Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  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 ro
d 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:

  The distant streetlamps are lit,

  Like countless glittering stars.

  Stars emerge in the heavens,

  Like the lighting of countless streetlamps.

  I continued:

  I think in the wafting air,

  There must be beautiful street markets.

  And objects laid out on those markets,

  Must be rarities like nothing on earth.

  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.

  * A respectful form of address for an elder.

  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...”