Ball Lightning

“Put on eye protection!” the aviator shouted, reminding me that, during the week of installations and adjustments, the arc had already turned my eyes red and watery. I looked over at Zhang Bin, who wasn’t wearing goggles, or even looking at the arc at all. He was watching the light shining on the cabin ceiling, as if waiting, or deep in thought.

The moment I put on the goggles, I could see nothing but the electric arc. As the helicopters gradually separated, the arc lengthened. It was a wonderfully simple universe I saw through my goggles, just endless black emptiness and a long electric arc. In fact, this universe was the actual context for our search, a shapeless cosmos of electromagnetism within which the physical world did not exist. All was invisible fields and waves…. What I saw drained away the last of my confidence. It was hard to believe, looking at this scene, that there was anything else in this jet-black universe apart from the electric arc. To escape that feeling, I took off the goggles and, like Zhang Bin, confined my gaze to the cabin. The physical world illuminated by the electric light made me feel a little better.

Now the arc was one hundred meters long. It began to move with the helicopter formation as we accelerated toward the west. I wondered what people on the ground would think at the sudden appearance of this long electric arc against the starry night sky. What would they imagine it to be?

We flew for half an hour, during which time we remained silent apart from short radio communication between the aviators. Now the arc had swept a space more than a thousand times the total space covered by all artificial lightning generated in history, but we had found nothing.

The arc was gradually dimming, the superconducting batteries nearly spent. Lin Yun’s voice came over the earpiece: “Attention. Extinguish the arc, disengage, and return to base.” In her voice I sensed a note of consolation for us all.

If there was one ironclad rule in my life it was this: if you expect to fail, then you will. There was, of course, almost a month of midair searching to come, but I’d already anticipated the final outcome.

“Professor Zhang, we might be wrong.” During the whole flight, Zhang Bin had hardly looked outside the cabin, remaining deep in thought.

“No,” he said. “I am more convinced than ever that you’re correct.”

I exhaled softly. “I don’t really have much hope for the next month of searching.”

He looked at me. “It won’t take a month. My intuition tells me that it ought to appear tonight. Can we recharge back at base and then fly out again?”

I shook my head. “You’ve got to rest. We’ll see about tomorrow.”

He murmured, “It’s weird. It ought to have appeared….”

“Intuition isn’t reliable,” I said.

“No. In more than three decades this is the first time I’ve had this feeling. It’s reliable.”

Then the voice of an aviator spoke in our earpieces: “Target located! About one-third of the way from Arc 1.”

Trembling, Zhang Bin and I pressed ourselves against the window. There, thirteen years after my first sighting, and more than forty years since his, we saw for a second time that life-changing ball lightning.

It was orange in color and pulled a short tail behind it as it drifted in a fluctuating path in the night sky. Its path showed that it was utterly unaffected by the strong wind at this high altitude, as if it had absolutely no interaction with our world.

“Attention! Pull back from the target! Danger!” Lin Yun shouted. Afterward I had to admire her cool-headedness, since Zhang Bin and I were totally transfixed, unable to think of anything else.

The helicopters separated, and as the distance grew, the arc soon extinguished. Absent the interference of the electric glow, the ball lightning stood out even clearer against the night, lighting the surrounding cloud cover red, like a miniature sunrise. Our first artificially excited ball lightning floated leisurely in the air for about a minute before suddenly vanishing.

When we returned to base, we immediately recharged the batteries and took off again. This time, after just fifteen minutes in the air, we excited our second ball lightning, and by fifty minutes, the third. That last one was a strange color, a peculiar violet, and it remained the longest—around six minutes, letting Zhang Bin and me savor the feeling of fantasy turned reality.

It was midnight when we landed back at base for the night. The helicopter rotors had come to a complete stop. Zhang Bin, Lin Yun, and I stood on the lawn surrounded by the sound of summer insects. It was a peaceful night, the glittering summer stars shining in the heavens overhead, as if they were countless lamps the universe had lit just for the three of us.

“I’ve finally tasted of the wine, and my life is complete!” Zhang Bin said. Lin Yun looked confused, but I immediately remembered the Russian story he had told me.

Thunderballs