Ball Lightning

by Cixin Liu

  “I had a large-scale computer at a Second Artillery Corps lab run the calculations for our final model. Thirty times, including predictions.” She shook her head gently, and I knew that the model had failed. “That was the first thing I did when I returned. But to be honest, I only ran it so that your work wasn’t a total waste.”

  “Thank you. Really. But let’s not do any more mathematical models. There’s no point.”

  “I’ve realized that, too. When I got back from our trip, I followed up through other channels and learned that over the past few decades, it wasn’t just the Soviet Union—the major Western powers invested immense sums in ball lightning research, too. Can we gain nothing from any of that?”

  “None of them, including Gemow, have disclosed even the slightest bit of technical material.”

  She laughed. “Look at you in your ivory tower.”

  “I’m too much of a nerd.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. If you really were, you wouldn’t have gone AWOL. But that shows that you’ve already seen what’s most important. The trip could have been a new starting point for us, but you turned it into an end point.”

  “What did I see?”

  “Conventional thinking will never be able to unlock the secret of ball lightning. This conclusion is worth billions!”

  “That’s true. Even if we managed to twist the equations and force them into a mathematical model, intuition tells me that it wouldn’t actually describe reality. You can’t explain the sheer improbability of the selectivity and penetration of its energy release using conventional theory.”

  “So we ought to broaden our thinking. Like you said, we’re not supermen, but starting now, we need to force ourselves to think in the manner of supermen.”

  “I’ve already thought that way,” I said excitedly. “Ball lightning isn’t produced by lightning. It is a structure that already exists in the natural world.”

  “You mean... lightning only ignites or excites it?” she rejoindered immediately.

  “Precisely. Like electric current lighting a lamp. The lamp was always there.”

  “Great. Let’s organize our thoughts a little.... My God! This idea would go a ways toward explaining what happened in Siberia!”

  “That’s right. The twenty-seven occurrences of ball lightning at Base 3141 and the parameters for artificial lightning that produced them were totally unrelated. The structures just happened to be present on twenty-seven occasions, and that’s why they were excited.”

  “Could the structure penetrate below ground...? Well, why not? People have often seen ball lightning coming out of the ground before earthquakes.”

  We couldn’t contain our excitement, and paced the floor. “That means the error in prior research is all too obvious: we shouldn’t be trying to produce it, we should try to find it! Meaning, when we’re simulating lightning, the key factor isn’t the nature and structure of the lightning itself, much less any external factors such as EM fields or microwaves. It’s getting the lightning to cover as large a space as possible.”

  “Correct!”

  “Then what should our next step be?”

  From behind us, General Lin called us to eat. A sumptuous feast was laid out on the table in the living room. “Remember, Xiao Yun, we invited Dr. Chen over as a guest. No work talk over dinner,” General Lin said, as he refilled my glass.

  Lin Yun said, “This isn’t work. It’s a hobby.”

  Then we turned toward some more casual topics. I learned that General Lin had been a top student at PLA Military Engineering Institute in Harbin, where he had studied electronics. But he hadn’t touched technology work since that time, transferring to pure military affairs and becoming one of the few senior generals in the army with a technical background.

  “I suspect Ohm’s Law is the sum total of what you remember of your studies,” Lin Yun said.

  The general laughed. “You underestimate me. But it’s computers, not electronics, that most impress me now. The first computer I saw was a Soviet one, I forget the clock speed but it had 4K of memory—magnetic core memory, mind you, held in a box taller than that bookshelf. But the biggest difference from today was in the software. Xiao Yun loves to boast how awesome a programmer she is, but on that machine, she’d find it hard to code a program for ’3+2’ without breaking a sweat.”

  “You used assembly in those days?”

  “No, just ones and zeroes. The machine had no compiler, so you had to write out your program on paper and then compile it into machine code, instruction by instruction, a string of ones and zeroes. Hand-coding, we called it.” As he was talking, the general turned toward the table behind him, picked up a pencil and paper, and wrote out a string of ones and zeroes for me. “See, this sequence of commands takes the contents of two registers and puts them into the accumulator, and then puts the result into another register. Don’t be skeptical, Xiao Yun. It’s entirely correct. I once used an entire month to code up a program to calculate pi. From then on I could remember the correspondence between instructions and machine code better than the times tables.”

  I said, “There’s essentially no difference between computers back then and today. Ultimately, what’s being processed is still a string of ones and zeroes.”

  “Right. It’s interesting. Imagine the eighteenth century, or even earlier—the scientists who were trying to invent computers would no doubt have imagined that the reason they failed was because their thinking wasn’t sophisticated enough. But now we know that it was because their thinking wasn’t simple enough.”

  “It’s the same with ball lightning,” Lin Yun mused. “Dr. Chen’s grand idea just now made me realize we failed because we weren’t thinking simply enough.” Then she told my new idea to her father.

  “Very interesting, and very plausible,” he said, nodding. “You really should have thought of it before. What’s your next step?”

  Lin Yun talked through her thought process: “Build a lightning matrix. To obtain results in the shortest possible time, I’d say that it would have to be... an area no smaller than twenty square kilometers. We’d install over one thousand lightning generators in that area.”

  “Right!” I said excitedly. “For the lightning generators, we could use the lightning weapon you were developing!”

  “But that leaves the question of money,” Lin Yun said, more soberly now. “At three hundred thousand yuan for a superconducting battery, we’d need a thousand of them.”

  “That’s enough to fit out an entire Su-30 squadron,” the general said.

  “But isn’t it worth it if we succeed?”

  “Hey, cut it out with all of the ifs and maybes. How many of those did you have at the start of the lightning weapons project? And how did it turn out? I’d like to say a few words about that project. The General Armaments Department insisted on proceeding with it, and I didn’t interfere, but let me ask you: Is the role you’re playing in this project within the scope of a major’s authority?”

  Lin Yun said nothing.

  “As for ball lightning, you can’t mess around anymore. I’ll agree to setting up the research project, but there won’t be any money.”

  Lin Yun was livid. “That’s the same as not doing anything. What can we do without money? The Western media says you’re one of the most technically minded top brass, but it looks like they have you wrong.”

  “I’ve got a technically minded daughter, but can she do anything apart from taking money and washing it down the drain? Isn’t your lightning weapons lab on the outskirts of Beijing still around? Why not just do it there?”

  “These are two separate things, Dad.”

  “What two things? They’re both lightning, so there’s got to be overlap. So much experimental equipment. I can’t accept that it’s completely useless to you.”

  “But Dad, we’ve got to build a large-area lightning matrix.”

  General Lin shook his head with a smile. “If there’s an idiotic idea in the world, it’s thi
s one. I really don’t get how you two PhDs are missing the obvious.”

  Lin Yun and I exchanged a confused glance.

  “Dr. Chen just came back from the ocean, am I correct? Did the fishermen you saw blanket the ocean in nets?”

  “You mean... make the lightning mobile? Ah! Dr. Chen’s idea got me so excited I lost my mind for an instant.”

  “How do we make it mobile?” I asked, still confused.

  “All we need to do is move the lightning weapon’s target from the ground to another helicopter. Then we’ll have a discharge arc in the air, and if the two helicopters fly at the same speed, we can sweep the arc through a wide area. It’ll have the same effect as a lightning matrix, but it will only require one superconductive battery.”

  “Like a dragnet in the sky,” I said, thrilled to no end.

  “A skynet!” Lin Yun crowed.

  The general said, “But implementing the plan won’t be as easy as you’re imagining right now. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the difficulties.”

  “First off, there’s the danger,” Lin Yun said. “Lightning is one of the biggest killers in the air, and lightning areas are no-fly zones. We want to have the aircraft bring lightning along with them.”

  “Yes,” the general said somberly. “You’re going into combat.”

  Attack Bees

  When we finished eating, General Lin said that he wanted to speak with me alone. Giving the two of us a wary look, Lin Yun went upstairs.

  The general lit a cigarette, and said, “I’d like to speak with you about my daughter. When Lin Yun was a girl, I was away working on the front lines and didn’t spend much time with my family. She was raised by her mother, and had a strong attachment to her.”

  He got up and went over to his wife’s memorial portrait. “In Yunnan, on the front lines, she was a company commander in the signal corps. Equipment was still fairly primitive at the time, and front-line communications required massive amounts of telephone wire. These wires were one of the objectives of the many detachments of Vietnamese troops that were active on both sides of the line. Their tactic was to cut the wires, and plant mines or lay in ambush near the site of the break. One day, battle erupted between two divisions, and then a key telephone wire was cut. When contact was lost with the first three-member inspection team, she personally led four communications soldiers out to check the line. They were ambushed near the line break. It was a bamboo forest in which the enemy had cut out a clearing. When they entered the clearing, the enemy fired from the surrounding forest. The first volley killed three communications soldiers. This was on our side of the front line, so the small Vietnamese detachment didn’t dare stay long, and ran off immediately. She and the remaining communications soldier cleared mines as they approached the breakpoint. Just as the woman soldier reached the break, she saw the end of the wire wrapped around a foot-long bamboo segment. When she picked up the end of the wire to remove it from the bamboo, it exploded, blowing her face off... Lin Yun’s mother started to join the wires, but heard a buzzing in the distance. Turning to look, she saw that the Vietnamese soldiers had left behind a small cardboard box that was now spewing a cloud of bees in her direction. She was stung several times, then fled into the bamboo with her head wrapped in camo cloth. But the bees were close behind her, and she had to jump into a shallow pond and submerge herself, only surfacing every thirty seconds to take a breath. The bees swirled above her, refusing to disperse, and she grew anxious, since every minute the communication line was down could mean huge losses for the critical state of the front lines. At last she disregarded all concerns, crawled out of the pond, and returned to the site of the break, chased by the bees. By the time she had repaired the line, she had been stung more times than she could count, and she lost consciousness and was found by a patrol squad. Her skin turned black and festered, her facial features swelled beyond recognition, and a week later she died in immense agony. Lin Yun was five years old when she saw her mother’s misery in the hospital in Kunming.... For an entire year after that, she didn’t utter a word, and when she eventually began to talk again, she had lost her former fluency.”

  General Lin’s story shook me. Memories of pain and sacrifice had grown so distant and strange to me, but here they were so raw and immediate.

  He continued: “Perhaps that experience would have different effects on different children. For some, it might give rise to a lifelong aversion to war and all things war-related; to others, it might spark attention and even keen interest in it. My daughter, unfortunately, is the second sort.”

  “Is Lin Yun’s fascination with weapons, and new-concept weapons in particular, connected to this?” I asked, as delicately as I could. I couldn’t understand why the general was telling me this, and he seemed to sense my confusion.

  “As a researcher, you must know that it’s entirely normal, in the course of scientific research, to become fascinated with the subject you’re studying. But weapons research is special. If a researcher becomes infatuated with weapons, it poses a potential danger. Particularly with a weapon like ball lightning, which would have enormous power if successful. For someone as overly fascinated with weapons as Lin Yun, with her ends-before-means personality, that danger is even more obvious.... I don’t know whether you catch what I’m getting at.”

  I nodded. “I understand, General Lin. Colonel Jiang spoke of it as well.”

  “Oh, really?”

  I didn’t know whether the general was aware of the liquid mines, and I didn’t dare ask. I guessed he didn’t know.

  “Jiang Xingchen isn’t of much use on this front. His work is pretty distinct from hers. And also—” The general swallowed before quoting, significantly: “They’re both standing among those peaks.”*

  “So what can I do?”

  “Dr. Chen, I’d like to ask you to monitor Lin Yun during ball lightning weapons R&D, and prevent the occurrence of anything unexpected.”

  I thought about this for a few seconds, and then nodded. “Very well, sir. I’ll do my best.”

  “Thank you.” He went over to the desk, wrote down a phone number, and handed it to me. “If there’s a problem, then contact me directly. Dr. Chen, it’s in your hands. I know my daughter, and I’m genuinely worried.”

  The general uttered this last sentence with particular gravity.

  * A line from the Su Shi poem, “Inscribed on the Wall of Xilin Temple”: “One cannot know the true face of Lushan while standing among its peaks.”

  Skynet

  Lin Yun and I returned to the lightning research base. As we waited at the gate for a few seconds while the guard checked our documents, I was gratified to realize that I had changed significantly since that evening in early spring half a year ago, when Lin Yun had first revealed her idea of using ball lightning as a weapon.

  Once again we met Colonel Xu Wencheng, who was in charge of the base. When he learned that the base would not only continue functioning, but would host a new research project, he was overjoyed. But when we told him the details of our project, he was perplexed.

  Lin Yun said, “Our first step is to try to use the existing equipment to search for ball lightning, and show the higher-ups its potential as a weapon.”

  The colonel gave a cryptic smile. “Oh, I imagine the higher-ups are well aware of its power. Didn’t you know that the most critical location in the country was once subject to a ball lightning attack?”

  Lin Yun and I looked at each other in surprise, then Lin Yun asked him where it happened.

  “At the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse.”*

  I had amassed a large collection of eyewitness accounts of ball lightning through the years, the earliest of which dated to the late Ming or early Qing dynasties, and I thought I had covered the field relatively well. But I’d never heard of this incident.

  “It was August 16, 1982. Ball lightning simultaneously dropped in two separate locations at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, in both cases rolling down a tree trunk. One w
as near the reception hall’s eastern wall, where a soldier on guard was taken out immediately. He was standing in front of a two-meter-high guardhouse, approximately two to three meters from the tree. The instant the ball lightning came down the tree, he felt that a fireball was approaching him, and then everything turned black. When he came to, he had lost his hearing, but was otherwise unharmed. But several holes were blown in the concrete eaves of the guardhouse and its brick-faced walls, its interior electric lights were burned out, the light switch was broken, and the telephone line snapped. The other occurred in the southeast corner of the guesthouse compound, roughly one hundred meters from the guardhouse, also down a tree. About two meters away from the tree was a wooden storage shed surrounded by three enormous pagoda trees. The lightning rolled down the eastern tree and entered the shed through a window, putting two holes in the windowpane. It burned the wooden wall on the east side and the southeast corner, two inner tubes of a bicycle hanging on a wall, and also all of the plastic circuit breakers in the shed. The wire for the shed’s electric light was burned in half, too....”

  “How do you know so many details?”

  “After the incident, I went as part of an expert team to investigate the scene and study prevention methods. Proposals included installing a lightning cage—that is, grounded metal mesh in a building’s doors and windows; stopping up all unnecessary holes in the walls; and installing grounded wire mesh across the mouths of all chimneys and exhaust pipes.”

  “Was any of that helpful?”

  Colonel Xu shook his head. “The window the ball lightning passed through was already covered in a fairly fine metal mesh, which broke in eight places. But those conventional measures were all that was available at the time. If the stuff can really be put to use in combat, it will be immensely powerful. I know a little about the state of ball lightning research overseas, and you’re probably the first to have this idea. It sounds reasonable, but your next step...” He shook his head. “Lightning is one of the most uncontrollable phenomena in nature. Ball lightning even more so. It not only has lightning’s destructive power, but possesses the subtlety of a phantom. No one knows when its fearsome energy will be discharged, or into what. Controlling it will be no small task.”