“How do we make it mobile?” I asked, still confused.
“All we need to do is move the lightning weapon’s target from the ground to another helicopter. Then we’ll have a discharge arc in the air, and if the two helicopters fly at the same speed, we can sweep the arc through a wide area. It’ll have the same effect as a lightning matrix, but it will only require one superconductive battery.”
“Like a dragnet in the sky,” I said, thrilled to no end.
“A skynet!” Lin Yun crowed.
The general said, “But implementing the plan won’t be as easy as you’re imagining right now. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you of the difficulties.”
“First off, there’s the danger,” Lin Yun said. “Lightning is one of the biggest killers in the air, and lightning areas are no-fly zones. We want to have the aircraft bring lightning along with them.”
“Yes,” the general said somberly. “You’re going into combat.”
Attack Bees
When we finished eating, General Lin said that he wanted to speak with me alone. Giving the two of us a wary look, Lin Yun went upstairs.
The general lit a cigarette, and said, “I’d like to speak with you about my daughter. When Lin Yun was a girl, I was away working on the front lines and didn’t spend much time with my family. She was raised by her mother, and had a strong attachment to her.”
He got up and went over to his wife’s memorial portrait. “In Yunnan, on the front lines, she was a company commander in the signal corps. Equipment was still fairly primitive at the time, and front-line communications required massive amounts of telephone wire. These wires were one of the objectives of the many detachments of Vietnamese troops that were active on both sides of the line. Their tactic was to cut the wires, and plant mines or lay in ambush near the site of the break. One day, battle erupted between two divisions, and then a key telephone wire was cut. When contact was lost with the first three-member inspection team, she personally led four communications soldiers out to check the line. They were ambushed near the line break. It was a bamboo forest in which the enemy had cut out a clearing. When they entered the clearing, the enemy fired from the surrounding forest. The first volley killed three communications soldiers. This was on our side of the front line, so the small Vietnamese detachment didn’t dare stay long, and ran off immediately. She and the remaining communications soldier cleared mines as they approached the breakpoint. Just as the woman soldier reached the break, she saw the end of the wire wrapped around a foot-long bamboo segment. When she picked up the end of the wire to remove it from the bamboo, it exploded, blowing her face off… Lin Yun’s mother started to join the wires, but heard a buzzing in the distance. Turning to look, she saw that the Vietnamese soldiers had left behind a small cardboard box that was now spewing a cloud of bees in her direction. She was stung several times, then fled into the bamboo with her head wrapped in camo cloth. But the bees were close behind her, and she had to jump into a shallow pond and submerge herself, only surfacing every thirty seconds to take a breath. The bees swirled above her, refusing to disperse, and she grew anxious, since every minute the communication line was down could mean huge losses for the critical state of the front lines. At last she disregarded all concerns, crawled out of the pond, and returned to the site of the break, chased by the bees. By the time she had repaired the line, she had been stung more times than she could count, and she lost consciousness and was found by a patrol squad. Her skin turned black and festered, her facial features swelled beyond recognition, and a week later she died in immense agony. Lin Yun was five years old when she saw her mother’s misery in the hospital in Kunming…. For an entire year after that, she didn’t utter a word, and when she eventually began to talk again, she had lost her former fluency.”
General Lin’s story shook me. Memories of pain and sacrifice had grown so distant and strange to me, but here they were so raw and immediate.
He continued: “Perhaps that experience would have different effects on different children. For some, it might give rise to a lifelong aversion to war and all things war-related; to others, it might spark attention and even keen interest in it. My daughter, unfortunately, is the second sort.”
“Is Lin Yun’s fascination with weapons, and new-concept weapons in particular, connected to this?” I asked, as delicately as I could. I couldn’t understand why the general was telling me this, and he seemed to sense my confusion.
“As a researcher, you must know that it’s entirely normal, in the course of scientific research, to become fascinated with the subject you’re studying. But weapons research is special. If a researcher becomes infatuated with weapons, it poses a potential danger. Particularly with a weapon like ball lightning, which would have enormous power if successful. For someone as overly fascinated with weapons as Lin Yun, with her ends-before-means personality, that danger is even more obvious…. I don’t know whether you catch what I’m getting at.”
I nodded. “I understand, General Lin. Colonel Jiang spoke of it as well.”
“Oh, really?”
I didn’t know whether the general was aware of the liquid mines, and I didn’t dare ask. I guessed he didn’t know.
“Jiang Xingchen isn’t of much use on this front. His work is pretty distinct from hers. And also—” The general swallowed before quoting, significantly: “They’re both standing among those peaks.”[6]
“So what can I do?”
“Dr. Chen, I’d like to ask you to monitor Lin Yun during ball lightning weapons R&D, and prevent the occurrence of anything unexpected.”
I thought about this for a few seconds, and then nodded. “Very well, sir. I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you.” He went over to the desk, wrote down a phone number, and handed it to me. “If there’s a problem, then contact me directly. Dr. Chen, it’s in your hands. I know my daughter, and I’m genuinely worried.”
The general uttered this last sentence with particular gravity.
Skynet
Lin Yun and I returned to the lightning research base. As we waited at the gate for a few seconds while the guard checked our documents, I was gratified to realize that I had changed significantly since that evening in early spring half a year ago, when Lin Yun had first revealed her idea of using ball lightning as a weapon.
Once again we met Colonel Xu Wencheng, who was in charge of the base. When he learned that the base would not only continue functioning, but would host a new research project, he was overjoyed. But when we told him the details of our project, he was perplexed.
Lin Yun said, “Our first step is to try to use the existing equipment to search for ball lightning, and show the higher-ups its potential as a weapon.”
The colonel gave a cryptic smile. “Oh, I imagine the higher-ups are well aware of its power. Didn’t you know that the most critical location in the country was once subject to a ball lightning attack?”
Lin Yun and I looked at each other in surprise, then Lin Yun asked him where it happened.
“At the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse.”[7]
I had amassed a large collection of eyewitness accounts of ball lightning through the years, the earliest of which dated to the late Ming or early Qing dynasties, and I thought I had covered the field relatively well. But I’d never heard of this incident.
“It was August 16, 1982. Ball lightning simultaneously dropped in two separate locations at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, in both cases rolling down a tree trunk. One was near the reception hall’s eastern wall, where a soldier on guard was taken out immediately. He was standing in front of a two-meter-high guardhouse, approximately two to three meters from the tree. The instant the ball lightning came down the tree, he felt that a fireball was approaching him, and then everything turned black. When he came to, he had lost his hearing, but was otherwise unharmed. But several holes were blown in the concrete eaves of the guardhouse and its brick-faced walls, its interior electric lights were burned out, the light switch was broken, and the telephone line snapped. The other occurred in the southeast corner of the guesthouse compound, roughly one hundred meters from the guardhouse, also down a tree. About two meters away from the tree was a wooden storage shed surrounded by three enormous pagoda trees. The lightning rolled down the eastern tree and entered the shed through a window, putting two holes in the windowpane. It burned the wooden wall on the east side and the southeast corner, two inner tubes of a bicycle hanging on a wall, and also all of the plastic circuit breakers in the shed. The wire for the shed’s electric light was burned in half, too….”
6
A line from the Su Shi poem, “Inscribed on the Wall of Xilin Temple”: “One cannot know the true face of Lushan while standing among its peaks.”
7
The Diaoyutai State Guesthouse is a historic hotel located in Beijing that hosts visiting dignitaries.