Ball Lightning

“When she heard that, she went out at once and came back a couple of hours later carrying a bag made of mosquito netting full of mosquitoes she had caught. She stuck an arm into the bag and tied it tight around her elbow. When she took her arm out again, it was covered in welts from mosquito bites. She had the doctor observe her for symptoms, but he saw nothing, until she came down with that strain of malaria five days later and was evacuated to a hospital in Bangkok.

“I spent the last few days of my holiday sitting with her in the hospital. I felt even closer to her then. I told her about my mom dying in the war when I was six, and how I had lived with my mother in my memory, and how she had stayed forever young in my mind until a short while ago, when, with the realization of the passing of time, my mind began to sketch the outlines of an older image of her, but one I was unable to fully imagine. But when I saw the Russian woman, the image suddenly clarified and I became convinced that if Mom were still alive, she would be much like her.

“When I said this, she hugged me and began to cry, and told me through her tears that six years before, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend had overdosed and were found dead in a luxury Las Vegas hotel.

“We parted with an added sense of worry about each other. That’s why, on my trip to Siberia to study ball lightning with Dr. Chen, I paid her a visit when we passed through Moscow.

“You can imagine her surprise upon seeing me. She still lived alone, in a chilly retirees’ apartment, and she drank even more heavily. She seemed to spend her days in a half-inebriated state. She kept saying, ‘Let me show you something. Let me show you something.’ She brushed aside a stack of old newspapers concealing an oddly shaped sealed container, which she said was a super-cooled liquid nitrogen storage tank. A large part of her meager income was spent on periodically refilling the liquid nitrogen. That she had such a thing at home surprised me, and I asked her what it contained. She said it was the distillation of more than twenty years of efforts.

“She told me, ‘In the early 1970s, the Soviet Union’s new-concept weapons institutes had conducted a survey, global in scope, that brought together scattered ideas and implementations for new-concept weapons projects. Ideas first, collected from a truly broad range of sources. Intelligence agencies, naturally, but personnel going abroad on business were given these tasks as well. Sometimes things got ridiculous: researchers in some departments watched James Bond films over and over, to try and glean traces of the West’s new-concept weapons from the fancy gadgets he carried. Another angle was collecting the applications of new concepts on the battlefield from regional conflicts then in progress. The Vietnam War was their first choice, of course. Bamboo traps and the like set up by the Vietnamese people were carefully observed for their effectiveness on the battlefield. The first thing my department came across were some guerrillas in the south who used bees as weapons. We learned of it from news reports, and so I took a trip to Vietnam to investigate. It was at the time that the US was planning to abandon South Vietnam: the Saigon regime was teetering, and the Vietcong’s guerrilla war in the south had evolved into a proper war that was growing larger by the day. Naturally, the peculiar ways of fighting I wanted to investigate were no longer to be found. But I made contact with lots of guerrilla groups and learned details about their combat effectiveness—which it turned out the news reports had greatly exaggerated. All of the guerrillas I spoke to who had used bees said they had practically no lethal effect as weapons. Any use they might have had was purely psychological: they heightened the American soldiers’ feeling that this land they were in was unfamiliar and eerie.