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
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?”
Apart from his right thumb and the middle finger of his left hand, which had burnt remnants of fingernails, all of the nails on his fingers were gone. Then he took off his aviators’ boots. His toenails were entirely missing.
“When the thunderball exploded, I had a weird feeling in my fingers. I took off my gloves and saw my fingernails glowing red, but the next instant the light went out and all ten nails turned opaque white. I thought my hands had been burned, so I raised them to cool them in the air, but at the first wave the fingernails vanished in a cloud of ash.”
“And your hands weren’t burned?” Lin Yun said, grabbing his hands for a closer look.
“Believe it or not, they didn’t even feel warm. Besides, my boots and gloves are completely fine.”
The accident gave the project team its first experience of the threat of ball lightning, and afterward, they no longer called it “fluffy.” What surprised everyone the most was that the energy discharged by the thunderball acted on an object fifty meters away. Still, this phenomena was not at all rare in the more than ten thousand eyewitness accounts of ball lightning we had compiled.
And so the project reached an impasse. We had by that point excited forty-eight thunderballs, but we had also experienced a major accident; it was impossible for tests and observations to continue in this form. More importantly, everyone knew in their hearts that there was no point in risking it. We had been shaken not by the thunderball’s power, but by its almost supernatural strangeness. The aviator’s vanished fingernails reminded us that the secrets of the thunderball could not be unlocked through conventional means.