Ball Lightning

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 altar 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.”

Lin Yun said, “I can imagine how excited you must have been.”

Gemow shook his head. “Wrong again. To us, that ball lightning was just an ordinary electromagnetic phenomenon. Project 3141 was not intended to be so large-scale at first, so at the time, everyone from the senior leaders in the military and the Academy to the scientists and engineers on the project believed that a country that had sent a man into space merely needed to focus its research efforts and artificial ball lightning would only be a matter of time. In fact, three years without any success already came as a surprise to many people. With the appearance of that ball lightning we felt only a sense of relief. No one could have predicted the ensuing twenty-seven years and the ultimate failure that awaited us.

“Our confidence at the time appeared well-grounded: unlike natural lightning, the conditions and parameters for the lightning we generated had all been recorded in detail. I can write them out perfectly even today. The lightning current was twelve thousand amps, voltage eighty million volts, discharge time 119 microseconds. Entirely ordinary lightning. At the time of discharge, airflow was 2.4 meters per second, microwaves at 550 watts of power, and an external magnetic field…. And loads of other parameters, from ordinary ones like air temperature and pressure, to the more particular, like ultra-high-speed imaging of the lightning path, and instrument recordings of the strength and shape of the electromagnetic field and radioactive indices. On and on, all of it recorded into reference material I recall as being at least as thick as War and Peace, and all of it top secret. It was right at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember Niernov holding up that stack of material and saying, ‘It’s no big deal if we recall the missiles. We’ve got something that will send a bigger shock into imperialism!’ We all thought that by repeatedly generating lightning according to those parameters, we could make ball lightning in quantity.”

“You couldn’t?” I asked.

“I said you were thinking too simplistically. Nobody expected what happened next: when the test was repeated using the same set of parameters, nothing happened. Niernov, extremely irritated, continued the experiments throughout the following year in strict accordance with the recorded parameters, producing lightning fifty thousand times, but there was never any trace of ball lightning.