Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

“I’m afraid that won’t work. The paint produces a fairly thick coating, and definitely won’t meet the aerodynamic indicators required for an aircraft surface. Also, the skin of the plane is of an entirely different material from high-tension wires. It might erode the skin it’s painted on in the long term.”

  “None of that matters. I just want to know whether it would have an anti-lightning effect on planes.”

  “Definitely. Paint it thick enough, and the plane could fly straight through a thunderhead. The paint’s been tested for that before, just not on planes. The academy’s atmospherics lab once had a project to use sonar balloons to probe the structure of storm clouds. But on several occasions, the balloons and the instrument module suspended from them were destroyed by lightning strikes shortly after entering the clouds. So they looked me up, we put a layer of paint on the instrument module and the balloon, and they ended up entering clouds several dozen times without incident. That might possibly be the sole practical application of the paint.”

  “Excellent! Is any of the finished paint still around?”

  “Sure. It’s in the storage room of the atmospheric electricity lab. It should still be usable. There’s probably enough to paint a small airplane. The administrator has tried to get rid of those sealed barrels on a number of occasions, since they take up space, but I wouldn’t allow it. If they’re useful to you, then take them. I’ve also got a complete set of materials, so it won’t be a problem to fabricate more. I’ve got a question... though if it’s inconvenient, then of course you don’t have to answer: Is this connected to ball lightning research?”

  “It is.”

  “So you’ve really made progress?”

  “Professor Zhang, it’s not just me now. Lots of people are involved in it. As for progress, we just might make some.”

  “Great. I’ll come over at once. You’ll need me, at least as far as the paint is concerned.”

  Before I had a chance to speak, Lin Yun covered the mouthpiece. She had heard what Zhang Bin said and was evidently afraid I wouldn’t let him come. She whispered, “He can be admitted to 301 Military Hospital once he comes. They’re better equipped for treatment than where he is, right? Besides, if his materials are complete, then he won’t have to expend much energy.”

  I looked at Colonel Xu, who picked up the receiver. They were clearly in frequent contact, since without much in the way of salutation, he said, “About how heavy is all of that paint? Roughly two tons? Very well. Wait at home, and we’ll come pick you up.”

  *

  The next afternoon, Lin Yun and I went to Nanyuan Airport to meet Zhang Bin. We parked on the tarmac, awaiting the plane. It was the height of summer, but a storm had just passed, taking with it the oppressive heat of the past few days and leaving behind fresh, cool air. After such a long period of hard work, this was a rare occasion to relax.

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

  “Do you know what you’re like?”

  “Try me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

  He said, “Remember to call me over!”

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

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

  * The Diaoyutai State Guesthouse is a historic hotel located in Beijing that hosts visiting dignitaries.

  † This elite university was known as Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics until 2002.

  Ball Lightning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Intuition isn’t reliable,” I said.

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

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

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

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

  “Attention! Pull back from the target! Danger!” Lin Yun shouted. Afterward I had to admire her cool-headedness, since Zhang Bin and I were totally transfixed, unable to think of anything else.

  The helicopters separated, and as the distance grew, the arc soon extinguished. Absent the interference of the electric glow, the ball lightning stood out even clearer against the night, lighting the surrounding cloud cover red, like a miniature sunrise. Our first artificially excited ball lightning floated leisurely in the air for about a minute before suddenly vanishing.

  When we returned to base, we immediately recharged the batteries and took off again. This time, after just fifteen minutes in the air, we excited our second ball lightning, and by fifty minutes, the third. That last one was a strange color, a peculiar violet, and it remained the longest—around six minutes, letting Zhang Bin and me savor the feeling of fantasy turned reality.

  It was midnight when we landed back at base for the night. The helicopter rotors had come to a complete stop. Zhang Bin, Lin Yun, and I stood on the lawn surrounded by the sound of summer insects. It was a peaceful night, the glittering summer stars shining in the heavens overhead, as if they were countless lamps the universe had lit just for the three of us.

  “I’ve finally tasted of the wine, and my life is complete!” Zhang Bin said. Lin Yun looked confused, but I immediately remembered the Russian story he had told me.

  Thunderballs

  After the success of the first search, I found myself awash in an ecstasy I had never known before. Before my eyes, the world had turned wonderful and new, like I had begun a new life. For Colonel Xu and Lin Yun, however, excitement was tempered by bewilderment, since they had only taken the first of a thousand steps toward their goal. Lin Yun had said that my end point was their starting point. This wasn’t entirely correct. My end point was still very far away.

  When the aviators talked about ball lightning, they called it a “thunderball,” perhaps taking inspiration from the James Bond film of that name. This was the first time anyone had used the term thunderball in domestic lightning research, and it was simpler and catchier than earlier names. More importantly, as we now knew, calling the object “ball lightning” was incorrect. So we all quickly adopted the new name.

  After the first breakthrough, our progress stopped in its tracks. We were consistently able to excite thunderballs with lightning, more than ten times on the most successful days, but we were sorely lacking in techniques for studying it, apart from various long-range scanners like radar of various wavelengths, infrared scanners, sonar, and spectrum analyzers. Touch probing was flat-out impossible, as was sampling the air the thunderball came into contact with, since the wind speed was high enough to disperse any affected air in an instant. As a result, for several weeks we made little progress in understanding thunderballs.

  But Lin Yun was disappointed on another front. At one regular meeting on the base, she said, “This ball lightning doesn’t seem as dangerous as you said. There’s no lethality as far as I can see.”

  “Right,” said an aviator. “Are these fluffy fireballs really useful as weapons?”

  “You really won’t be satisfied until you see someone burned to a crisp?” I snapped.

  “Don’t be like that. Our end goal is making weapons, after all.”

  “You can doubt everything about ball lightning, but don’t doubt its lethality. The moment you let your guard down, it will grant you your wish!” I said.

  Colonel Xu Wencheng supported me. “I’ve seen a dangerous tendency right now, an increasing disregard for safety. The observer helicopter has been within the stipulated fifty-meter minimum distance from the target on countless occasions, and once as close as twenty meters! This is absolutely prohibited. I want to remind all team members, particularly aviators, that any further orders to approach the thunderballs closer than the set minimum should be refused.”

  No one could have anticipated that my ominous prediction would be fulfilled that very night.

  The frequency of thunderball discovery remained the same day or night, but because the thunderballs made a better visual effect in the dark, most of the excitement tests were carried out at night. That night, six thunderballs were excited. For five of them, measurements were carried out successfully, including measurements of orbit, radiation intensity, spectral characteristics, and magnetic field strength at the point of disappearance.

  When a touch probe was being carried out for the sixth thunderball, disaster struck. When the thunderball was excited, the probe helicopter carefully approached it, flying parallel to its path and trying to maintain a distance of fifty meters. I was in a helicopter a little farther away. After four minutes of flying like this, the thunderball suddenly vanished. But unlike previous occasions, this time we heard a faint explosion, which—taking the helicopter’s excellent noise insulation into account—must have sounded deafening outside. Then the probe helicopter gave off a plume of white smoke, right as it lost control. It plummeted, toppling about, and was soon gone from sight. In the moonlight, we saw a white parachute open below us and felt a tiny bit of relief. Not long after that, a fireball appeared, turning the surrounding area into a conspicuous circle of red against the pitch-black ground. Our hearts seized up, and only when we received the report that the helicopter had crashed in
to a desolate mountain and no one had been injured did we heave a sigh of relief.

  Back at the base, the pilot, still shaken, recalled that when the thunderball had exploded in front of his helicopter, an electric discharge had flared from somewhere in the cabin, followed by smoke, and then the craft lost control. The crashed helicopter was burned beyond recognition, making it impossible to determine which part had been struck.

  “What makes you sure that the thunderball had anything to do with the accident? Maybe it was a problem with the helicopter that just happened to coincide with the thunderball explosion,” Lin Yun said at the accident analysis meeting.

  The pilot looked her straight in the eye with the expression of someone who had just awoken from a nightmare. “Major, I’d have agreed with you, except... look.” And he held up his hands. “Is this a coincidence?”

  Apart from his right thumb and the middle finger of his left hand, which had burnt remnants of fingernails, all of the nails on his fingers were gone. Then he took off his aviators’ boots. His toenails were entirely missing.

  “When the thunderball exploded, I had a weird feeling in my fingers. I took off my gloves and saw my fingernails glowing red, but the next instant the light went out and all ten nails turned opaque white. I thought my hands had been burned, so I raised them to cool them in the air, but at the first wave the fingernails vanished in a cloud of ash.”

  “And your hands weren’t burned?” Lin Yun said, grabbing his hands for a closer look.

  “Believe it or not, they didn’t even feel warm. Besides, my boots and gloves are completely fine.”

  The accident gave the project team its first experience of the threat of ball lightning, and afterward, they no longer called it “fluffy.” What surprised everyone the most was that the energy discharged by the thunderball acted on an object fifty meters away. Still, this phenomena was not at all rare in the more than ten thousand eyewitness accounts of ball lightning we had compiled.