Ball Lightning

After the success of the first search, I found myself awash in an ecstasy I had never known before. Before my eyes, the world had turned wonderful and new, like I had begun a new life. For Colonel Xu and Lin Yun, however, excitement was tempered by bewilderment, since they had only taken the first of a thousand steps toward their goal. Lin Yun had said that my end point was their starting point. This wasn’t entirely correct. My end point was still very far away.

When the aviators talked about ball lightning, they called it a “thunderball,” perhaps taking inspiration from the James Bond film of that name. This was the first time anyone had used the term thunderball in domestic lightning research, and it was simpler and catchier than earlier names. More importantly, as we now knew, calling the object “ball lightning” was incorrect. So we all quickly adopted the new name.

After the first breakthrough, our progress stopped in its tracks. We were consistently able to excite thunderballs with lightning, more than ten times on the most successful days, but we were sorely lacking in techniques for studying it, apart from various long-range scanners like radar of various wavelengths, infrared scanners, sonar, and spectrum analyzers. Touch probing was flat-out impossible, as was sampling the air the thunderball came into contact with, since the wind speed was high enough to disperse any affected air in an instant. As a result, for several weeks we made little progress in understanding thunderballs.

But Lin Yun was disappointed on another front. At one regular meeting on the base, she said, “This ball lightning doesn’t seem as dangerous as you said. There’s no lethality as far as I can see.”

“Right,” said an aviator. “Are these fluffy fireballs really useful as weapons?”

“You really won’t be satisfied until you see someone burned to a crisp?” I snapped.

“Don’t be like that. Our end goal is making weapons, after all.”

“You can doubt everything about ball lightning, but don’t doubt its lethality. The moment you let your guard down, it will grant you your wish!” I said.

Colonel Xu Wencheng supported me. “I’ve seen a dangerous tendency right now, an increasing disregard for safety. The observer helicopter has been within the stipulated fifty-meter minimum distance from the target on countless occasions, and once as close as twenty meters! This is absolutely prohibited. I want to remind all team members, particularly aviators, that any further orders to approach the thunderballs closer than the set minimum should be refused.”

No one could have anticipated that my ominous prediction would be fulfilled that very night.

The frequency of thunderball discovery remained the same day or night, but because the thunderballs made a better visual effect in the dark, most of the excitement tests were carried out at night. That night, six thunderballs were excited. For five of them, measurements were carried out successfully, including measurements of orbit, radiation intensity, spectral characteristics, and magnetic field strength at the point of disappearance.

When a touch probe was being carried out for the sixth thunderball, disaster struck. When the thunderball was excited, the probe helicopter carefully approached it, flying parallel to its path and trying to maintain a distance of fifty meters. I was in a helicopter a little farther away. After four minutes of flying like this, the thunderball suddenly vanished. But unlike previous occasions, this time we heard a faint explosion, which—taking the helicopter’s excellent noise insulation into account—must have sounded deafening outside. Then the probe helicopter gave off a plume of white smoke, right as it lost control. It plummeted, toppling about, and was soon gone from sight. In the moonlight, we saw a white parachute open below us and felt a tiny bit of relief. Not long after that, a fireball appeared, turning the surrounding area into a conspicuous circle of red against the pitch-black ground. Our hearts seized up, and only when we received the report that the helicopter had crashed into a desolate mountain and no one had been injured did we heave a sigh of relief.

Back at the base, the pilot, still shaken, recalled that when the thunderball had exploded in front of his helicopter, an electric discharge had flared from somewhere in the cabin, followed by smoke, and then the craft lost control. The crashed helicopter was burned beyond recognition, making it impossible to determine which part had been struck.

“What makes you sure that the thunderball had anything to do with the accident? Maybe it was a problem with the helicopter that just happened to coincide with the thunderball explosion,” Lin Yun said at the accident analysis meeting.

The pilot looked her straight in the eye with the expression of someone who had just awoken from a nightmare. “Major, I’d have agreed with you, except… look.” And he held up his hands. “Is this a coincidence?”