “They’ve been aware of it for a long time, and they already have an explanation. Ghost lanterns.”

“Isn’t that enough?” he said, unfolding his fingers. “It’s beautiful. All your plasmas and vector-soliton resonators may not be able to tell you anything more than that. Modernity is complex, and I don’t like complexity.”

I snorted. “Look at you and your attitude. Professor Zhang’s the only one who’ll tolerate you.”

“Don’t talk to me about Zhang Bin,” Zhao Yu said with a drunken wave. “He’s the sort of person who, if he drops his keys, won’t look for them in the place the sound came from. Instead, he’ll get a piece of chalk and divide the room into a grid and then search section by section….”

We broke down into fits of laughter.

“People like him are suited only to the sort of work that will be done entirely by machines in the future. Creativity and imagination have no meaning for them, and they employ rigor and discipline in their scholarship to cover up their mediocrity. You know the universities are full of them. Still, with enough time, you can find things going section by section, so they manage to do well in their field.”

“And what has Zhang found?”

“I believe he was in charge of R&D of an anti-lightning material for use on high-tension lines. It turned out to be quite effective as a lightning deterrent. Putting it on power lines would have eliminated the need for a shield wire along the top. But the cost was too high, and in large-scale use it would have been more expensive than a traditional shield wire. So in the end it had no practical value, and all he got out of it were a few papers and second prize for technological achievement from the province. Nothing more than that.”

At last the project advanced to the stage I was waiting for: collecting physical data on lightning. We put out a large number of magnetic alloy recorders and lightning antennae, and each time a storm passed, we retrieved the devices that had been struck, taking care not to jostle them or bring them close to transmission lines or other magnetic sources that could affect their sensitivity by influencing their residual magnetism. Then we used a field strength meter (basically a compass whose needle angle indicated magnetic field strength and polarity) to read the data and a demagnetizer to wipe each device before returning them to their original positions to await the next strike.

The actual work at this stage was as tedious as before, but I was pretty interested. After all, it was my first opportunity to conduct quantitative measurements of lightning. Zhao Yu, that slacker, noticed this and began to slack off even more. It got to the point that when Zhang Bin was not around, Zhao Yu simply dumped his entire workload on me and went off to go fishing in a nearby stream.

As measured by the magnetic alloy recorders, the lightning current averaged around ten thousand amps and peaked at more than a hundred thousand, which meant we could calculate the voltage at one billion volts.

“What could you produce under those extreme physical conditions?” I asked Zhao Yu.

“Produce?” he said dismissively. “The power of an atomic blast or a high energy accelerator is far greater, yet it won’t produce the sort of thing you’re thinking of. Atmospheric physics is a mundane subject, yet you want to turn it mysterious. I’m the opposite: I’m used to taking sacred things and turning them ordinary.” Saying this, he gazed out into the dark green of the tropical rain forest that surrounded the weather station. “Hey, you go chasing after your mysterious fireball. I’m going to enjoy an ordinary life.”

His career as a master’s student was reaching an end, and he had no desire to continue on to a PhD.

Back at school, classes continued, and I took part in a few more of Zhang Bin’s projects outside of class and during the holidays. His methodical fastidiousness sometimes annoyed me, but apart from that he was easygoing enough, and I gained an immense amount of practical experience from him. But more importantly, his specialty was in line with my own quest.

For that reason, when it came time to graduate, I chose to test into the master’s program under him.

As I had anticipated, he firmly opposed my choice of ball lightning as a master’s thesis topic. In all other matters he was accommodating, including tolerating a lazy student like Zhao Yu, but in this there could be no accommodation.

“Young people should not get wrapped up in imaginary things,” he said.

“The existence of ball lightning is recognized by the scientific community. You think it’s imaginary?”

“Fine, I’ll repeat myself. What point is there to something that is not included in international standards or national regulations? When you were an undergraduate, you could study your own specialty using basic scientific techniques, but now that you are a graduate student, that’s no longer acceptable.”

“But Professor Zhang, atmospheric physics is pretty much a basic discipline now. It’s not just a tool for engineering; it has a duty to help us understand the world.”

“But in this country, the priority is to serve the cause of economic development.”

“Even so, if the anti-lightning measures at the Huangdao Oil Port had taken ball lightning into account, the 1989 catastrophe might have been avoided.”

“The source of the fire in Huangdao is just conjecture. Research on ball lightning itself is full of more conjecture. From now on, you’re going to avoid such harmful elements in your studies.”

There would be no further discussion of the subject. I was prepared to devote my entire life to that quest, so it was unimportant what I studied for the three years I was in graduate school. So I submitted to Zhang Bin’s suggestion and did a project on lightning defense computer systems.

Three years later, my graduate studies reached a smooth and uneventful conclusion.

To be fair, I learned quite a bit from Zhang Bin during those three years, and I benefited substantially from his technical rigor, proficient experimental skill set, and rich engineering experience. But, as I knew three years before, the core of what I required I was unable to find with him.

I also learned a fair amount about his personal life: his wife had died long ago, he had no children, he had lived alone for many years, and he had few social interactions. His humdrum existence echoed my own, but, to my mind, that lifestyle required the presence of an overpowering quest—a “fascination with something,” in my dad’s words, or what the pretty girl in the library six years ago had called “a sense of purpose.” Zhang Bin, with no goals and no fascination with anything, mechanically carried out his boring applied research, treating it as a job rather than a pleasure. His attitude toward fame and fortune displayed a similar rigidity. If that really were how he felt, then life must be a kind of torment for him, and hence I felt a little sympathy.

However, I did not think I was ready to explore the mystery quite yet. No, everything I had studied over the course of six years only made me feel my impotence all the more strongly. My first efforts were primarily in physics, but I eventually discovered that physics itself was a huge mystery, at the far end of which the very existence of the world was called into question. And assuming that ball lightning was not a supernatural phenomenon, only relatively low-level physics would be necessary to understand it: Maxwell’s Equations and the Navier-Stokes Equations in fluid mechanics would be sufficient (how superficial and naïve were my initial ideas). But compared to ball lightning, all known structures in electromagnetism and fluid mechanics were simple. If ball lightning was indeed a complicated structure in stable equilibrium constrained by the basic laws of electromagnetism and fluid mechanics, its mathematical expression would have to be incredibly complex, just like simple rules for black and white pieces can describe the intricate positions of Go, the world’s most complicated game.

This, then, was what I felt I needed now: first, mathematics; second, mathematics; and third, more mathematics. Complex mathematical tools were absolutely necessary for cracking the secret of ball lightning, tools as unruly as an unbridled mustang. Although Zhang Bin felt that my math skills far exceeded the standard requirements of atmospheric physics, I knew that I was still far from the level required for ball lightning research. As soon as complicated electromagnetic and fluid structures got involved, mathematical descriptions turned savage, involving weird partial differential equations that tangled up like twine, and dense matrices that held blade-filled traps.

With so much to learn before my explorations could truly begin, I knew I could not leave the campus environment immediately, so I decided to study for a PhD.

My doctoral advisor, a man named Gao Bo, had a formidable reputation and had gotten his PhD at MIT. He was the polar opposite of Zhang Bin. What first attracted me to him was his nickname, “Fireball,” which I later learned had nothing at all to do with ball lightning. Perhaps it had more to do with his nimble mind and vigorous personality. When I suggested ball lightning as the topic of my dissertation, he acquiesced immediately, at which point I began to have second thoughts: the project would require a large-scale lightning simulator, but there was only one in the country and I would never have a chance to use it.

But Gao Bo disagreed. “Listen, all you need is a pencil and a piece of paper. What you’re constructing is a mathematical model for ball lightning. It needs to be internally consistent, innovative, mathematically flawless, and executable on a computer. Treat it as a piece of theoretical art.”

Still, I had worries: “Will they accept something that forgoes experimentation entirely?”

He waved his hand. “Are black holes accepted? To date there is no direct evidence of their existence, yet look how far astrophysics has developed the theory, and how many people make a living off it. At the very least, ball lightning exists! Don’t worry. If your dissertation meets the requirements I gave you but still doesn’t pass, I’ll resign and we’ll get the hell away from this college!”

Gao Bo was a little too far toward the opposite extreme from Zhang Bin, I thought—I wasn’t on a quest for a piece of theoretical art. Still, I was pleased to be his student.

I decided to use the break before classes began to go back to my hometown and visit the neighbors who had been helping me. I could sense that I would have few chances to go back in the future.

When the train reached Tai’an Station, my heart jumped. I remembered what Zhang Bin had said about the atmospheric physicist who had witnessed ball lightning at Yuhuang Peak. I got off mid-journey and began to climb Mount Tai.

Lin Yun I

I grabbed a taxi to Zhongtian Gate. I had originally planned on taking the cable car up to the peak, but when I saw the long line, I headed upward on foot. The fog was thick, and the trees on either side were indistinct shadows that extended upward before vanishing into white. From time to time, stone inscriptions from past eras loomed into view.

Ever since my trip to Yunnan with Zhang Bin, I always felt a little frustrated whenever I found myself out in the middle of nature. Looking around at the natural world, its mysteries and unfathomable complexity and variability on display, I found it difficult to imagine that humanity could constrain it within the thin bonds of mathematical equations. And every time I thought of this, I would recall how Einstein once said that every tree outside, every flower attracting pollinating bees, escapes all book knowledge.

But my annoyance was soon replaced with physical exhaustion. I could see stone steps stretching endlessly into the fog ahead of me, and the Nantian Gate just below the peak seemed like it was far above the stratosphere.

Just then, I saw her for the first time. She caught my attention because she contrasted with the rest of the people around me. I had seen couple after couple stopped on the path, the woman sitting on a stone step exhausted while the man, breathing heavily, tried to get her to move onward. Whenever I passed someone, or on those rare occasions that someone passed me, I could hear their short, strenuous breathing. I pushed myself to follow a porter in whose broad bronze shoulders I found the strength to continue climbing. It was then that a white figure slipped easily past us, a woman who looked like condensed fog in her white blouse and white jeans. When she passed me on light and springy footsteps, I could not hear her breathing at all. She looked back—not at me, but at the porter—with a serene expression, no sign of fatigue on her face. Her lithe body seemed to have no weight at all, as if climbing this exhausting mountain path was like strolling down an avenue. Before long, she vanished into the fog.

By the time I finally reached the South Gate, it was already floating on a sea of clouds stained red by the sun, which was just setting in the west.

I dragged my heavy feet to the Yuhuang Peak Meteorology Station. Once the people inside learned who I was and where I was from, they acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary: meteorological workers were constantly arriving at the famous station to conduct all sorts of tests. They told me that the station chief had gone down the mountain, so they introduced me to the deputy chief. I almost cried out in astonishment when I saw him: it was Zhao Yu.

It had been three years since our trip down to Yunnan. I asked him how he ended up in this peculiar place, and he said, “I came here in search of peace and quiet. The world down there is too damn frustrating!”

“Then you should become a monk at Dai Temple.”

“That’s not a peaceful place, either. What about you? Are you still chasing your ghosts?”

I explained my reason for coming.

He shook his head. “1962. That’s too long ago. They’ve changed staff at the station so many times since then, I can’t imagine that anyone would know about it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “I only want to learn about it because it was the first time someone working in meteorology personally witnessed ball lightning in this country. It’s not all that important, really. I came up the mountain as a diversion, and who knows, maybe there’ll be a thunderstorm. Next to Wudang, this is the best place for lightning.”

“Who’s got the time to sit and watch lightning? I think you’ve really gone over the edge! Still, you can’t escape thunderstorms up here. If you really want to see something, then stay for a few days and maybe you will.”

Zhao Yu took me to his dormitory. It was supper time, so he called the cafeteria to have them send over some food: thin, crispy Taishan pancakes, green onions as big around as shot glasses, and a bottle of Taishan liquor.

Zhao Yu thanked the elderly cook, but as the old man turned to go, a thought occurred to him. He asked, “Master Wang, when did you first start working at the station?”

“It was 1960 that I started, right at this very cafeteria. Those were trying times. You weren’t around then, Director Zhao.”

Zhao Yu and I shared a surprised smile.

Immediately, I asked, “Have you seen ball lightning?”

“You mean… rolling lightning?”

“Right! That’s what they call it.”

“Of course I’ve seen it. Over the past forty years, I’ve seen it three or four times!”

Zhao Yu picked up another glass and we enthusiastically invited Lao[1] Wang to sit down. As I poured him a drink, I asked, “Do you remember the time it hit in 1962?”

“Sure do. That’s the one I remember the best. A guy got hurt then!”

Lao Wang started into the story: “It was at the end of July, maybe a little after seven in the evening. Normally, it would still have been light, but that day the clouds were so thick that you couldn’t see anything without a lantern. The rain came in driving sheets, enough to smother you if you stood out in it! Flash after flash of lightning, with no pause between them—”

“Probably a thunderstorm at the head of a passing front,” Zhao Yu put in.

“I heard one crack of thunder. The lightning just before it was really bright, enough to almost blind me where I was sitting in my room. Then I heard a voice outside shouting that someone had been hurt, so I ran out to help. At that time, there were four people at the station conducting observations. It was one of them who had been struck. When I hauled the man into the room, one of his legs was smoking and the rain fizzled where it fell, but he was still fully conscious. And then the rolling lightning came in. It entered through the west window, but the window was closed at the time! The thing was about… about the size of this pancake, and red, blood red, so that it filled the whole room with red light. It drifted around the room, about this fast…” He lifted his glass and gestured in midair. “…floating this way and that. I thought I’d seen a ghost, and was so scared I couldn’t speak. But those science guys weren’t panicked. They just told us not to touch it. The thing floated for a while, up to the ceiling, and down across the bed—fortunately it didn’t touch anyone—and finally entered the chimney. Right as it got in, it exploded with a bang. All these years on the peak, and out of all the thunder I’ve heard, I don’t remember hearing anything that loud. It set my ears buzzing, and did something to my left ear so bad that I’m hard of hearing now. All of the lanterns in the room went out, and the lantern globes and the glass liners for the hot water bottles shattered and left burn marks on the bed. When we went outside afterward we found that the chimney had exploded!”

“Where did they come from, the four people doing the monitoring?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you still remember their names?”

“Hmm. It’s been so many years… I only remember the one who got hurt. I carried him down the mountain to the hospital with two other people from the station. He was very young, and must’ve still been a college student. One of his legs was burned to a crisp, and because Tai’an Hospital wasn’t all that great back then, he was transferred to Jinan. Geez, it must’ve made him lame. The guy was named Zhang, I think. Zhang… something… fu.”

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.

The storm stopped, and the setting sun radiated golden light through the gaps in the clouds.

“Look at how new the world looks, like it’s been reborn in the thunderstorm!” She gasped in admiration.

I shared that feeling, although it was unclear whether it was because of the storm or the girl in front of me. At any rate, it was not a feeling I had experienced before.

That night, Lin Yun, Zhao Yu, and I went for a walk. Before long, Zhao Yu got a call to return to the station, so Lin Yun and I continued along the path up the mountain until we reached the Skyway. It was late, and the Skyway was shrouded in a light fog through which streetlamps shone hazily. Nighttime on the mountain was quiet, so still that the clamor of the world below seemed but a distant memory.

When the fog lifted somewhat, a few stars emerged in the sky, their light reflected immediately in Lin Yun’s eyes. I gazed spellbound at the reflected starlight before quickly turning to look at the stars themselves. If my life were a movie, then what had been a black-and-white screen had burst into color today on the peak of Mount Tai.

In the night fog on the Skyway, I told Lin Yun my deepest hidden secret. I told her about that nightmarish birthday night so many years before, and I told her about the thing to which I had decided to devote my entire life. This was the first time I had told anyone.

“Do you hate ball lightning?” she asked.

“It’s hard to feel hate toward an unknowable mystery, regardless of how much disaster it may bring. At first I was only curious, but as I’ve learned more about it, that curiosity has transformed into total fascination. In my mind it became a doorway to another world, a world where I can see the wonders I have been dreaming about for so long.”

A winsome breeze picked up and the fog dissipated. Up above, the glittering summer star field stretched across the heavens, and far off down the mountain, the lights of the town of Tai’an formed their own star field like a reflection in a pond.

In a soft voice, she began to recite a Guo Moruo poem:

I continued:

Tears welled. The beautiful night city quivered for a moment through my tears and then resolved to an even greater clarity. I understood that I was a person in pursuit of a dream, but I also understood how unimaginably hazardous the road I followed was. Yet even if the South Gate to Heaven never emerged from the fog, I would keep on climbing.

I had no other choice.

Zhang Bin

Two years as a doctoral student passed quickly while I built my first mathematical model of ball lightning.

Gao Bo was a remarkable advisor, whose forte lay in his ability to induce creativity in his students. His obsession with theory was paired with an extreme distaste for experimentation, which could be insufferable at times. Without any experimental basis whatsoever, my mathematical model became totally abstract. But I did successfully defend my dissertation, and received the assessment, “A novel argument that evinces a strong mathematical foundation and deft technique.” The fatal lack of the experimental side of the model naturally provoked considerable debate. As the defense was concluding, one panelist taunted, “One last question: How many angels can fit on the point of a pin?” to a burst of laughter.

Zhang Bin was on the dissertation committee, and he asked a single question on a trivial detail and did not put forth much commentary. In those two years, I had never directly mentioned Mount Tai to him, for a reason I did not know myself, or perhaps I foresaw that it would force him to tell a painful personal secret. But now, since I was about to leave the school, I could no longer hold back from asking about it.

I went to his house and told him what I had heard on Mount Tai. He remained quiet after I finished, looking at the floor and sucking on a cigarette. When I was done, he dragged himself up and said, “Come with me.”

Zhang Bin lived alone in a two-bedroom apartment. He occupied one of the rooms, but the door to the other was always shut tight. Zhao Yu once told me that when a classmate from out of town had come for a visit, he had thought of Zhang Bin and asked him whether his classmate could stay there, but Zhang Bin had said there wasn’t any room. He wasn’t ordinarily so callous, even if he seldom interacted with other people, so Zhao Yu and I felt there was something mysterious about that closed room. After asking him about Mount Tai, he took me through that tightly closed door.

When Zhang Bin opened the door, the first thing I saw was a wall of stacked cardboard boxes, with more of them piled on the floor beyond. But apart from these, there wasn’t anything special in the room. On the facing wall hung a black-and-white photograph of a woman in glasses, short-haired in the style of her time. Her eyes sparkled behind the lenses.

“My wife. She died in ’71,” he said, pointing at the picture.

I noticed something peculiar: the room clearly belonged to a man very concerned with the tidiness of the area around the photograph, since the boxes were some distance away, leaving a semicircle of empty space. But right next to it an old-style rubber-coated dark green canvas raincoat hung on a nail in the wall, looking quite out of place.

“As you’ve found out, since the day I saw ball lightning in Mount Tai, I’ve been fascinated with it. I was just an undergrad then, and my attitude was exactly like yours. No more need be said. I first looked for it in natural thunderstorms in tons of places. When I met her later on, it was ball lightning that brought us together. She was an obsessed researcher, and we ran into each other during a huge storm, then went out on searches together. Conditions were poor back then: we had to go on foot more than half the way, and we stayed most nights in local homes, or in crumbling temples or mountain caves, or even slept in the open. I remember once, when we were making observations during an autumn thundershower, we both contracted pneumonia in a remote area where there were no doctors and few drugs. She became seriously ill and nearly died. We crossed paths with wolves and got bitten by snakes, not to mention the frequent hunger. More than a few times, lightning struck the ground quite close to us. These field observations lasted eight years, and it’s impossible to sum up the total distance we walked, the pain we endured, and the danger we faced in that time. For the sake of our cause, we decided not to have children.

“Most of the time it was the two of us on the road, but when she was too busy with teaching or research, I would sometimes go out on my own. Once, in the south, I strayed into a military base and was seen carrying a camera and instruments. Since it was the height of the Cultural Revolution and my parents had been to Russia, I was suspected of being a spy gathering intelligence and was locked up, on no charges, for two years. During those two years, my wife continued field observations in thunderstorms.

“I heard of her death from the village elders. She finally found ball lightning in that thunderstorm, and chased the fireball right up to the edge of a raging flash flood. In her haste she touched the raised air terminal of the magnetic field meter to the fireball. Afterward, they said it was an accident, but they didn’t understand what it might feel like to finally see the ball lightning you’d spent almost a decade searching for, only to be on the verge of losing the opportunity to observe it.”

“I understand,” I said.

“According to eyewitnesses, who were quite far away, when the fireball contacted the terminal it vanished, and then traveled the length of the meter and emerged from the other terminal. She was unharmed at this point, but in the end she did not escape: the fireball revolved around her several times, and then exploded directly above her head. When the flash cleared, she was gone. All they found in the place she was last standing was this raincoat, spread untouched on the ground, and underneath it a pile of white ash, most of which was washed away by the rain in thin trickles of white…”

I looked at the raincoat, imagining it wrapped around that young, dedicated soul, and said softly, “Like the captain who dies at sea or the astronaut who dies in space, her death was worth it.”

Zhang Bin nodded. “I think so, too.”

“And the meter recording?”

“Also unharmed. And it was taken immediately to the lab to determine the residual magnetism.”

“How much?” I asked nervously. This was the first firsthand quantitative observational data in the history of ball lightning research.

“Zero.”

“What?”

“No residual magnetism whatsoever.”

“That means no current passed through the receptor conductor. So how was it conducted?”

Zhang Bin waved a hand. “There are too many mysteries about ball lightning that I won’t go into here. Compared to the others, this isn’t a big one. Now I’d like you to take a look at something even more incredible.” As he spoke, he pulled out a plastic-covered notebook from a pocket of the raincoat. “She had this in her raincoat pocket when she died.” He placed the notebook on a cardboard box with extreme care, as if it were a fragile object. “Use a light touch when you turn the pages.”

It was an ordinary notebook, with a picture of Tiananmen on the cover, blurry now from wear. I gently opened the cover and saw a line of graceful characters on the title page: The entrance to science is the entrance to hell.—Marx.

I looked at Zhang Bin, and he motioned for me to turn the page. I turned to page one, and realized why he told me to be gentle: this page was burned, partly turned to ash and lost. Very gently, I turned this burnt page, and the next one was completely intact, its dense data recordings easily visible, as if written yesterday.

“Turn another page,” he said.

The third leaf was burned.

The fourth was intact.

The fifth was burned.

The sixth was intact.

The seventh was burned.

The eighth was intact.

As I paged through the notebook, every other page was burned. Some of the burnt pages only had bits close to the binding remaining, but on the neighboring intact pages I could see no burn marks. I looked up and stared at Zhang Bin.

He said, “Can you believe it? I’ve never shown this to anyone else, since they’d certainly think it’s fake.”

Looking straight at him, I said, “No, Professor Zhang. I believe!”

Then I told a second person about my fateful birthday night.

After hearing my story, he said, “I guessed you had experience in this area, but I never imagined it would be so terrible. You ought to know, after all you personally witnessed, that the study of ball lightning is a foolish thing.”

“Why? I don’t understand.”

“I realized this fairly late myself. Over the past thirty years, apart from seeking ball lightning in naturally occurring thunderstorms, more of my energies were devoted to theoretical study. Thirty years.” He sighed. “I won’t describe that process to you. See for yourself.” He gestured at the large cardboard boxes surrounding us.

I opened two of the heavy ones and found they were filled to the top with stacks of calculation books! I pulled out two of them and read the dense differential equations and matrices, then looked around at the low wall of boxes, and sucked in a breath of cold air at the thought of the work he had done in thirty years.

I asked, “And experiments—what have you done?”

“Not much. Means were limited. There’s no way the project could get much funding. But more importantly, none of these mathematical models is worth testing. They were not well-founded, and when I got further along I’d find out that I’d taken a wrong first step. In other words, even coming up with a self-consistent mathematical model is still very far from being able to produce ball lightning in the lab.”

“Are you still carrying out research in this area?”

Zhang Bin shook his head. “I stopped a few years ago. Odd—it was the same year you first asked me questions about ball lightning. On New Year’s Eve, I was mired in hopeless calculations when I heard the bells ringing out the new year and the joyous cheers of the students. All of a sudden I realized that my life was practically over, and a sadness I had never known before came over me and I came here. Like so many times before, I took the notebook out of the raincoat, and as I carefully turned the pages, I realized a truth.”

“What?”

He picked up the notebook and held it before him. “Look at this, and think about the stormy night of your fourteenth birthday. Do you truly believe that all of this is contained within the existing laws of physics?”

I could say nothing in response.

“We’re both mortal men. We may have put far more into the search than other people, but we’re still mortal. We can only make deductions within the framework defined by elemental theory, and dare not deviate from it, lest we step out into the airless void. But within this framework, we cannot deduce anything.”

Listening to him, I felt the same frustration I had on the foggy mountain road on Mount Tai.

He went on: “In you, I saw another young man like myself, and did my utmost to stop you from going down that dangerous path, although I knew it was of no use. You’ll still take that path. I’ve done everything I can.” He finished, and sat wearily down on a cardboard box.

I said, “Professor Zhang, you’re being a bad judge of your own work. When you’re captivated by something, striving after it is enough. That’s a kind of success.”

“Thank you for your consolation,” he said weakly.

“I’m saying it for myself, too. When I get to your age, that’s how I’ll console myself.”

He gestured to the boxes. “Take these, and some discs too. Take a look if you’re interested. If you’re not, then forget about it. They’re all meaningless…. And this notebook—take it too. I get scared looking at it.”

“Thank you,” I said, a little choked up. I pointed at the photo on the wall. “Could I scan a copy of that?”

“Of course. What for?”

“Perhaps to one day let the world know that your wife was the first person to directly measure ball lightning.”

He carefully took the photo down from the wall and handed it to me. “Her name is Zheng Min. Peking University physics department, entering class of ’63.”

The next day, I moved the boxes from Zhang Bin’s house to my dormitory, as if it were a storage unit. Then I read the stuff day and night. Like an inexperienced climber, I had attempted a summit I supposed no one else had reached. But looking around me, I saw the tents of the people before me, and their footprints leading onward. By this point, I had read through the three mathematical models Zhang Bin had constructed, each superbly fashioned, one of which was along the same lines as my PhD thesis, but completed more than a decade before. What shamed me even more was that on the final pages of his manuscript, he pointed out the error of the model, something that I, Gao Bo, and all of the committee members had missed. At the close of the other two models, he likewise pointed out errors. Where I had seen incomplete mathematical models, Zhang Bing had, during their construction, discovered errors.

That night, as I was buried in the pile of manuscripts, Gao Bo dropped by. He looked around at the mountain of calculations and shook his head. “I say, are you really thinking of living your whole life like he did?”

I chuckled, and said, “Professor Gao…”

He waved me off. “I’m no longer your professor. With luck, we’ll end up colleagues.”

“So it’s even better that I say this. Honestly, Professor Gao, I’ve never seen you so brilliant. That’s not a compliment. Forgive me for being blunt, but I feel that you lack perseverance. Like how recently, in that structural lightning protection system CAD—a wonderful project—you spent just a minimum of effort to complete it, and after completing the pioneering work, you foisted the rest of the work onto others because you felt it was too much trouble.”

“Ah, perseverance. Spending a lifetime on one thing isn’t how things are done any longer. In this age, apart from basic science, all other research should be surgical strikes. I’ve come to further demonstrate to you my lack of perseverance: Do you still remember what I said? If your dissertation was rejected, then I’d resign.”

“But I passed.”

“And I’m still resigning. You see now that the promise was a trap!”

“Where will you go?”

“The Lightning Institute at the Academy of Atmospheric Sciences has recruited me as director. I’m tired of universities! What about you? Do you have plans for the future? Come with me!”

I said I’d think about it, and two days later I agreed. I had no particular desire to go there, but it was the country’s largest institution of lightning research.

Two nights before leaving the university, I was still reading those calculation manuscripts when I heard a knock at the door. Zhang Bin.

“You’re leaving?” He looked over my packed bags.

“Yes. The day after tomorrow. I heard you retired.”

He nodded. “It came through yesterday. I’ve reached an age where all I want to do is rest. I’ve had such a tiring life.”

He sat down. I lit him a cigarette, and we stayed quiet a while before he said, “I’ve come to tell you another thing, something I’m afraid only you will understand. Do you know what the most painful thing in my life is?”

“I know, Professor. Extricating yourself from this fixation is no easy thing. It’s been thirty years, after all. But this hasn’t been the only thing you’ve done in that time. Besides, there are probably more than a few people over the past century who have studied ball lightning their entire lives, and none of them have been as fortunate as you.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You misunderstand. I’ve been through far more than you have, and have a deeper understanding of science and human life. I regret nothing about these three decades of research, much less feel any pain about it. And, like you say, I’ve exhausted my efforts. It’s not a block for me.”

So what was it, then? I thought about the many years since his wife died.

As if he could read my thoughts, he said, “Zheng Min’s death was a blow, but I think you’ll understand that for people like us whose mind and body are occupied so completely that the obsession becomes a part of you, anything else in life will always come second.”

“Then what could it be?” I asked in confusion.

Again, he shook his head with a smile. “It’s difficult to admit.” He went on smoking. My thoughts were jumbled. Was he ashamed of something? Then, due to the common pursuit that made our minds think alike, I realized what it was. “I believe you once said that you’ve spent these thirty years on an unending search for ball lightning in the field.”

He let out a long stream of smoke, and said, “That’s right. After Zheng Min died, my health declined and my legs got worse, and I didn’t get out as much. But I never interrupted my search, and, at least in the surrounding area, I’ve practically never let any thunderstorm slip by.”

“Then…” I paused, realizing in that instant all of his pain.

“Yes, you’ve guessed it. In thirty years, I’ve never seen ball lightning a second time.”

Unlike other mysteries of nature, ball lightning was not particularly rare. Surveys showed that at least one percent of people claimed to have seen it. But its appearance was accidental and random, following no rules, and it was entirely possible to spend thirty years in an arduous search during thunderstorms and never come across it, with only the cruelty of fate to blame.

He continued, “Long ago I read a Russian story that described a wealthy lord of a manor whose sole joy in life was drinking wine. Once, from a mysterious stranger, he bought a bottle, hauled up from an ancient shipwreck, that still contained a few drops of wine. Once he’d drunk that wine he was intoxicated with it, body and soul. The stranger told him that two bottles had been found in the wreck, but the whereabouts of the second bottle was unknown. At first the lord put no thought to this, but later the memory of that wine kept him up day and night, until at last he sold off the manor and all of his property and went off in search of the second bottle. Through untold hardships he wandered the earth, and grew old. Finally he found it, when he was now an old beggar on his deathbed. He drank the bottle, and then passed away happy.”

“He was fortunate,” I said.

“Zheng Min was fortunate, too, in a sense.”

I nodded, and fell deep into thought.

After a while, he said, “So about that pain—can you still maintain your detached attitude?”

I stood up, went to the window, and looked out at the campus in the darkness. “No, Professor. I can’t be detached. What you feel is not just pain, but a kind of fear! If you’re trying to show me how evil this road of ours can be, this time you’ve done it.”

Yes, he had done it. I could bear a lifetime of exhausted fruitlessness; I could bear abandoning everything in my life, living out my days alone; I could even sacrifice my life if necessary; but I could not stand it if I never had another glimpse of it. My first encounter determined the path for my entire life, and I could not stand not seeing it again. Other people might not understand, but could a sailor stand never seeing the sea again? Or a mountaineer never seeing a snowcap? Or a pilot never seeing the sky?

“Perhaps you can show it to us again.”

Staring blankly out the window, I said, “I don’t know, Professor Zhang.”

“But this is my final wish in life,” Zhang Bin said, standing up. “I have to go. Have you scanned that photograph?”

I recovered myself. “Oh, yes. I ought to have returned it to you before, but I broke the frame while taking it out and wanted to buy a new one, and I haven’t had time in the past few days.”

“That’s not necessary. The old one’s okay.” He took the photo. “The place feels like it’s missing something.”

I returned to the window and watched my advisor’s figure vanish into the darkness, his leg more hobbled than usual, his footsteps more labored.

Strange Phenomena II

When Zhang Bin left, I turned off the lights to go to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep, so when it happened, I’m certain I remained absolutely clearheaded.

I heard a soft sigh.

I couldn’t tell which direction it had come from; it seemed almost to fill the entire dark space of the dorm room. Alert, I lifed my head from the pillow.

I heard another sigh, very quiet, but audible.

It was a school holiday and the dormitory was practically empty. I sat up sharply and scanned the dark room, but all I saw were those boxes, which in the dark resembled a haphazard pile of stones. I flipped the switch, and as the fluorescent bulb was flickering to light, I saw a faint shadow on the boxes, white. It lasted only an instant before it vanished, so I couldn’t make out its shape. I can’t be certain it wasn’t an illusion, but as the shadow vanished I saw it move in the direction of the window leaving a trail behind it, obviously a stream of fleeting images, like an afterimage.

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.

A Bolt from the Blue

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.

“Oh, that’s what we call the PLA National Defense University’s New Concept Weapons Development Center. I’ve worked here since graduating.”

Gao Bo pushed me to visit Lin Yun before I’d even reported to my new workplace.

Half an hour’s drive beyond the Fourth Ring Road, wheat fields had sprung up along the highway. Quite a few military research institutions were clustered in this area, most of them plain buildings behind high perimeter walls with no signs on the gates. But the New Concept Weapons Development Center was an eye-catching, modern-looking twenty-story building that resembled an office for some multinational corporation. Unlike the nearby agencies, it had no guards at the gate, so people could freely go in and out.

I entered through the automatic door into a large, bright lobby and took the elevator up to Lin Yun’s office. The place was like a civilian-side administrative agency. Looking into the half-opened doors lining the corridor, I saw a modern modular office layout, with lots of people busy at computers or amid piles of papers. If they hadn’t been in uniform, I would have imagined I had walked into a large corporate office building. I saw a few foreigners, two of whom were wearing their own country’s uniforms, talking and laughing with Chinese soldiers in an office.

I found Lin Yun in an office labeled “System Review Dept. 2.” When she walked over, wearing a major’s uniform and a glittering smile on her face, she rocked my heart with a beauty that transcended fashion, although I was aware at once that she was in the military.

“Different from what you imagined?” she asked me, after we exchanged greetings.

“Very. What is it that you do here?”

“What the name suggests.”

“What are new-concept weapons?”

“Well, for example, in the Second World War, the Soviet army strapped explosives onto trained dogs and had them slip beneath German tanks. That was a new-concept weapon, and an idea that still counts as a new concept even today. But there are lots of variations, like strapping explosives to dolphins and having them attack submarines, or training a flock of birds to carry small bombs. Here’s the latest thing—” She bent over her computer and pulled up an illustrated article that looked like a page from an entomology website. “Attaching tiny sacks of corrosive fluid to cockroaches and other insects so they can destroy the circuits of the enemy’s weapons systems.”

“Interesting,” I said. Looking at the computer screen, I stood close to Lin Yun and caught an elusive fragrance: a scent stripped of all sweetness, a comfortable, slightly bitter scent that reminded me of a grassy meadow under the first sun after a rainstorm….

“And take a look at this: a liquid that, when sprayed on roads, will turn them slippery and impassible. And this: a gas that can kill the engine of a car or tank. This one’s not very interesting—a laser that can scan an area like a CRT’s electron gun so that everyone in that area is temporarily or permanently blinded….”

I was a little surprised that they seemed to allow outsiders to see anything pulled up from their information system.

“We’re producing new concepts. Most of them are useless, and some might even look ridiculous, but one in a hundred, or one in a thousand, may become a reality, and that’s what’s significant.”

“So this is a think tank.”

“You could call it that. The job of the department I’m in is to figure out which of these ideas are workable, and to conduct preliminary research. Sometimes this research can advance quite a ways, like the lightning weapon system we’re just about to discuss.”

That she brought up Gao Bo’s topic of interest so quickly was a good sign, but I still wanted to ask her about something I was very curious about: “What are the Western officers doing here?”

“They’re visiting scholars. Weapons research is an academic discipline, and it requires communication. A new-concept weapon is very far from practicality. In this field, we need nimble minds, huge quantities of information, and the clash of a range of ideas. Exchanges are beneficial to both sides.”

“So that means you also send visiting scholars to the other side?”

“When I came back from Mount Tai two years ago, I went to Europe and North America and spent three months as a visiting scholar at a leading new-concept weapons development institution called the Weapons Systems Advanced Evaluation Committee. How have you been the past two years? Still chasing ball lightning every day?”

I said, “Of course. What else can I do? But right now my chase is on paper.”

“Let me give you a gift,” she said, mousing through directories on her computer. “This is an eyewitness account of ball lightning.”

Dismissively, I said, “I’ve seen a thousand of these things.”

“But this one’s different.” As she spoke, a video clip appeared on screen. It appeared to have been shot in a forest clearing with a military helicopter parked in it. In front of it stood two people: Lin Yun, wearing an Army training uniform, and the other, evidently the pilot, wearing a light flight suit. In the background were several air balloons in mid-rise. Lin Yun said, “This is Captain Wang Songlin, an Army Aviation Corps helicopter pilot.”

Then I heard her voice in the recording saying, “Tell it again. I’ll record it for a friend of mine.”

The captain said, “Sure. I said that what I saw that time is without a doubt the thing you’re talking about. It was during the Yangtze River flood of 1998. I flew out toward the disaster area for an airdrop. I was at an altitude of seven hundred meters when I carelessly flew into a thundercloud. Totally a no-fly zone, but for a while I couldn’t get out. The air currents in the cloud buffeted the aircraft like a leaf, and my head kept bumping against the hatch. Most of the instruments were jittering randomly, and nothing was clear on the radio. It was pitch black outside. Suddenly a bolt of lightning lit up, and then I saw it: about the size of a basketball, giving off orange light, and when the bolt appeared the static on the radio grew even worse…”

“Listen carefully to what he says next,” Lin Yun told me.

“…The ball of light floated around the craft, not too fast, first from the nose to the tail, and then vertically up through the rotors, and then back down through the rotors into the cabin again. It floated for about half a minute, and then it suddenly disappeared.”

“Wait. Replay that last part!” I shouted. Like Lin Yun had said, this eyewitness account was unusual.

The video rewound, and after it replayed that section, it continued with Lin Yun asking the question I wanted to: “Were you hovering or flying?”

“Could I hover in a thundercloud? Of course I was flying. Speed at least four hundred. I was looking for an exit from the cloud.”

“You must have remembered incorrectly. You must have been hovering. It’s not right otherwise.”

“I know what you’re thinking. That’s what’s so weird about it. The airflow had no effect on it at all! Even if I’m misremembering, or had the wrong impression at the time and I really was hovering, the rotors were still rotating constantly, and that airflow was enormous. Besides, wouldn’t there be wind? But the fireball just turned very slowly around the helicopter. Taking relative speeds into account, it was moving very fast, but it wasn’t affected at all by the air.”

“This is really important information!” I said. “There’s evidence of this in lots of previous records, like eyewitness accounts saying that when ball lightning entered a room through a window or door, wind was blowing in, or other accounts that straight-out describe ball lightning as moving against the wind, but none of them are as believable as this. If the motion of ball lightning really isn’t affected by air currents, then the plasma theory is untenable. But that’s what the majority of current ball lightning theory is based on. Can I talk to the pilot?”

“Impossible.” She shook her head. “Well, let’s get down to business. First off, I’d like you to take a look at what we’ve been doing the past two years.” She picked up the phone and seemed to be arranging a tour. Evidently Gao Bo’s mission would be easily completed. I took a look around Lin Yun’s desk.

The first thing I noticed was a group photo of her and several PLA Marines wearing blue-and-white marine camouflage. Lin Yun was the only woman, and she looked quite young, with a childish face and a submachine gun clutched in her arms like a puppy. A sergeant. Several landing craft were on the water behind them, and there was residual smoke from explosions in the vicinity.

“You went from the army to university?” I asked, and she nodded, still on the phone.

Another photo caught my eye, this one of a young navy captain, handsome, charismatic, against the background of the carrier Zhufeng, which appeared so often in the media. Immediately I had the fierce desire to ask Lin Yun who he was, but I held back.

She had finished her call by this point, and said, “Let’s go. I’ll take you to see the non-results we’ve come up with in two years.”

As we left and took the elevator downstairs, she said, “We’ve put tremendous effort into lightning weapons these two years. Two subprojects, neither successful, and now the project has been canceled. This weapons system went the furthest and had the highest funding out of all of New Concepts, but it ended badly.”

In the lobby, I noticed lots of people smiling at Lin Yun and greeting her, and I sensed that her status exceeded that of an ordinary major.

Exiting the building, Lin Yun took me to a small car. As we sat in the front seats, I caught another whiff of that bitter aroma of grass after the rain, so carefree. Yet this time there was a more ethereal aroma, like the last wisp of cloud in a boundless clear sky, or a fleeting chime in a deep mountain valley. I sniffed once or twice to capture it.

“Do you like this perfume?” she said, glancing at me with a smile.

“Oh… don’t they stop you from wearing perfume in the army?” I played innocent.

“Sometimes it’s allowed.”

Wearing that charming smile, she started the car. A small ornament hanging from the windshield caught my interest: it was a piece of bamboo. Two segments, finger-thick, with a length of leaves attached. Quite a fascinating shape. What intrigued me was that the segments and leaves had yellowed, and there were several splits in the bamboo from the dry northern air. Evidently it was quite old, but she kept it hanging in such a prominent position that there must be some story in the bamboo. I reached out to take it for a closer look, but she caught my wrist, her slender white hands surprisingly strong, a strength that disappeared once my hand was pressed back down, leaving only a soft warmth that set my heart beating.

“That’s a land mine,” she said calmly.

I looked at her in surprise, then looked at the seemingly harmless bamboo in disbelief.

“It’s an anti-personnel mine. The structure is simple: the lower segment contains the explosive, and the upper section contains the fuse, which is a flexible striker and a length of rubber band. The bamboo deforms when stepped on, and the striker bends down.”

“Er… where did it come from?”

“It was seized on the front line in Guangxi in the early eighties. It’s a classic design that costs as little as a two-bang firecracker, but it’s highly destructive, and since it contains little metal, ordinary mine detectors won’t notice it. It’s a real headache for engineers, since its exterior is subtle enough that it doesn’t need to be buried. Just scattering them on the ground is enough. The Vietnamese spread tens of thousands of them.”

“It’s hard to believe that something so small can kill someone.”

“It won’t usually kill, but the explosion can easily take off half a foot or a leg, and a wounding weapon like this can sap the enemy’s combat strength far more efficiently than lethal weapons.”

It gave me a funny feeling that the first woman I felt something for talked so calmly of bloodshed and death like other women her age talked of makeup. But who could say for certain whether this was an indispensable part of what had attracted me to her?

“Can it still explode?” I asked, pointing to the bamboo.

“Probably. But the striker’s rubber bands may have decayed after so many years.”

“What? You’re saying it’s… it can still…”

“That’s right. It’s still set, and the striker’s taut, so don’t touch.”

“That’s… far too dangerous!” I said, staring in horror at the bamboo as it swung beneath the window glass.

She calmly looked straight ahead. It was quite some time before she said in a soft voice, “I like the feeling.”

Then, perhaps to break the awkward silence, she asked me, “Are you interested in weapons?”

“I was when I was a kid. My eyes would light up when I saw a weapon. Most boys are like that… but let’s not talk so much about weapons. Do you know what it feels like for a man to seek information about weapons from a woman?”

“Don’t you think they have a transcendent beauty?” She pointed at the mine. “What an exquisite piece of art.”

“I’ll admit that weapons do possess an indescribable allure, but it’s built on top of murder. If this bamboo were just bamboo, that beauty would no longer exist.”

“Have you ever thought about why such a brutal thing as murder can bring with it such beauty?”

“A profound question indeed. I’m not much for that kind of thinking.”

The car turned onto a narrow road. Lin Yun continued: “The beauty of an object can be completely separated from its practical function. Like a stamp: its actual function is irrelevant in a collector’s eyes.”

“So then, to you, is weapons research motivated by beauty, or by functionality?”

As soon as the words left my mouth I felt the question too impertinent. But again, she smiled in place of an answer. So many things about her were a mystery.

“You’re the sort of person whose entire life is occupied by one thing,” she said.

“And you’re not?”

“Hmm. Yes, I am.”

Then we were both silent.

The car stopped just beyond an orchard, where the mountains that had seemed so distant now appeared right in front of us. A fenced-off area at the foot of the mountains contained mostly weed-covered ground, with a small cluster of buildings in one corner comprising a wide-slung warehouse-like structure and three other four-story buildings. Two military helicopters were parked out front. I realized that this was where the video of the ball lightning eyewitness had been shot. This must be the weapons testing grounds. In stark contrast to the New Concept center, it was heavily guarded. Inside one of the buildings we met the man in charge of the base, an air force colonel named Xu Wencheng, who had an honest face. When Lin Yun introduced him, I realized he was one of the country’s specialists in lightning research. I had often seen his papers in domestic and international academic journals, so his name was familiar, but I had never met him in the flesh, much less been aware he was a soldier.

The colonel said, “Xiao[2] Lin, they’re leaning on us to close up shop. Can you work the higher-ups a little more?” I noticed that his attitude toward Lin Yun was not one of a superior to a subordinate, but something more cautious and deferential.

She shook her head. “I can’t speak up in our situation. We must have resolve.” Nor was her tone one of a subordinate to a superior.

“It’s not a matter of resolve. The General Armaments Department is standing firm, but can’t last for much longer.”

“New Concepts wants to come up with something as fast as possible—some theory, at least. This is Dr. Chen from the Lightning Institute.”

As the colonel shook my hand with enthusiasm, he said, “If our two institutions were already cooperating, things might not have gotten to this point. What we’re going to show you today would be eye-opening for anyone in lightning research.”

Just then, there was a marked increase in the brightness of the lights in the room, as if some piece of high-energy equipment had just stopped. The colonel obviously noticed this too, and said, “Looks like it’s charged. Xiao Lin, take Dr. Chen to have a look. I won’t go with you, since, as you put it, I’ve got to have resolve here. You should get in touch with the Lightning Institute in person afterward, to establish a relationship between our two sides. I know former director Xue. He’s retired now, but, just like us, he couldn’t turn his experimental results into anything practical.”

On the way in, I noticed the fully equipped laboratories and engineering shops. That was another clear difference from New Concepts—this was obviously a place for real work.

Lin Yun explained, “Our lightning research is divided into two parts. What we’ll be looking at first is part one: an air-to-ground attack system.”

When we exited the large building we saw a pilot and another operator walking toward a helicopter, and two other people gathering up the thick cable that had just been detached from it. The cable ran straight into one of the buildings where several soldiers were loading a bunch of old oil drums into a truck. It was clear that there had been nothing for anyone to do for quite some time, so they all looked excited now.

Lin Yun led me to a sandbag bunker behind an open space the size of a soccer field, where the soldiers were now unloading the oil drums and stacking them into a cabin-like shape inside a red square. Engines roared in the distance, and then, through the dust whipped up by its propellers, the helicopter rose up slowly, angled its rotor slightly, and flew toward the space above the drums. It hovered over the target for a few seconds, and then a glittering shaft of lightning emerged from its belly and struck the drums. The practically simultaneous clap of thunder caught me off guard and startled me, and right on the heels of the thunder were several more dull noises, the explosions and fire from the residual oil in the drums. I stared in shock for a while at the black smoke wrapped around dark flames, and then asked, “What are you using for energy to produce the lightning?”

“The National Laboratory for Superconductivity at CAS has developed high-energy batteries made of room-temperature superconducting material. They can store lots of power simply by flowing current continuously through a large loop of superconducting wire.”

Then the helicopter began to discharge to the ground, for a longer duration this time, but at a low intensity. A long, thin arc connected ground and helicopter, snaking through the air like a dancer’s graceful curves, or a windblown strand of UV-emitting spider silk.

“This is a low-intensity, continuous release of the superconductor battery’s residual energy. The battery is highly unstable and not very safe, so ordinarily it can’t store a charge. Let’s wait a bit—this will take at least ten minutes. It’s a nice sound, isn’t it?”

The power release wasn’t loud, but it sounded like fingernails on glass, and gave me goose bumps.

I asked, “How many times can you repeat that high-intensity release?”

“That depends on the number and capacity of the superconductor batteries. This helicopter could manage eight to ten, but we can’t drain the residual power in that way.”

“Why not?”

“People would protest.” She pointed to the north, where I saw a group of luxury homes not too far from the base. “The base was originally meant to be farther from the city, but for various reasons it was built here. You’ll see later on that noise nuisance isn’t the only consequence of this mistake.”

When the residual power was drained, she took me to look at the equipment on the helicopter. Unfamiliar with electronics and machinery, I didn’t understand much, but I was deeply impressed by the cylindrical superconductor batteries.

“So you say this system isn’t successful?” I asked, inwardly amazed at what I’d just witnessed.

“First Lieutenant Yang is an attack helicopter pilot with the Thirty-Eighth Army Aviation Regiment. He is most qualified to draw a conclusion.”

I thought about the ball lightning eyewitness, but the man in front of me was a little younger. He said, “The first time I saw this, I was really excited for a while. I felt like I couldn’t praise it enough, and that it would greatly increase the ground attack capabilities of our armed helicopters…. Basically, I was as excited as a World War I pilot seeing one of today’s guided missiles! But I soon realized that it’s nothing more than a toy.”

“Why?”

“First, the attack range. No more than one hundred meters from its target, or it won’t release electricity. A grenade can go a hundred meters.”

Lin Yun said, “We tried everything, but that’s the range limit.”

This was easy to understand. The energy in the superconductor battery was far too insufficient to produce natural lightning in an arc several kilometers long, and even if this energy could be generated by other means, like nuclear reactions, no existing weapons platform—be it armed helicopter or destroyer—would be able to withstand such an energy discharge: when shooting lightning, they’d end up destroying themselves first.

The lieutenant said, “There’s another thing that’s even more ridiculous… but I’ll let Dr. Lin explain it herself.”

Lin Yun said, “You’ve probably already thought of it.”

This time I had. “You’re referring to a discharge pole?”

“Yes.” She pointed to the red square area with the oil barrels, still burning. “We gave that red area a negative charge of 1.5 coulombs in advance.”

I thought for a moment. “Would it be possible to use another means, like radiation, to induce a negative charge in the target area from a distance?”

“That was one thing we considered from the start, and we began R&D on a long-range electrostatic charger concurrently with this discharge device, but the technology was very difficult, particularly under combat conditions, where effectively fighting a moving target requires completing the charging process within roughly one second. Under current technical conditions, that’s practically impossible.” She sighed. “Like the lieutenant said, we created a toy. We can demonstrate it to scare people a little, but it has no actual combat value.”

Then she took me to see the next project. “You’ll probably be most interested in this,” she said. “We’re producing lightning in the atmosphere.”

We entered the high, wide-roofed building, which Lin Yun told me was converted from a large warehouse. A row of floodlights on the high domed ceiling illuminated the vast space, where our footsteps echoed, and Lin Yun’s voice produced a pleasant echo as well.

“Ordinary lightning produced by thunderclouds is pretty hard to make artificially on a large scale, so there’s little military value. Our research objective is to produce dry lightning—that is, lightning discharged by an electric field produced in electrified air, with no involvement of clouds.”

“That’s what you said at Mount Tai.”

Lin Yun showed me two machines installed along a wall, each the size of a truck, that resembled enormous air compressors and consisted largely of high pressure airbags. “These are electrostatic air generators. They take a large volume of air, charge it, and then expel it. The two machines produce positive and negatively charged air.”

A thick tube ran from each generator along the wall at ground level, with thin tubes, more than a hundred in all, extending vertically along it at regular distances to two rows of nozzles affixed to the wall, one high and one low. Lin Yun told me that the one set of nozzles sprayed positively charged air, and the other negatively charged air, to form a discharge field.

Then I saw someone hoisting a small model airplane on a pulley high up into the space between the nozzles. Lin Yun said, “That’s the strike target. It’s the cheapest kind, only able to fly in a straight line.”

Turning around, Lin Yun led me into a small room in the corner of the building—a glassed-in iron cage, really—that contained an instrument panel. She said, “The lightning doesn’t usually strike over here, but for safety reasons, we built this shielded control room. It’s a Faraday cage.” She handed me a plastic bag containing a set of earplugs. “It gets very loud. You’ll damage your hearing without earplugs.”

When she saw I had the earplugs in, she pressed a red button on the console and the two machines roared to life, their nozzles high up on the wall spraying red and blue mist into the room to form a strange sight under the floodlights shining from the dome.

She said, “Charged air is normally colorless. To see more clearly, the charging process adds a large quantity of aerosol particles.”

The blue and red air accumulated, forming two even layers over our heads. On the console, a red number ticked, and Lin Yun told me it displayed the strength of the electric field that was now forming. After a few minutes, a piercing buzzer sounded to indicate that the electric field strength had reached the set value. Lin Yun pressed another button and the small plane that had been hoisted up began to fly. When it reached the space between the red and blue layers, there was a flash of lightning bright enough to white out my vision, and I heard a clap of thunder, still startlingly loud even though I was wearing earplugs. When my vision returned, I saw that the plane was in small pieces, like bits of paper scattered on the floor by an unseen hand, and at its final location, yellow smoke was slowly dissipating.

I was stunned as I surveyed the scene, and I asked, “Did that little plane trigger the lightning?”

“Yes. We brought the atmospheric electric field to a critical point, where any foreign object of sufficient size that enters the vicinity will trigger lightning. It’s like an airborne minefield.”

“Have you conducted outdoor tests?”

“Lots of them. But we can’t give you a demonstration, since a considerable investment is required each time the experiment is run. To release charged air outdoors, pipes with high and low nozzles are hung from tethered balloons that vent positively and negatively charged air. When building an atmospheric electric field, dozens of balloons—more than a hundred, sometimes—are lined up to form two lines of nozzles to produce the two charged air layers. Of course, this is only an experimental system. Other methods may be used in actual combat, such as release from aircraft, or from ground-launched rockets.”

I thought about this, and said, “But the air outside isn’t still. Currents will blow away the charged air layers.”

“That is indeed a major problem. Initially, we thought about continuous release upwind to form a dynamically stable atmospheric field over the defensive target.”

“And the results of actual tests?”

“Basically successful. And that success is why the accident occurred.”

“What happened?”

“Prior to conducting the atmospheric lightning generation tests, we considered all aspects of safety. Only if the wind direction was safe would we conduct the test. If, at any time during the test, the atmospheric field we created exceeded our expected stability threshold, it would be blown far downwind. During the test, there were constant reports of clear-sky lightning in the area downwind of the base, the farthest from around Zhangjiakou. But that lightning didn’t cause any damage, since it was the equivalent of a small thunderstorm. In most directions, the wind was safe. Even in the direction of the city we didn’t feel there was any particular danger, apart from one: toward Beijing Capital Airport. The atmospheric field is especially dangerous to aircraft, since, unlike thunderclouds, pilots and ground radar are unable to see it. To increase visibility, we added color, like what you just saw in the inside test, but we later discovered that over long distances the colored air separated from the charged air. Unlike the charged air, the colored air containing heavy aerosol ions dissipated quickly, so the color soon disappeared.

“We set up our own meteorology team to recheck wind direction data with the air force and local meteorological bureaus before each test, but even so, there were many sudden, unexpected changes in wind direction. On the twelfth test, the wind suddenly changed direction after the field was established, and the atmospheric electric field began drifting toward the airport. The airport had an emergency shutdown, and we dispatched five helicopters to track the drifting field. It was difficult and dangerous, since after the colored air dissipated, it was only possible to locate it through the changes in interference on the helicopter radios. One helicopter accidentally entered the field and induced lightning, and exploded when it was struck. The captain who was killed was the ball lightning eyewitness you want to see.”

The image of that young pilot came up clearly in my mind. For years, whenever I heard that someone died from a lightning strike, I felt an indescribable fear in my heart, and now this fear grew stronger. Looking at the red and blue fog hanging in midair, my scalp crawled.

“Can you get rid of the field?” I asked.

“That’s easy,” she said as she pressed a green key. Colorless air immediately issued from the nozzles. “The charge is being neutralized.” She pointed to the red digits indicating the field strength, which was dropping dramatically.

But my anxiety persisted. I could feel the invisible electric field everywhere, the surrounding space pulled taut like a rubber band, about to snap, and I found it difficult to breathe.

“Let’s go outside,” I suggested. Once out of doors, I could finally breathe a little easier. “That thing’s frightening!” I said.

She didn’t notice anything unusual about me, but said, “Frightening? No, it’s a failed system. We ignored one important point. Although we repeatedly measured the dependence curve between the volume of charged air and the volume and strength of the electric field, with promising results, the curve could be determined to within a small range indoors. It wasn’t at all applicable to outside space, where creating a large, external atmospheric field consistent with combat conditions meant a geometric increase in the amount of air to measure. Maintaining a sustained atmospheric electric field by continuously releasing charged air requires an enormous system—one that, even setting aside economic factors, would be an easy target under combat conditions. So you see now that our two experimental systems were failures. Or maybe, they were partially successful in technical areas, but have no combat value. As for the reasons they failed, I expect you have a deeper notion.”

“Oh… what?” I fumbled for an answer, too distracted to follow what she was saying.

“You must have realized that the two systems failed due to a physical reason, one that underlying technological problems make it very difficult to solve. We’ve arrived at a conclusion: there is no hope for these two systems.”

“Hmm… perhaps…,” I ventured half-heartedly, as I saw replayed before my eyes scenes of red-and-blue fields, brilliant lightning, plane fragments, and burning oil drums…

“So we needed to devise a completely new lightning weapon system. Surely you can guess what it is.”

…drifting atmospheric electric fields, the face of the pilot, an exploding helicopter…

“Ball lightning!” she cried.

I was jerked back to my senses to discover that we had crossed the open space and had reached the door to the experimental base. I stopped in my tracks and looked at her.

“If you could really generate that kind of artificial lightning, its potential far, far surpasses these two systems. It strikes targets with incredibly selective precision, and can be as accurate as a page in a book, something absolutely unachievable by any other weapon. And, more importantly, it isn’t affected by air movement—”

“Did you see how lightning struck the helicopter piloted by that captain?” I interrupted her to ask.

She paused, and then shook her head. “No one saw it. The aircraft was blown to pieces, and we only found part of the scattered wreckage.”

“Then have you seen how other people have been killed by lightning?”

She shook her head a second time.

“So you’ve definitely never seen how a person is killed by ball lightning.”

She looked at me with concern. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’ve seen it,” I said, doing my best to suppress my stomach cramps. “I’ve seen ball lightning kill. It killed my parents. I watched them turn to ash in a split second, and then the two human-shaped columns of ash collapse at a gentle touch of my finger. Back then I didn’t even tell the police, and they filed my parents’ case under ‘missing persons.’ For so many years I’ve kept it hidden in my heart and haven’t told a soul. But that night two years ago on the Skyway on Mount Tai, I told it to you. I’d never have thought you would draw this kind of inspiration from it.”

She seemed flustered. “Please let me explain. I didn’t want to hurt you. I am truly sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. When I go back I’ll report to my superiors on what I’ve learned today and your intention to cooperate, but as for myself, I have no interest in lightning weapons.”

Lin Yun and I spent the trip back to the city in silence.

“I never thought you’d be one to have a nervous breakdown!”

Back at the Institute, Gao Bo was highly displeased with me. He did not know about my past, and I did not want to tell him.

“But what you’ve found out is very valuable. I’ve learned through other channels that the military has indeed terminated lightning weapons research, but the stoppage was only temporary. Judging from the investment those two experimental systems received, the project remains highly regarded. They’re looking for a new research direction, and ball lightning really is an excellent idea. But that project requires an even greater investment, so neither we nor the military can ramp up easily in the short term. Still, we can proceed with theoretical preparations first. I can’t give you any money for this project right now, but I can give you time and effort, and you can come up with a few mathematical models with various theoretical perspectives and boundary conditions, so that when conditions are right, we can take all of the promising models and test them at the same time. Of course, the first thing to do is to firm up collaboration with the military.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to make weapons.”

“I never took you for a pacifist.”

“I’m not any -ist. It’s not complicated. I just don’t want to see ball lightning turn anyone else to ashes.”

“You’d rather wait for the day when someone else will turn us to ashes?”

“I said it wasn’t that complicated! Everyone has their own psychological minefield. I don’t want to touch mine. That’s all.”

Gao Bo gave a sly grin. “The nature of ball lightning determines that research must involve weapons. Are you simply going to abandon the chase you swore you’d devote your life to?”

As the realization hit me, I was at a sudden loss for words.

After work, I went back to my dorm and lay on the bed, my mind a blank. There was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find Lin Yun. She was dressed like a college student and looked far younger than she did in uniform.

“I’m really sorry about yesterday,” she said. She looked sincere.

“I’m the one who should say sorry,” I said awkwardly.

“With the terrible experience you had, it’s understandable that you’d feel such revulsion at my idea. But we must make ourselves strong for the cause.”

“Lin Yun, I’m not sure we’re working for the same cause.”

“Don’t say that. All of the major scientific advances this century—aerospace, nuclear energy, computers—are the result of scientists and military personnel, two groups on different paths, combining what their different goals had in common. The common point of our goals is very clear: artificial production of ball lightning. It’s just that for you that’s an endpoint, and for me it’s just the beginning. I didn’t come to explain my goals to you, since we’re unlikely to find common ground. I came to help reduce your disgust at lightning weapons a little.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

“Okay. Your first thought as far as lightning weapons are concerned is killing—what we call ‘destroying the enemy’s effective strength.’ If you think carefully about this, though, you’ll realize that even if the production of lightning weapons is entirely successful, they won’t be any more capable than conventional weapons. If the target is a large volume of metal, then a Faraday cage effect will be produced, creating a shield and resulting in a partial or complete reduction in damage to those inside. So lightning weapons aren’t as cruel to life as they might appear. In fact, they might be the best weapons system for achieving victory at the least cost to enemy lives.”

“How do you figure?”

“What targets suffer greatest damage from lightning weapons? Electronics systems. When the electromagnetic pulse induced by lightning exceeds 2.4 gauss, permanent damage will be caused to integrated circuits, and at greater than 0.07 gauss, there will be interference with computers. The transient pulse induced by lightning is pervasive, and even without a direct strike, lightning can deal a devastating blow to particularly sensitive microelectronics. And it strikes targets with incredible precision, making it a weapon capable of destroying all circuits in the enemy’s weapons systems without touching any other parts. If those systems are fried, then the battle is over.”

I said nothing, mulling over her words.

“Your revulsion has been reduced a little, I imagine. Next, I’ll give you a clearer look at your own goal. The study of ball lightning isn’t fundamental science. Weapons systems are its only possible application. Apart from weapons research, who’s going to fund your project? You can’t possibly believe you can create ball lightning with just a pencil and paper.”

“But we’ve still got to rely on pencil and paper right now.” I told her Gao Bo’s idea.

“That means we’ll be working together?” Delighted, she jumped out of her seat.

“I must congratulate your persuasive abilities.”

“It’s a work necessity. Every day, New Concepts needs to convince people to accept strange-looking ideas. We successfully convinced the General Armaments Department about lightning weapons, but we’ve let everyone down so far.”

“I see why your position is difficult.”

“It’s not just a difficult position. The lightning weapons project has been halted, leaving us to fend for ourselves. As you and Director Gao say, we’ve got to make theoretical preparations. Opportunity will surely come! It’s too seductive a weapons system. I refuse to believe that they’ll simply terminate it…. Have you eaten? Let’s go. My treat.”

We entered a restaurant with low lighting, few people, and a piano playing soft music.

“The military environment suits you,” I said after we sat down.

“Perhaps. I grew up in the army.”

As I watched her carefully under the dim lights, my attention was drawn to her brooch, the sole piece of jewelry she wore, a sword the length of a matchstick with a tiny pair of wings on the handle. It was exquisitely beautiful, glistening silver in the dimness like a star hanging from her collar.

“Do you think it’s pretty?” she asked me as she looked down at the brooch.

I nodded and said it was, feeling slightly awkward that, as with the perfume the day before, she had noticed that I noticed. A fault of the small circles I moved in. I was unaccustomed to being alone with the opposite sex, or to their refined sensitivity. But to find those feminine qualities so concentrated in a woman piloting a land mine–equipped car was breathtaking.

Then I discovered that the elegant brooch and terrifying bamboo were one and the same.

Lin Yun took off the brooch and pinched the handle of the small sword in one hand, while she picked up a fork and spoon from the table with the other. Holding them together vertically, she swept the sword gently past. To my astonishment, the metal spoon and fork handles severed as if they were wax.

“This is a silicone material produced using molecular arrangement technology, with an edge just a few molecules thick. It’s the keenest blade in the world.”

Gingerly I took the brooch she handed me and inspected it under the light. The blade was practically transparent.

“Isn’t it dangerous to wear something like that?”

“I like the feeling. Just like the Inuit like the cold. It’s a feeling that can accelerate your thinking, and give birth to inspiration.”

“Inuit don’t like the cold. They just don’t have any alternative. You… you’re very special.”

She nodded. “I get that sense too.”

“You like weapons, and danger. So what about war? Do you like that?”

“In the present circumstances, it’s not an issue of whether or not we like war.” She adroitly evaded my question, and I knew she was nowhere near opening up. Maybe that day would never come.

But we still talked easily, and had lots to talk about. Her mind was as sharp as her little sword, nicking and slicing and giving me chills; her cool rationality was something I’d never seen in other women.

She never revealed her family background, carefully changing the topic when things moved in that direction. All I knew was that her parents were military.

Before we knew it, it was two in the morning. The candelabra on our table was nearly extinguished, and we were the only ones left in the restaurant. The piano player came over to ask what we wanted to hear, in a clear bid to push us out.

I tried to come up with something obscure, so that we might be able to stay a while longer if he couldn’t play it. “There’s a movement from Scheherazade where Sinbad is voyaging. I’ve forgotten what it’s called.”

The piano player shook his head and asked us to choose another piece.

Lin Yun told him, “Play The Four Seasons.” Then she said, “You must like ‘Summer,’ the season of thunder and lightning.”

We continued to talk through the melody of The Four Seasons, on subject matter much less serious than before. She said, “I am convinced that you never spoke to the prettiest girl in your class.”

“I did.” I remembered the night in the library when the pretty girl asked me what I was looking for, but I couldn’t remember what her name was.

When the piece was finished, it was at last time for us to leave, but Lin Yun smiled and told me to wait. “I’ll play that piece from Scheherazade for you.”

She sat down at the piano and the Rimsky-Korsakov that had accompanied me on countless lonely nights wafted over like a breeze on a spring evening. Watching her lithe fingers dance on the keys, I suddenly realized that I’d wanted to hear this piece because this place was like a harbor. A beautiful major was telling me the story of Sinbad’s voyages with music, telling me of the ocean with its storms and calms, of princesses, fairies, monsters, and gemstones, and palm trees and sandy beaches under the setting sun.

On the table before me, in the light of the guttering candles, the world’s sharpest sword lay quietly.

Seti@Home

Again I began to count the angels on the head of a pin, but this time Lin Yun was counting them with me.

In the process of building a mathematical model, I found that while Lin Yun’s mathematical abilities were no match for mine, she possessed vast knowledge and was accomplished in a wide range of disciplines, as her field required. She was strong in computers, so she was the one who programmed the models. Her programs had visualizations for the results. If the mathematics were successful, they would display a slow-motion view of ball lightning on the screen with every last detail visible, capable of clearly showing the release of energy upon the lightning’s disappearance as its trajectory was tracked on a three-dimensional axis in a second view. Compared to the dry tables and curves of my earlier program, this was much better, and not just because of visuals and aesthetics: When the earlier data was outputted, it required time-consuming detailed analysis before the success of the simulation could be determined, but now this was done automatically by the computer. The software caused a material change in our study of the theory of ball lightning.

An infinite number of mathematical models could be created for ball lightning, just like an essay prompt. You just have to build a mathematically consistent system compatible with physical laws that uses an electromagnetic field to constrain energy into a stable ball, and that satisfies all known characteristics of ball lightning. But doing this wasn’t easy. An astronomer once made an interesting observation: “Take stars. If they didn’t exist, it’d be very easy to prove that their existence is impossible.” That applied to ball lightning, too. Conceptualizing a means by which electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light could be confined into such a small ball was maddening.

But with enough patience, and enthusiasm for a hopeless cause, such mathematical models could be constructed. Whether they would withstand experimental tests was another matter altogether. Truth be told, I was almost certain that experiments would not succeed. The models we had built only exhibited a subset of the characteristics of ball lightning. Some unexpressed by one model were easily found in another, but none exhibited all of its known characteristics.

Apart from the aforementioned confined EM waves, one of ball lightning’s most mysterious properties was the selectivity of its release of energy. In the computer, the virtual ball lightning produced by the mathematical model was like a bomb that reduced everything around it to ash when it touched an object or released energy of its own accord. Whenever I saw this, my mind pulled up those charred books on an unharmed bookshelf, and the cooked seafood in the likewise unharmed refrigerator, and the burnt tee shirt next to my skin underneath a completely intact jacket, and the cool surfaces of the oranges beside the spot where my incinerated parents had been sitting…. But most deeply imprinted upon my memory was the notebook Zhang Bin had shown me with the alternating burnt pages: the arrogant demonstration of some mysterious force that had mercilessly destroyed my confidence.

Most of my time was spent working at the Lightning Institute, but sometimes I went to New Concepts.

Most of Lin Yun’s colleagues and friends were men—soldiers—and even outside of work I seldom saw her with any female friends. Those young officers were members of the swiftly expanding intelligentsia, and all possessed a masculinity that was rare in contemporary society. This gave me a sense of inferiority that became particularly acute when Lin Yun was engrossed in discussions with them of military affairs, which I knew nothing about. And the navy captain in the photo on her desk was the most impressive of them all.

When I met him, Jiang Xingchen was a colonel, which meant that Lin Yun had known him for quite some time. He was in his early thirties and looked even younger than in his photo. It was rare for a colonel to be so young.

“Jiang Xingchen, captain of Zhufeng,” Lin Yun said by way of introduction. Addressing him without title, and the brief glance they exchanged, confirmed their relationship.

“Dr. Chen. Lin Yun has spoken of you often, and that ball lightning of yours.” As he spoke, his eyes were gently fixed on me, and there was a sincerity in them that put me at ease, not at all how I’d imagined an aircraft carrier captain to be.

My first glimpse of him made me understand that competition was meaningless. He didn’t posture or put on aggressive displays of power, but strove at all times to conceal his strength, as a sort of kindness, or a fear that his strength would hurt someone like me. He seemed always to be saying, “I’m really very sorry to make you feel inferior before her. It’s not intentional. Let’s work to change the situation together.”

“Your aircraft carrier cost ten yuan from every ordinary taxpayer,” I said in an attempt to relax myself, only realizing how clumsy that sounded after it left my mouth.

“That doesn’t even account for the carrier’s aircraft and its escort cruisers. So every time we leave harbor, it’s like we’ve got a burden on our shoulders,” he said seriously, successfully relieving my tension a second time.

I wasn’t as dejected as I imagined I’d be after meeting Jiang Xingchen, but felt instead like a weight had been lifted. Lin Yun had become a microcosm of perfection in my mind, a world I could appreciate, a place I could turn to for relaxation when I was fatigued, but one I was careful to avoid getting trapped in. Something separated our hearts, something that was inexpressible but clearly existed. For me, Lin Yun was like the miniature sword she wore around her neck: crystalline beauty that cut dangerously sharp.

After setting up a few mathematical models, I gradually got the hang of it, and the next models I constructed reflected increasing numbers of the known characteristics of ball lightning. At the same time, the models required an increasing number of calculations, and sometimes my desktop would run for days before completing a model. At New Concepts, Lin Yun networked eighteen machines, and she and I broke the models down into eighteen parts that could execute separately on those machines as close to simultaneously as possible and combine their results, greatly increasing efficiency.

When I finally completed a model that exhibited all of ball lightning’s known characteristics, the event Lin Yun had feared had already taken place. This time, she didn’t immediately start programming the model when she received it, but spent several days conducting estimates of its computational complexity. When she obtained the results, she let out a long sigh.

“We have a problem,” she said. “One round of calculations for this model will need to run for five hundred thousand hours on a single computer.”

I was shocked. “That’s… more than fifty years?”

“Yes. From past experience, every model requires several rounds of debugging before it’s operational—more in this case, since it’s such a complex model. We can only allow ten days to complete a simulation.”

I mentally estimated: “We’d need two thousand computers working simultaneously.”

Instead, we started a search for a mainframe, but it wasn’t easy. Neither Lightning Institute nor New Concepts had one; their biggest machine was an AlphaServer. The military’s mainframes were busy and had tight restrictions, and since ours wasn’t a registered military project, Lin Yun could not win us their use despite repeated attempts. So we had to place our hopes on civilian-sector mainframes, where Lin Yun and I had no connections at all. We turned to Gao Bo for ideas.

His situation wasn’t good. When he took up his position, he had converted all of the institutional departments into business units that were completely reliant on the market. He had conducted competitive rehiring and laid off a huge number of staff. His HR conduct was more impulsive than careful, and combined with his poor understanding of national conditions and human sentiment, his relationships were tense throughout the hierarchy.

His business failures were even worse. The first thing he did in office was to focus the Institute’s main strength on new surge arrestors and eliminators vastly different from conventional anti-lightning systems, including semiconductor eliminators, optimized lightning rods, laser lightning attractors, rocket lightning attractors, and water column lightning attractors. However, right around that time, new surge arrestors and eliminators were under discussion at a conference of the Chinese Society for Electrical Engineering’s High Voltage Committee, Overvoltage and Insulation Coordination Subcommittee. Minutes from the meeting showed a decision that, as there had been no theoretical or practical demonstration that these nonstandard products had any superior functionality to ordinary anti-lightning devices, and seeing as many R&D problems still remained, nonstandard anti-lightning products therefore could not be adopted in engineering projects. Due to the group’s authority and influence, the conference’s viewpoint was destined to be adopted by state-designated lightning projects, meaning that any such technology currently under development would be completely shut out of the market, wasting enormous investment. When I went to Gao Bo to talk about the mainframe, he was looking for me, to ask me to put ball lightning research on hold and concentrate my energy on developing a new lightning location system for power supply systems. He also wanted me to complete the design of an anti-lightning project for the Beijing Capital Theater. Hence the mainframe was a no-go. I had to do ball lightning research in my spare time.

Lin Yun and I tried some other leads, but it turned out that in the era of commoditized computers, mainframes were scarce.

“We’re pretty fortunate, really,” she said. “Our calculations are nothing next to the world’s supercomputing projects. I recently saw the data for a US DOE nuclear test simulation, which their current twelve teraFLOPS is far from satisfying. They’re setting up a cluster incorporating twelve thousand individual Alpha processors that can achieve speeds on the order of one hundred teraFLOPS. Our calculations rate as conventional compared to that, so we should be able to find a solution.”

She acted like a warrior at all times. No matter the difficulty, she pushed forward, minimizing my stress by understating the difficulties involved. It was something I ought to have been doing for her.

I said, “There are similarities between the digital models of ball lightning and nuclear tests. They’re both simulating an energy release process, and in some respects, the former is more complicated. So at some point we’ll need the kind of computational power they’re using. But even right now, I don’t see any way out for us.”

For the next few days, I concentrated on the lightning location system Gao Bo had passed down to me, and I didn’t have any contact with Lin Yun. One day I received a phone call from her, telling me to look at a website. She sounded very excited.

I opened up the website and saw a black outer space background topped by purple radio waves floating over the Earth. The page title was SETI@home, short for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home.”

I’d heard of it before: a huge experiment that harnessed the idle power of tens of thousands of Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The SETI@home program was a special screen saver that analyzed data from the world’s largest radio telescopes to help in the hunt. When you have a fire hose of data coming at your ears and you need to sift through it to find the information you need, a giant supercomputer is a necessity that comes at a huge cost. Scientists with tight budgets found an expedient solution: rather than use one large machine, they shared the workload among many smaller computers. Every day, data received by Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was recorded onto high-density tapes and sent back to the research base in California, where it was divided into chunks of roughly 0.25 megabytes and distributed by the main SETI@home server to different personal computers. All Internet users around the world had to do was visit the website and download and install the screen saver. Then, when they took a break from work, the screen saver would start running, and a computer that appeared to be at rest would join the ranks of those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, receiving and analyzing chunks of data from SETI@home, automatically returning the results to base when complete, and then fetching another chunk.

I downloaded the screen saver and started it running. It also had a black background, and in the lower half, the signal received by radio telescope was displayed in three-dimensional coordinates, like a bird’s-eye view of a megacity composed of countless skyscrapers, a magnificent sight. The upper left displayed a dynamic waveform—the portion of the signal under analysis—as well as a completion percentage, which, after five minutes, displayed just 0.01 percent.

“Wonderful!” I exclaimed, drawing startled looks from my officemates. At the realization of how those wealthier scientists had, on encountering the same problem as us, come up with such a creative and frugal solution, I felt a sense of embarrassment. I went to New Concepts immediately, where Lin Yun was seated at a computer and, as I had expected, working on a web page.

“I’m almost done, and we’ve located a server. The key thing is, under what pretense?”

“Modeling ball lightning, of course!”

“Absolutely not! How many people are interested in that? I say we look for aliens, too.”

“We can’t trick people.”

“It’s not tricking them. Ball lightning’s behavior is difficult to explain using purely physical laws, but most of the problems are easily resolved if you think of it as a life-form.”

“That’s going a bit woo-woo.”

“I’ve thought about this before. A world composed of atoms and molecules has evolved life, so if the Big Bang theory is correct, then in the long evolutionary history of the universe, the invisible electromagnetic world would have been in existence far longer than the world of atoms and molecules. Why wouldn’t it have evolved an electromagnetic structure akin to life?”

“That settles it. Let’s look for aliens!”

“We’ve got an advantage over SETI. They’re looking for aliens tens of thousands of light-years away, but we’re looking in the atmosphere,” she said as she showed me the home page, with SETI@home’s background replaced with blue sky, and the title changed to “SML@home”—“Search for Magnetic Life at home.” The screen saver displayed a faint blue fireball that drifted slowly across the screen, dragging a purple tail of light and emitting a deep hum.

The next thing to do was to divide the model we needed to calculate into two thousand chunks in parallel. That was a lot of work that took us half a month—the programming was more complicated than SETI@home’s since the chunks had to transmit data to each other. Then we hooked the chunks up to the screen saver and put it on the web page. Finally, we put up the web page and hopefully awaited the results.

Three days later, we realized we’d been a bit too optimistic. The website had received fewer than fifty hits, and only four people had downloaded the screen saver. Two comments were left on our guestbook warning us not to engage in pseudoscience.

“There’s only one option left,” Lin Yun said. “Subterfuge. We’ll upload our data to the SETI@home servers. It’s no hassle to hack them. Then, all of those computers that have downloaded their screen saver will do our work, and the program will send the results back to us.”

I didn’t object. I had discovered how weak moral constraints seemed when you crave something. But I rationalized: “They’ve got more than a hundred thousand computers working for them. We only need two thousand, and we’ll leave when we’re done. It won’t affect them much.”

Lin Yun’s conscience didn’t need soothing. She hooked up the broadband and quickly got to work. She worked so adeptly I had a hard time imagining how she’d learned that. Two days later, she had successfully put our data and programs onto the SETI@home server (at UC Berkeley, we found out later).

Lin Yun, I was learning, had far fewer moral constraints than I did, in that she dared to act recklessly to achieve her goals.

Just two days later, all of the two thousand screen savers had been downloaded from the SETI@home server, and the calculation results began streaming into our server. For several days, Lin Yun and I sat for hours watching the data build up, imagining in exhilaration the two thousand computers scattered across the globe working for us.

But on the eighth day, I turned on my computer and logged on to the New Concept server to discover that the updates had stopped. The last transmission was a text file, which read:

I felt a chill in my heart like I’d plunged into an ice pit, and was too disheartened even to call Lin Yun.

She called instead. “I know. But that’s not why I called,” she said, and added, “Look at the guestbook on our old web page.”

I opened up SML@home and saw another message in English in the guestbook:

Siberia

“Ah, the sigh of wind in the pines!” Lin Yun said excitedly. My mind wasn’t on aesthetics, but on tightening my coat around me. Through the swirling snow and fog, the distant peaks were vague shadows.

The plane from Moscow took four hours to reach Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport, adding an additional layer of strangeness atop the one I felt upon landing in Moscow the week before, except with a modicum of comfort at the thought that this place was closer to China.

After receiving the message, we instinctively felt that there had to be something behind it, but I never dreamed I would ever get the chance to go to Siberia. A week before, Lin Yun informed me that she and I would travel to Russia with a technical advisory group. China and Russia, she said, had basically completed negotiations for in-China assembly of Sukhoi Su-30 fighters, and the advisory group was accompanying low-level representatives to Russia to work out the details. I would be the group’s sole lightning expert. Finding this an odd coincidence, I asked her how she’d found this opportunity, and she said mysteriously, “I exercised a certain privilege, one I didn’t use when looking for the mainframe. This time there was no other way.”

I didn’t know what privilege she was talking about, but I didn’t ask further.

After reaching Moscow, I found I had absolutely nothing to do in the delegation’s activities, nor did Lin Yun. We visited the Sukhoi Design Bureau and a few military-industrial assembly plants.

One evening in Moscow, Lin Yun asked for leave from the group leader and went out, only returning to the hotel late at night. I visited her in her room, where she was sitting woodenly, eyes red and face stained with tears, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought of her as the type to cry. She said nothing and I asked nothing, but for the next three days in Moscow she was depressed. This episode informed me that her life was far more complicated than I imagined.

When the delegation boarded the plane to fly home, we boarded a different plane headed in basically the same direction, but for a much closer destination. Novosibirsk wasn’t all that much closer to Moscow than to Beijing.

We found a taxi to Nekrasovsky Naukograd, which the driver told us was a sixty-kilometer drive. On either side of the snow-covered roadway was an endless swirl of snow and dark forests. Lin Yun could speak halting Russian and seemed to have struck up a rapport with the driver. He twisted his neck to peer at me, shivering with cold in the back seat, and, as if sympathizing with me being left out of the conversation, suddenly switched into fluent English and carried on talking to Lin Yun.

The driver told us Noksbek Naukograd was a Science City. “…Science Cities were a romantic idea of the 1950s, brimming with the purity and innocence of that era, and with idealism for creating a new world. But they weren’t, in fact, as successful as you may have heard. Far from metropolitan areas, transportation difficulties limited the radiant effects of science and technology. Insufficient population meant that metropolitan culture was unable to take shape, violating the human inclination toward urbanism, and, in a futile struggle with larger cities, they could only watch as scientists migrated toward more attractive locations.”

“You don’t sound like a taxi driver,” I remarked.

Lin Yun said, “He’s a researcher at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is… what did you say your specialty was?”

“I’m engaged in studying comprehensive resource planning of undeveloped areas in the far-east economic region, a project of use to no one in an age of quick bucks.”

“Were you laid off?”

“Not yet. Today’s Sunday. I make more driving this cab on the weekend than I get in salary for the week.”

When the car entered the Science City, buildings from the 1950s and ’60s swept past on either side of us in the snow, and I’m certain I even saw a statue of Lenin. It was a city with a sense of nostalgia, something you didn’t get from ancient cities and their thousand-odd years of history. They were too old, old enough to have no connection to you, old enough that you lost all feeling. But young cities like these made you think about the era that had just passed away, the childhood and youth you spent there, your own antiquity, your own prehistory.

The car stopped at a five-story building in what could have been a residential area, part of a row of identical-looking buildings. Before the driver drove off, he left us with a memorable line through the window: “This is the cheapest neighborhood in the city, but the people who live here aren’t cheap.”

We went through the door into a dark interior of a residential building with ’50s-era high ceilings and several election stickers for various local political parties stuck to the lobby walls. Farther in, we had to feel our way forward. We used a cigarette lighter to check the door numbers up on the fifth floor. As we skirted the stairwell entrance in search of number 561, my fingers now getting scorched, I heard a man’s deep voice shout in English, “Is that you? For BL? Third door on the left.”

We pushed open the door and entered a room that gave two contradictory feelings: at first it was very dark, but then the ceiling lights glared. The room was filled with the stench of alcohol. Books were everywhere, and it looked chaotic, but not to the point of being out of control. A computer screen flashed for an instant before going dark, and the large man sitting at it stood up. He had a long beard, a somewhat pale face, and seemed to be in his sixties.

“When you’ve lived here for so long, it’s easy to tell who’s coming up the stairs from the sound. The only strangers paying a visit would have to be you two. I knew you’d come.” He took stock of us. “So young—like I was at the start of my tragic life. You’re Chinese?”

We nodded.

“My father went to China in the fifties as a hydroelectric engineer, to help you build the Sanmenxia Hydropower Station. I heard it only made things worse.”[3]

Lin Yun thought a moment before replying. “It seems you all didn’t account for the silt in the Yellow River, so the dam caused flooding upstream. Even now the reservoir can’t be filled to design levels.”

“Ah, another failure. The memories left to us from that romantic age are nothing but failure. Alexander Gemow,” he said by way of introduction. We introduced ourselves in turn. He took stock of us again, this time with a more meaningful look, and then said to himself, “So young. You’re still worth saving.”

Lin Yun and I glanced at each other in surprise, and then tried to guess the meaning behind his words. Gemow put a liquor bottle and a glass onto the table, and then began rummaging around for something. We took this opportunity to take a look at the room. I noticed a forest of empties flanking his computer, and realized the source of the peculiar paradox I’d felt upon entering: the walls were papered in black, so it was practically a darkroom, but age and water seepage had faded the color, bringing out white lines and blotches on the black walls.

“Found them. No one ever comes here, damn it.” He put two large glasses on the table, then filled them with alcohol, a home-brewed vodka, cloudy white. I declared I couldn’t drink that much.

“Then let the lady drink for you,” he said coldly, draining his glass and refilling it. Lin Yun did not protest, but drained her glass as I clicked my tongue, then reached over and drank half of mine.

“You know why we’ve come,” I said to Gemow.

He said nothing, simply poured more vodka for him and Lin Yun. They took turns drinking wordlessly for ages. I looked at Lin Yun, hoping she’d say something, but she seemed to have caught Gemow’s alcoholism. She downed another half glass and then looked him straight in the eyes. Anxious, I nudged my empty glass on the table beside her. She gave me a look, and then jerked her head toward the wall.

Again I turned my attention to the peculiar black wall, and noticed a few blurry images on the black paper. Going in for a closer look, I found that they were ground scenes of buildings and vegetation, apparently at night, and very blurred, largely showing up as silhouettes. But when I looked back at the white stripes and lines, my blood congealed in my veins.

This huge room was densely covered in black-and-white photos of ball lightning, on all the walls, and the ceiling too.

Different-sized photos, but most of them were three-by-fives, and I could scarcely imagine the total number. One by one I looked at them. There were no duplicates.

“Look over there,” Gemow said, pointing toward the door. Hanging on the door we came in through was a large photo that looked to be of a sunrise, the sun just peeking over the horizon and a jungle silhouette in the white orb.

“That was taken seventy-five years ago in the Congo. Its diameter,” he said, draining his glass, “was 105 meters. When it exploded, it turned two hectares of forest to cinders and boiled away a small lake. The weird thing is that this superball of lightning appeared during daytime.”

I took a glass from beside Lin Yun and poured myself a drink, drained it, and let the craziness of it all begin to spiral. She and I did not speak, but sought to calm our shock. I turned my attention to the pile of books on the table and picked up the closest one, but this time I was disappointed. I couldn’t read Russian, but from the photo on the frontispiece of the author with a world map birthmark on his head, I knew what it was. Lin Yun took a look at the book and then passed it back.

“Perestroika,” she said.

Now I knew why, when we’d come in, the pile of books hadn’t seemed too messy: they were all impeccably and identically bound. Perestroika, all of them.

Gemow said, “I used to have the materials you’re looking for, more than would fit in this building, but ten years ago I torched them. Then I bought tons of books as a new way to make a living.”

We looked at him in confusion.

He picked up a volume. “Check out the cover. The lettering is gilded, and gold dust can be washed off with acid. You can procure these books wholesale, then return them to the distributing bookstore as unsold merchandise, only you paint in the lettering with fake gilding. Later on you don’t even regild them, since they don’t notice anyway. There’s a lot of money in this. My only complaint about the author is why the hell he didn’t pick a longer title, something like New Thinking on the Establishment of a New Democratic Institution for the Soviet Socialist Union, Its Integration into a New Democratic Society, and the Possibility of Becoming an Intimate Member. But the money had only just started coming in when the red flag came off the spire, and then there wasn’t any gold on the book cover, and finally the book itself went away. These are from the last lot I bought. They sat in the basement for ten years, and now that the price of kerosene is going up, I remembered that they make pretty good fuel for the stove. Ah, when you’ve got guests, you really ought to fire up a stove…” He picked up a book, lit it with a cigarette lighter, and stared at it a while. “The paper’s good quality. A decade and it hasn’t yellowed. Who knows—maybe it’s made from Siberian birchwood.” Then he tossed the book into the stove, followed by two more. The fire kicked up, and the countless balls of lightning in the photos danced in the red light, lending a bit of warmth to the chilly room.

Without turning his gaze from the fire, Gemow asked us a few simple questions about our situation, but didn’t touch on ball lightning at all. At last he picked up an old rotary telephone. After he’d dialed, he spoke a few words into the receiver, and then stood up and said, “Let’s go.”

The three of us went downstairs, and then out into the frozen wind and snow. A jeep pulled up in front of us, and Gemow beckoned us inside. The driver was roughly his age, but burly like an old sailor. Gemow introduced him: “This is Uncle Levalenkov. He’s a fur trader. We use him for transportation.”

The jeep drove along a roadway with few cars, and before long we had driven out of the city and into a vast snowy plain. We turned onto a bumpy road, and after another hour or so, a warehouse-like building appeared in the snow and fog ahead of us. The vehicle stopped in front of the entrance. The gate rumbled as Levalenkov pushed it open, and we entered. Pungent animal skins were piled high on both sides inside the warehouse, but right in the middle was an open space where a plane was parked. It was an ancient biplane with a tattered fuselage and some tears in the aluminum skin.

Levalenkov spoke a few words in Russian, which Lin Yun translated: “This used to be used for spraying the trees. I bought it when the forest was privatized. The old fella’s a little worn on the outside, but it still works well. Let’s strip everything out of it.”

And so, from the plane’s narrow cabin, we carried out bundles of furs—what animal I couldn’t say, but they were clearly of high quality. When all the bundles were out, Levalenkov emptied a canister of oil underneath the plane and lit it, while Gemow explained that the cold had caused the engine pipes to freeze, and that they needed to be roasted a bit before starting up. While they were heating, Levalenkov took out a bottle of vodka and the four of us passed it around, taking swigs. After two sips, I had to sit on the floor and couldn’t get up, but Lin Yun continued drinking with them, and I had to admire her alcohol tolerance. When the bottle was drained, Levalenkov waved us up, and then, with an agility that belied his years, jumped nimbly into the pilot’s seat. He had not appeared so agile before, but the alcohol was evidently like lubricant for this Siberian. The three of us squeezed through the tiny door into the cabin, and Gemow picked up three heavy fur coats and passed two to us: “Put them on. You’ll freeze otherwise.”

The plane’s engine coughed to life, and the propellers began to turn. Slowly the biplane eased out of the warehouse and into the world of wind and snow. Levalenkov jumped out of the pilot’s seat, went back to lock the door, and then sat back at the controls to accelerate the plane across the snowfield. But before long, the engine quit, and then all we could hear was the sound of the snow beating against the window glass. Levalenkov cursed, then clambered around and tinkered for ages before he got the plane started again. When it resumed taxiing, I asked him from my seat in the back, “What happens if the engine stops in midair?”

After Lin Yun translated, he shrugged nonchalantly. “We drop.”

He added a few more sentences, which Lin Yun translated. “In Siberia, a one hundred percent guarantee isn’t necessarily a good thing. Sometimes you fly all the way only to discover it would have been better to have fallen halfway. Dr. Gemow knows this from experience. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

“That’s enough, Captain,” Gemow said, obviously pricked by the remark.

“You used to be an air force pilot?” Lin Yun asked Levalenkov.

“Of course not. Just the last guard commander at the base.”

We felt a sudden heaviness, and out the window the snowy fields fell away as the plane took off. Now, apart from the engine sound, the snow beat even more urgently on the plane. The air currents blew away the snow that had accumulated in the window troughs. Looking outside beneath the plane, we could see through the dense snow and fog the vast forests slowly slipping past, or the occasional iced-over lake, spots of white dotted through the black forests that reminded me of the photos on Gemow’s wall. Looking down at Siberia, I felt immensely gratified that ball lightning had brought me to a place I never imagined I would go.

“Siberia, hardship, romance, ideals, sacrifice…,” Lin Yun murmured, her head leaning on the glass as she raptly watched the foreign land.

Gemow said, “You’re talking about the Siberia of the past and of fiction. Today all that’s left is greed and loss. Everywhere on the ground below us is rampant logging and hunting, and black crude from oil-field leaks flows unchecked.”

“Chinese,” said Levalenkov from the pilot’s seat. “Lots of Chinese. They exchange fake alcohol that turns you blind for our furs and timber. They sell down jackets filled with chicken feathers…. But friends of Dr. Gemow I’ll trust.”

We stayed silent. The storm buffeted the plane about like a leaf, and we wrapped tightly in our coats against the torment of the cold.

After around twenty more minutes of flying, the plane started its descent. Below us I could see a large clearing among the trees, where the plane eventually landed. When we disembarked, Gemow said, “Leave the coats. You won’t need them.” This baffled us, since the door had opened to a blast of threateningly frigid air, and the world of swirling snow outside was even more formidable. Leaving Levalenkov behind to wait for us, Gemow headed straight out from the plane with us following close behind as the wind ripped through our clothes like gauze. The snow was deep, but the sensation under my feet told me that we were walking along rail tracks. Not far ahead of us was a surface entrance to a tunnel, but from here we could tell it had been sealed up by a concrete wall. We entered the short tunnel portion before the cement wall, which got us out of the wind a bit. Gemow pushed away the snow and heaved aside the large rock he uncovered to reveal a dark hole about one meter in diameter.

Gemow said, “This is a spur tunnel I dug around the cement seal. It’s over ten meters long.” As he spoke he took out three large rechargeable flashlights, passed one to each of us, and, carrying the third, motioned for us to follow him into the hole.

I was right behind him, with Lin Yun taking up the rear, as we practically crawled through the squat tunnel. It was claustrophobic in the cramped space, and my feeling of suffocation grew the farther in I went. Suddenly Gemow stood up, and I followed. In the gleam of the flashlight I saw we were in a broad tunnel that sloped gently downward into the earth, leading to the train tracks I had sensed outside and off into the darkness. I shone the flashlight on the wall, and saw smooth cement studded with metal pegs and bands, evidently once hung with electrical cables. We followed the tunnel downward, and the chill gradually disappeared as the depth increased. Then we caught the odor of damp, and heard dripping water—the temperature was now above the freezing point.

Space suddenly opened up before us. My flashlight beam lost its target, as if the tunnel had come out into the pitch-black night. But looking carefully I could still see the circle illuminated by the flashlight high up on the ceiling, too high and too dim to make anything out. Our footsteps had multiple echoes, so I couldn’t be certain how big the place was.

Gemow stopped and lit a cigarette. Then he began: “More than forty years ago, I was a doctoral student in physics at Moscow State University. I still remember clearly the day that thousands of us watched Yuri Gagarin, just returned from space, cross Red Square in an open-top jeep. He waved flowers, and his chest was covered in medals. Overflowing with passion and harboring a desire to accomplish a grand thing in a brand-new world, I voluntarily requested to join the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that was just then being set up.

“Once I got there, I told my supervisor that I wanted to work on something completely new, something with no foundation whatsoever, regardless of the difficulty. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You’ll join Project 3141.’ Later I found out that the project code had been chosen based on the value of pi. For days after first meeting the person in charge of the project, the academician Nikolai Niernov, I didn’t know what it was about. Niernov was a very unusual person, fanatical even given the politics of the time, someone who secretly read Trotsky and was enamored with the idea of global revolution. When I asked him about the nature of Project 3141, this is what he said: ‘Comrade Gemow, I know that recent accomplishments in space flight are particularly attractive to you, but what do they matter? From orbit, Gagarin wasn’t able to toss so much as a rock down onto the heads of those capitalists in Washington. But our project is different. If we succeed, it will turn all the conventional weapons of the imperialists into toys, and make their air force flight groups as fragile as butterflies, and make their fleets as flimsy as cardboard boxes floating on the water!’

“And then I came here, with the first group of scientists, and it looked like what you just saw outside. It was snowing that day, and this open area had just been cleared out, and there were still stumps on the ground.

“I won’t go into detail about what happened later. Even if we had time, I don’t think my mind could take it. All you need to know is that right where we’re standing was the world’s largest ball lightning research center. The study of ball lightning took place here for thirty years, employing, at its height, more than five thousand people. The Soviet Union’s greatest physicists and mathematicians were all involved to varying extents.

“To demonstrate just how much was invested into this project, I’ll give you one example. Look at this.”

Gemow shone his flashlight behind us, and just beside the tunnel we had come out of we saw another massive tunnel entrance.

“That tunnel is twenty miles long, but for secrecy, all shipments to the base were unloaded on the other end and then brought here through the tunnel. This led to large quantities of goods unaccountably disappearing over there. To keep this fact from attracting attention and questions from the outside world, they built a small city there. Only—likewise for secrecy—the city was not inhabited. It was just a useless ghost town.

“To hide the radiation produced during artificial lightning research, the entire base was constructed underground. We’re standing in a medium-sized lab. The rest of the base has been sealed up or demolished, and there’s no way to get to it now.

“Large experimental equipment was once installed here, like the world’s largest lightning simulator, a complex field generator, and a large-scale wind tunnel, to model the environment producing ball lightning on the largest possible scale and from every angle. Take a look at this.”

We had arrived at a massive trapezoidal cement platform.

“Can you imagine a platinum electrode several stories high? There used to be one installed on this platform.”

He bent down to pick something up and passed it to me. It was heavy, a metal ball. “It looks like it’s from a ball mill,” I said.

Gemow shook his head. “During testing of the lightning simulator, metal structures at the top of the tunnel were melted by the lightning, and the drips cooled to form these.” I examined the ground with a flashlight and found many of the metal balls. “The lightning produced by the massive simulator in the central lab was an order of magnitude more powerful than natural lightning in the wild, enough for NATO’s nuclear monitoring system to detect the shock wave. NATO believed that it was from an underground nuclear test, and the Soviet government admitted to that, taking a major hit in nuclear disarmament talks. When the lightning tests were in progress, the mountains shook, and the ozone produced by underground lightning vented above ground, giving the air within a hundred-kilometer radius an unusually fresh scent. While the simulations were ongoing, the electric field generator, microwave emitter, and large-scale wind tunnels were run to simulate lightning under every condition, and then the results were input into a huge computer system for analysis. Parameters for some of the tests far exceeded the most extreme natural conditions: super-powerful lightning was triggered in a complicated maze of electric fields, or amid microwaves capable of boiling away a pond in a brief period of time…. Lightning research continued here for three decades.”

I looked up at the trapezoidal platform that had once supported a massive electrode, illuminated by the three beams of our flashlights against the backdrop of the depths of the night, like an Aztec altar in the thick jungle, somehow sacred. We pitiful ball lightning chasers had come here like pilgrims to the highest temple, full of fear and awe. Watching the concrete pyramid, I thought about how many people, over the past thirty-odd years, had been sacrificed here.

“And the final outcome?” I asked. At last, the critical question.

Gemow took out another cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, but did not speak. The flashlight didn’t give me a clear look at his expression, but he reminded me of how Zhang Bin had looked when describing his unspeakable pain as a ball lightning researcher. So I answered for Gemow. “There was never any success, was there?”

But immediately I realized I was wrong, because Gemow laughed. “Young man, you’re thinking too simplistically. Holmes said, ‘It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious.’ It would have been very weird if there were not a single success in thirty years of research, weird enough to encourage people to continue. The tragedy was the lack of even that weirdness. All we had was a frustrating boredom. We succeeded, over the course of thirty years, in producing ball lightning twenty-seven times.”

Lin Yun and I were stunned, and for a moment had nothing to say.

Gemow laughed again. “I can imagine you are feeling two different things right now. Major Lin Yun is no doubt pleased, since all a soldier cares about is the possibility of making a weapon. You, however, are despondent. You’re like Scott reaching the South Pole at last, only to see the Norwegian flag that Amundsen left behind. But neither feeling is necessary. Ball lightning remains a mystery. No more is certain than when we first came here more than thirty years ago. Truly, we came out of it with nothing.”

“What does that mean?” Lin Yun asked in wonder.

Gemow let out a slow cloud of smoke and stared at its transformations in the beams of light, sunken into memory of the past. “The first successful generation of ball lightning was in 1962, the third year after research began. I personally witnessed it. After a discharge from the lightning simulator it appeared in midair, light yellow in color, dragging a tail behind it as it flew for around twenty seconds before vanishing without a sound.”

Lin Yun said, “I can imagine how excited you must have been.”

Gemow shook his head. “Wrong again. To us, that ball lightning was just an ordinary electromagnetic phenomenon. Project 3141 was not intended to be so large-scale at first, so at the time, everyone from the senior leaders in the military and the Academy to the scientists and engineers on the project believed that a country that had sent a man into space merely needed to focus its research efforts and artificial ball lightning would only be a matter of time. In fact, three years without any success already came as a surprise to many people. With the appearance of that ball lightning we felt only a sense of relief. No one could have predicted the ensuing twenty-seven years and the ultimate failure that awaited us.

“Our confidence at the time appeared well-grounded: unlike natural lightning, the conditions and parameters for the lightning we generated had all been recorded in detail. I can write them out perfectly even today. The lightning current was twelve thousand amps, voltage eighty million volts, discharge time 119 microseconds. Entirely ordinary lightning. At the time of discharge, airflow was 2.4 meters per second, microwaves at 550 watts of power, and an external magnetic field…. And loads of other parameters, from ordinary ones like air temperature and pressure, to the more particular, like ultra-high-speed imaging of the lightning path, and instrument recordings of the strength and shape of the electromagnetic field and radioactive indices. On and on, all of it recorded into reference material I recall as being at least as thick as War and Peace, and all of it top secret. It was right at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember Niernov holding up that stack of material and saying, ‘It’s no big deal if we recall the missiles. We’ve got something that will send a bigger shock into imperialism!’ We all thought that by repeatedly generating lightning according to those parameters, we could make ball lightning in quantity.”

“You couldn’t?” I asked.

“I said you were thinking too simplistically. Nobody expected what happened next: when the test was repeated using the same set of parameters, nothing happened. Niernov, extremely irritated, continued the experiments throughout the following year in strict accordance with the recorded parameters, producing lightning fifty thousand times, but there was never any trace of ball lightning.

“I should explain that in the Soviet scientific community in those days, mechanistic determinism held sway over all other approaches. Researchers believed that the natural world was governed by the iron law of cause and effect. This mentality was a product of the political environment. Renegades like Gamow[4] were still rare. This was the case even in basic science and pure theory. For ball lightning, which was classified as an applied project at the time, people’s minds were even more constrained by traditional linear thinking. They were unable to accept the outcome of the tests, believing that if they successfully produced ball lightning once, they should be able to produce it in subsequent tests using the same parameters. And so Niernov arrived at the obvious conclusion about the fifty thousand tests: the data for the ball lightning test had been recorded incorrectly.

“It wasn’t a big deal at first. Entirely solvable within the normal scope of work, and the most anyone would be penalized for would be for dereliction of duty. But Niernov made it political. His dictatorial style had made him lots of enemies, and now he was presented with an opportunity to get rid of dissent. In an alarmist report he submitted to the supreme leadership, he said that Project 3141 had been sabotaged by imperialist spies. And since Project 3141 was a key national weapons research program, his report received swift attention, and a large-scale investigation was launched.

“The investigation team was made up largely of GRU [5] personnel, with Niernov a key member. To explain the ensuing experimental failures, he came up with a theory inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The protagonist of that book prepared a drug that could split a person’s personality, but when he made a second batch, the drug was ineffective. He assumed that the new ingredients he had bought were impure, but later he found out that the ingredients in his successful batch had been impure, and it was those impurities that made it a success. Niernov believed that in every test, the saboteur had caused the system to deviate from the preset parameters, but as luck would have it, one of the deviations ended up producing ball lightning. Of course, there was no record of what the deviation was, since only the preset parameters were recorded.

“The explanation may have been a little unusual, but it was the only one the investigation team was able to accept at the time. The next issue was which parameter experienced a deviation. Tests had been performed using four systems: the lightning simulator, the external magnetic field, the microwave emitter, and aerodynamics, each of which was formed of mostly independent personnel. This made it unlikely that a saboteur would have been able to penetrate several at once, so at first, deviation in only one system was considered. The mostly unanimous thinking at the time was that the key parameter was the discharge value in the lightning simulation system. The person in charge of the design and operation of this system was none other than me.

“This wasn’t the prewar Great Purge era, when unsupported speculation could convict a man. However, right at that time, when attending an academic conference in East Germany, my father defected to the West. He was a biologist, and a staunch geneticist, but genetics still rated as treachery in the USSR. At the time, Lysenko’s shadow still loomed large over the academic world, and even though it might not be as dangerous as before if you diverged from the mainstream, it at least meant the termination of your own academic career. My father’s viewpoint was suppressed and his spirit was mired in a deep depression. I imagine that was the main factor in his defection. For me, the consequences of his action were disastrous. The investigation focused itself on my person. They soon discovered that during an academic visit to Western Europe, I had had an affair with a British woman. Some of the members of my team, out of self-preservation and at Niernov’s behest, directed all manner of false accusations at me. Ultimately, I was convicted of espionage and received a twenty-year sentence.

“But Niernov couldn’t handle the technology without me, so he advised the higher-ups to have me returned to the base for the sentence period to continue my former work. Back at work, I led a menial life. No personal freedom, and the scope of my activities was confined to the base. I even had to wear a different color uniform than everyone else. Worst of all was the loneliness. Outside of work, no one wanted to have contact with me, apart from one college graduate who had just been placed onto our team who treated me as an equal. She gave me lots of warmth, and later became my wife.

“As a form of escape, I poured myself entirely into research. My hatred for Niernov is difficult to describe in words. Oddly, I basically agreed with his Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis, although I didn’t believe it was deliberate sabotage. I truly thought that a deviation in some unknown parameter was the cause of the experiment’s success. This frustrated me, because if I did end up discovering the one or several deviations, it would only make it harder for me to prove my innocence. But I gave this no thought, instead working as hard as I could, looking forward to producing ball lightning a second time.

“The subsequent research path was quite clear: The deviation could not be too large without being detected by other instruments or even the naked eye at the time of discharge. Thus tests ought to be run on minor fluctuations around the recorded value for each parameter in succession. Taking into account the possibility of deviations in multiple parameters simultaneously gave a large combination set that required a huge number of tests. The process only increased my certainty that Niernov was framing me, since if he really believed I’d sabotaged the experiment, he naturally would have tried to find a way to get me to reveal which parameters I had altered. But he never even asked. The others, run ragged repeating experiments without a break, hated me. But at the time, everyone, me included, believed that producing ball lightning again was just a matter of time.

“How things developed was another surprise for everyone: after all of the parametric deviations had been tested, there had still been no success, unexpectedly demonstrating my innocence. This was right as Brezhnev was taking office. He struck a far more cultivated image than that pig farmer who preceded him and was much more acceptable to the intelligentsia. My case was retried, and although in the end I was not cleared of guilt, I was nevertheless released and provided with the chance to return to teach at Moscow State University, a highly desirable opportunity for someone working at this remote base. But I stayed. Ball lightning had become part of my life, and I couldn’t leave it.

“Now the one in trouble was Niernov. He had to accept responsibility for the failure of the research, and although he didn’t get it as bad as I had, his future in academia and politics was over. He struggled on a while in his Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis, only this time with the notion that the deviation had occurred in one of the other three systems. And so he launched a huge number of tests, far more this time than the last. Who knows how long they’d have lasted, if not for an unexpected interruption.

“Base 3141 had the world’s largest lightning simulator, and while ball lightning research was being conducted, it was also being used for some other civilian and military research projects. One test of an anti-lightning project unexpectedly produced ball lightning. The parameters this time were far different from those in our first successful test. No overlap. No external factors like magnetic field and microwave radiation in this test. Just pure lightning.

“And so we started another round of that infernal cycle, repeating their test using their parameters more than ten thousand times. But the outcome was the same as the first round: no ball lightning. There was no question of a saboteur altering the parameters this time, and even Niernov had to admit that his Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis was mistaken. He was transferred to a branch facility in Siberia, where he occupied a nonessential administrative role until his retirement.

“By this point, Project 3141 had been running for fifteen years. After Niernov left, the base changed its experimental direction and began conducting tests using different sets of parameters, producing ball lightning nine more times during the following decade. For each success, at least seven thousand duplication attempts were made, and in some cases tens of thousands. Parameters were different each time ball lightning was produced, diverging quite widely in most cases.

“In the mid-eighties, spurred on by America’s Star Wars program, the Soviet Union increased its own investment in high technology and new-concept weapons, including the study of ball lightning. The base was dramatically enlarged and tests multiplied, with the aim of discovering through sheer quantity of tests a rule governing the conditions for ball lightning production. In the final five years, ball lightning was produced a total of sixteen times, but as before, we were unable to discover any rule for its production.”

Gemow finished his story, led us to the platform, and shone his flashlight on it. “I made this into a memorial. When I’m tormented by memories of the past, I come here and make inscriptions on it.”

I looked at the steps. In the flashlight circles I could see lots of lines, like a pack of slithering snakes.

“In three decades of experiments, ball lightning was produced a total of twenty-seven times. These lines sketch the main parameters for those tests. This line is the lightning’s current radiation value. This line, the strength of the external magnetic field…”

I looked closely at the lines, each made up of twenty-seven points. They looked like segments of white noise, or the painful spasms of some dying creature. There was no order at all.

We followed Gemow to another side of the platform, which was covered in carved text. “These are the people who sacrificed themselves to Project 3141 over the course of three decades, and who lost their lives to the horrible working conditions. This is my wife, who died after long exposure to discharge radiation gave her a peculiar illness marked by skin ulcers. She died in terrible agony. A fair number of these people died of that condition. This is my son. He was killed by the final ball lightning the base produced, one of three people killed by the twenty-seven times ball lightning was produced here. The stuff can penetrate anything. No one can predict where or when it will release its energy. But we didn’t think that conducting these experiments was anything dangerous. Since the chances of producing it were so low, people gradually dropped their guard. And that’s when ball lightning would appear, causing a disaster. The final time it appeared, everyone at the test site was unharmed, but it passed through solid rock and incinerated my son in the central control room. He was a computer engineer at the base.”

Gemow switched off his flashlight and turned back toward the vast darkness in the cavern. He gave a long sigh. “When I entered the control center, it looked as calm as ever. Under the soft glow of the overhead lights, everything seemed clean and bright. All of the computer equipment was quiet and operating normally. Except, in the middle of a white anti-static floor pad, stood the remains of my son, burned almost entirely to ash, as if he was an apparition projected there from some other place…. Right then I surrendered. After thirty years of struggling against this natural or supernatural force, I was completely beaten. My life ended at that moment. What came after was just existence.”

When we returned to the surface, the snow had stopped. The setting sun was visible over the crest of the forest in the west, painting the snowscape blood red. On heavy feet I trudged back to the plane, feeling that my life was over.

Back at Gemow’s place, the three of us drank through the night. The fierce Siberian wind called outside the window as volume after volume of Perestroika turned to ash in the stove. Ball lightning, infinite in number, circled me on the walls and ceiling, revolving faster and faster, as if I was caught in the center of a vortex of white balls of light.

Gemow slurred, “Children, find something else to do. There are lots of interesting things in the world, but you only live once. Don’t waste it on an illusion.”

When I went to sleep later on a pile of books, I dreamed I was back on the night of my fourteenth birthday, in that small room during the thunderstorm, sitting alone before the birthday cake and lit candles. No father, no mother, and no ball lightning. My dreams of them had ended.

The next morning, Gemow took us straight to the airport. Before he left, Lin Yun said, “I know that you’ve told us lots of things you shouldn’t have. But please rest assured: You have our word that we won’t divulge any of it—”

Gemow cut her off with a wave of his hand. “No, Major. The reason I invited you was so you would tell it to the world. I want people to know that in that tragic, romantic era a group of Communist Youth League members went deep into the dense Siberian forest to chase a ghost, and for this sacrificed their lives.”

We embraced tightly, tears on our faces.

After takeoff, I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes in exhaustion, my mind a total blank. A passenger next to me gave me a poke and asked, “Chinese?” I nodded, and he pointed to the screen in front of my seat, as if it was weird for a Chinese person not to be watching TV. The news was on. The situation between China and its adversaries was getting tense, and the clouds of war were thickening. I was tired, and my numb heart couldn’t care for anything, not even war. I turned toward Lin Yun, who was watching the screen intently. I envied her: ball lightning was just one part of one stage of her life, so losing it would not be a mortal blow. Soon I fell asleep, and when I awoke the plane was about to land.

The spring wind in Beijing that evening was heady and warm, and for the time being the global situation cast no shadow. The snow and ice of Siberia already seemed infinitely far off, like a world that only existed in a dream.

On second thought, my life up till then had been a dream that I was now waking up from.

The streetlights on Chang’an Avenue had just turned on. Lin Yun and I looked at each other without speaking. We were from vastly different worlds, following different roads. It was ball lightning that had brought us together, but now that bond no longer existed. Zhang Bin, Zheng Min, Gemow… so many people had been dismembered on that altar that adding me would have little significance. The flame of hope in my heart had already extinguished, but I felt cold water pour onto it, leaving nothing but submerged ash. Farewell, my beautiful major.

“Don’t give up,” she said, looking at me.

“Lin Yun, I’m just an ordinary person.”

“So am I. But don’t give up.”

“Goodbye.” I held out my hand. Under the streetlights I saw the glint of tears in her eyes.

Callously I released her soft, warm hand, then turned and walked off with brisk steps. I did not look back.