Ball Lightning

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 rod 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.