Ball Lightning

“But Niernov couldn’t handle the technology without me, so he advised the higher-ups to have me returned to the base for the sentence period to continue my former work. Back at work, I led a menial life. No personal freedom, and the scope of my activities was confined to the base. I even had to wear a different color uniform than everyone else. Worst of all was the loneliness. Outside of work, no one wanted to have contact with me, apart from one college graduate who had just been placed onto our team who treated me as an equal. She gave me lots of warmth, and later became my wife.

“As a form of escape, I poured myself entirely into research. My hatred for Niernov is difficult to describe in words. Oddly, I basically agreed with his Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis, although I didn’t believe it was deliberate sabotage. I truly thought that a deviation in some unknown parameter was the cause of the experiment’s success. This frustrated me, because if I did end up discovering the one or several deviations, it would only make it harder for me to prove my innocence. But I gave this no thought, instead working as hard as I could, looking forward to producing ball lightning a second time.

“The subsequent research path was quite clear: The deviation could not be too large without being detected by other instruments or even the naked eye at the time of discharge. Thus tests ought to be run on minor fluctuations around the recorded value for each parameter in succession. Taking into account the possibility of deviations in multiple parameters simultaneously gave a large combination set that required a huge number of tests. The process only increased my certainty that Niernov was framing me, since if he really believed I’d sabotaged the experiment, he naturally would have tried to find a way to get me to reveal which parameters I had altered. But he never even asked. The others, run ragged repeating experiments without a break, hated me. But at the time, everyone, me included, believed that producing ball lightning again was just a matter of time.

“How things developed was another surprise for everyone: after all of the parametric deviations had been tested, there had still been no success, unexpectedly demonstrating my innocence. This was right as Brezhnev was taking office. He struck a far more cultivated image than that pig farmer who preceded him and was much more acceptable to the intelligentsia. My case was retried, and although in the end I was not cleared of guilt, I was nevertheless released and provided with the chance to return to teach at Moscow State University, a highly desirable opportunity for someone working at this remote base. But I stayed. Ball lightning had become part of my life, and I couldn’t leave it.

“Now the one in trouble was Niernov. He had to accept responsibility for the failure of the research, and although he didn’t get it as bad as I had, his future in academia and politics was over. He struggled on a while in his Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis, only this time with the notion that the deviation had occurred in one of the other three systems. And so he launched a huge number of tests, far more this time than the last. Who knows how long they’d have lasted, if not for an unexpected interruption.

“Base 3141 had the world’s largest lightning simulator, and while ball lightning research was being conducted, it was also being used for some other civilian and military research projects. One test of an anti-lightning project unexpectedly produced ball lightning. The parameters this time were far different from those in our first successful test. No overlap. No external factors like magnetic field and microwave radiation in this test. Just pure lightning.

“And so we started another round of that infernal cycle, repeating their test using their parameters more than ten thousand times. But the outcome was the same as the first round: no ball lightning. There was no question of a saboteur altering the parameters this time, and even Niernov had to admit that his Jekyll and Hyde hypothesis was mistaken. He was transferred to a branch facility in Siberia, where he occupied a nonessential administrative role until his retirement.

“By this point, Project 3141 had been running for fifteen years. After Niernov left, the base changed its experimental direction and began conducting tests using different sets of parameters, producing ball lightning nine more times during the following decade. For each success, at least seven thousand duplication attempts were made, and in some cases tens of thousands. Parameters were different each time ball lightning was produced, diverging quite widely in most cases.