by Cixin Liu
“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, h
er 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 al
tar 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.”