“What?” Ding Yi instantly turned furious. “You mean I’m to be put into the helicopter for the sake of demonstrating some sort of spirit? Not a chance! My life belongs to another master, physics. You listen to me: I’m not going on any helicopter!”
“No one’s making you go, Professor Ding,” Colonel Xu said, shaking his head.
With the meeting finished, I walked over to an empty space on the test ground, pulled out my phone, and dialed a number. It only rang once before I heard General Lin’s deep voice say, “Is that Dr. Chen?”
I was caught a little off guard, but I recounted the meeting to him, and he replied at once.
“We’re already familiar with the situation you described. But this is an unusual time and we urgently require the success of this project, so some risks have to be taken. Of course, Lin Yun’s approach is unfortunate. Very bad, you might even say. But that’s her nature. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. We did not put enough thought into this matter previously. Tomorrow, we’ll have GAD send a special commissioner to the base to take charge of communication between the project’s front lines and the higher-ups. But thank you for the news, Dr. Chen.”
“General, what I’d really like to say is that Professor Ding’s theory is really out there. It’s incredibly hard to believe.”
“Doctor, what area of modern physics isn’t out there, or incredibly hard to believe?”
“But…”
“We’ve had other academics and experts look at Professor Ding’s theories and calculations, which Lin Yun brought over, and they’ve given careful thought to her experimental design. In addition, what you may not know is that this isn’t the first time that Ding Yi has taken part in a national defense project. We are confident in his abilities, no matter how strange his theories. This is a risk worth taking.”
Over the next two weeks, I came to realize the difference between soldiers and civilians. This experiment, for example, was incredibly absurd from a common sense angle. The majority of the project team’s members were staunchly opposed to it, and stood in sharp opposition to the minority led by Lin Yun. In a civilian research body, it would be impossible to make smooth progress. Every opponent would slack off, or attempt to secretly undermine the project through any possible means. But it was different here. Everyone put their heart into it. Lin Yun’s orders were resolutely carried out, often by individuals who outranked her. Of course, the role her personal charm played couldn’t be discounted. Quite a few of the highly educated young officers on the project would have followed her blindly, right or wrong.
With us on the tests were a few engineers who had been transferred over from the feeler defense system. They had upgraded the hardware, lengthened the pole one and a half times, and installed it on the helicopter. In addition to altering the target identification module, the engineers modified the system’s control software to reverse the trigger mechanism so that it would whip out the pole the instant the thunderball disappeared.
On the day of the formal test, with everyone on base gathered at the launch site, I was reminded of the first air discharge test more than a month ago. Like on that occasion, it was a clear day with no wind. Now, the only people who seemed truly relaxed were the two aviator captains who were about to risk their lives. As usual, they were chatting up the nurses beside the ambulance.
Lin Yun, wearing a combat uniform as she had done on every previous flight, headed toward the helicopter carrying the feeler system. But Captain Liu stopped her. “Major, the feeler system works automatically. Only a pilot is needed on board.”
She pushed aside his arm without saying a word and climbed into the rear seat. The captain stared at her for a few seconds, then climbed into the cabin and silently helped her strap on the parachute. His burnt-off fingernails had still not grown back.
Ding Yi began to make a fuss, afraid that someone would drag him onto a helicopter. He again declared, without a thought for the looks of withering disdain he received from those around him, that his life belonged to physics. He added that he had done additional calculations to further prove the correctness of his theory. A thunderball was certain to be captured! Now the image of the man before us was no more than an itinerant con artist. Apart from him and Lin Yun, no one held out any hope of success for the experiment. They just prayed that those aboard the two helicopters would escape with their lives.
The helicopters took off with a roar. When the arc crackled to life, tension seized the hearts of everyone on the ground. The plan was that after the thunderball was excited, the arc would go out at once and the feeler system–equipped helicopter would close to a distance of twenty-five meters from the target. When the thunderball extinguished, the pole would whip out, carrying a superconducting lead connected directly to a drained superconducting battery on board the helicopter, into contact with the spot where Ding Yi believed the bubble to be.
The helicopters slowly flew farther out, and the arc turned into a sparkle against the blue sky. What happened next we only heard about later on.
Around twenty-four minutes into the flight, ball lightning was excited. The arc went out, and the feeler-equipped helicopter approached the thunderball to a distance of roughly twenty-five meters, then aligned the feeler. This was the first time a helicopter had been so close to the thunderball since the first one was excited. Tracking flight was difficult, because the thunderball was unaffected by air movement and no one knew what determined the path of its drift, which was volatile and random-seeming. Most dangerously, it might suddenly approach the helicopter. From recordings after the incident we discovered that the helicopter had drawn as close as sixteen meters to the thunderball. It was an ordinary thunderball that glowed orange yellow, and was inconspicuous in the daylight. It remained excited for one minute and thirty-five seconds before it disappeared, at a point 22.5 meters from the helicopter, with an explosion that Lin Yun and Captain Liu could hear clearly from inside. The feeler system triggered, and the twenty-odd-meter pole brought the tip of the superconducting lead to the precise point of disappearance. The recording showed that the time from the thunderball’s disappearance to the arrival of the lead was just 0.4 seconds.
That was immediately followed by a loud noise next to Lin Yun, as if something on the aircraft had exploded. The cabin quickly filled with scalding steam. But the helicopter maintained a normal flight attitude all the way back.
The helicopter landed amid cheers. Like Colonel Xu had said, in this experiment, a safe return was a victory.
Upon inspection, it was a bottle of spring water left under the seat by one of the ground crew that had exploded. The thunderball had released its energy into the water, turning it instantly to steam. Fortunately, since it was under the seat and ruptured without fragmenting, the only injury was a light burn to Lin Yun’s right calf where the steam had penetrated her combat uniform.
“We’re lucky the helicopter is oil-cooled. If it had a water tank like in a car, it would have turned into a bomb,” Captain Liu said with a shudder.
“You’re overlooking another, even bigger way you were lucky,” Ding Yi said, coming over with a mysterious smile, as if none of this had anything to do with him. “You’re forgetting that there was water on the helicopter apart from that bottle.”
“Where?” Lin Yun asked, but then answered immediately, “My God! Inside of us!”
“Yes. Your blood, too.”
We all took a chilly breath. The prospect of all the blood in their bodies turning to steam in the blink of an eye was too much to imagine.