Ball Lightning Sneak Peek Page 7

  The colonel said, “Xiao* Lin, they’re leaning on us to close up shop. Can you work the higher-ups a little more?” I noticed that his attitude toward Lin Yun was not one of a superior to a subordinate, but something more cautious and deferential.

  She shook her head. “I can’t speak up in our situation. We must have resolve.” Nor was her tone one of a subordinate to a superior.

  “It’s not a matter of resolve. The General Armaments Department is standing firm, but can’t last for much longer.”

  “New Concepts wants to come up with something as fast as possible—some theory, at least. This is Dr. Chen from the Lightning Institute.”

  As the colonel shook my hand with enthusiasm, he said, “If our two institutions were already cooperating, things might not have gotten to this point. What we’re going to show you today would be eye-opening for anyone in lightning research.”

  Just then, there was a marked increase in the brightness of the lights in the room, as if some piece of high-energy equipment had just stopped. The colonel obviously noticed this too, and said, “Looks like it’s charged. Xiao Lin, take Dr. Chen to have a look. I won’t go with you, since, as you put it, I’ve got to have resolve here. You should get in touch with the Lightning Institute in person afterward, to establish a relationship between our two sides. I know former director Xue. He’s retired now, but, just like us, he couldn’t turn his experimental results into anything practical.”

  On the way in, I noticed the fully equipped laboratories and engineering shops. That was another clear difference from New Concepts—this was obviously a place for real work.

  Lin Yun explained, “Our lightning research is divided into two parts. What we’ll be looking at first is part one: an air-to-ground attack system.”

  When we exited the large building we saw a pilot and another operator walking toward a helicopter, and two other people gathering up the thick cable that had just been detached from it. The cable ran straight into one of the buildings where several soldiers were loading a bunch of old oil drums into a truck. It was clear that there had been nothing for anyone to do for quite some time, so they all looked excited now.

  Lin Yun led me to a sandbag bunker behind an open space the size of a soccer field, where the soldiers were now unloading the oil drums and stacking them into a cabin-like shape inside a red square. Engines roared in the distance, and then, through the dust whipped up by its propellers, the helicopter rose up slowly, angled its rotor slightly, and flew toward the space above the drums. It hovered over the target for a few seconds, and then a glittering shaft of lightning emerged from its belly and struck the drums. The practically simultaneous clap of thunder caught me off guard and startled me, and right on the heels of the thunder were several more dull noises, the explosions and fire from the residual oil in the drums. I stared in shock for a while at the black smoke wrapped around dark flames, and then asked, “What are you using for energy to produce the lightning?”

  “The National Laboratory for Superconductivity at CAS has developed high-energy batteries made of room-temperature superconducting material. They can store lots of power simply by flowing current continuously through a large loop of superconducting wire.”

  Then the helicopter began to discharge to the ground, for a longer duration this time, but at a low intensity. A long, thin arc connected ground and helicopter, snaking through the air like a dancer’s graceful curves, or a windblown strand of UV-emitting spider silk.

  “This is a low-intensity, continuous release of the superconductor battery’s residual energy. The battery is highly unstable and not very safe, so ordinarily it can’t store a charge. Let’s wait a bit—this will take at least ten minutes. It’s a nice sound, isn’t it?”

  The power release wasn’t loud, but it sounded like fingernails on glass, and gave me goose bumps.

  I asked, “How many times can you repeat that high-intensity release?”

  “That depends on the number and capacity of the superconductor batteries. This helicopter could manage eight to ten, but we can’t drain the residual power in that way.”

  “Why not?”

  “People would protest.” She pointed to the north, where I saw a group of luxury homes not too far from the base. “The base was originally meant to be farther from the city, but for various reasons it was built here. You’ll see later on that noise nuisance isn’t the only consequence of this mistake.”

  When the residual power was drained, she took me to look at the equipment on the helicopter. Unfamiliar with electronics and machinery, I didn’t understand much, but I was deeply impressed by the cylindrical superconductor batteries.

  “So you say this system isn’t successful?” I asked, inwardly amazed at what I’d just witnessed.

  “First Lieutenant Yang is an attack helicopter pilot with the Thirty-Eighth Army Aviation Regiment. He is most qualified to draw a conclusion.”

  I thought about the ball lightning eyewitness, but the man in front of me was a little younger. He said, “The first time I saw this, I was really excited for a while. I felt like I couldn’t praise it enough, and that it would greatly increase the ground attack capabilities of our armed helicopters.… Basically, I was as excited as a World War I pilot seeing one of today’s guided missiles! But I soon realized that it’s nothing more than a toy.”

  “Why?”

  “First, the attack range. No more than one hundred meters from its target, or it won’t release electricity. A grenade can go a hundred meters.”

  Lin Yun said, “We tried everything, but that’s the range limit.”

  This was easy to understand. The energy in the superconductor battery was far too insufficient to produce natural lightning in an arc several kilometers long, and even if this energy could be generated by other means, like nuclear reactions, no existing weapons platform—be it armed helicopter or destroyer—would be able to withstand such an energy discharge: when shooting lightning, they’d end up destroying themselves first.

  The lieutenant said, “There’s another thing that’s even more ridiculous … but I’ll let Dr. Lin explain it herself.”

  Lin Yun said, “You’ve probably already thought of it.”

  This time I had. “You’re referring to a discharge pole?”

  “Yes.” She pointed to the red square area with the oil barrels, still burning. “We gave that red area a negative charge of 1.5 coulombs in advance.”

  I thought for a moment. “Would it be possible to use another means, like radiation, to induce a negative charge in the target area from a distance?”

  “That was one thing we considered from the start, and we began R&D on a long-range electrostatic charger concurrently with this discharge device, but the technology was very difficult, particularly under combat conditions, where effectively fighting a moving target requires completing the charging process within roughly one second. Under current technical conditions, that’s practically impossible.” She sighed. “Like the lieutenant said, we created a toy. We can demonstrate it to scare people a little, but it has no actual combat value.”

  Then she took me to see the next project. “You’ll probably be most interested in this,” she said. “We’re producing lightning in the atmosphere.”

  We entered the high, wide-roofed building, which Lin Yun told me was converted from a large warehouse. A row of floodlights on the high domed ceiling illuminated the vast space, where our footsteps echoed, and Lin Yun’s voice produced a pleasant echo as well.

  “Ordinary lightning produced by thunderclouds is pretty hard to make artificially on a large scale, so there’s little military value. Our research objective is to produce dry lightning—that is, lightning discharged by an electric field produced in electrified air, with no involvement of clouds.”

  “That’s what you said at Mount Tai.”

  Lin Yun showed me two machines installed along a wall, each the size of a truck, that resembled enormous air compressors and consisted largely of high pressure airba
gs. “These are electrostatic air generators. They take a large volume of air, charge it, and then expel it. The two machines produce positive and negatively charged air.”

  A thick tube ran from each generator along the wall at ground level, with thin tubes, more than a hundred in all, extending vertically along it at regular distances to two rows of nozzles affixed to the wall, one high and one low. Lin Yun told me that the one set of nozzles sprayed positively charged air, and the other negatively charged air, to form a discharge field.

  Then I saw someone hoisting a small model airplane on a pulley high up into the space between the nozzles. Lin Yun said, “That’s the strike target. It’s the cheapest kind, only able to fly in a straight line.”

  Turning around, Lin Yun led me into a small room in the corner of the building—a glassed-in iron cage, really—that contained an instrument panel. She said, “The lightning doesn’t usually strike over here, but for safety reasons, we built this shielded control room. It’s a Faraday cage.” She handed me a plastic bag containing a set of earplugs. “It gets very loud. You’ll damage your hearing without earplugs.”

  When she saw I had the earplugs in, she pressed a red button on the console and the two machines roared to life, their nozzles high up on the wall spraying red and blue mist into the room to form a strange sight under the floodlights shining from the dome.

  She said, “Charged air is normally colorless. To see more clearly, the charging process adds a large quantity of aerosol particles.”

  The blue and red air accumulated, forming two even layers over our heads. On the console, a red number ticked, and Lin Yun told me it displayed the strength of the electric field that was now forming. After a few minutes, a piercing buzzer sounded to indicate that the electric field strength had reached the set value. Lin Yun pressed another button and the small plane that had been hoisted up began to fly. When it reached the space between the red and blue layers, there was a flash of lightning bright enough to white out my vision, and I heard a clap of thunder, still startlingly loud even though I was wearing earplugs. When my vision returned, I saw that the plane was in small pieces, like bits of paper scattered on the floor by an unseen hand, and at its final location, yellow smoke was slowly dissipating.

  I was stunned as I surveyed the scene, and I asked, “Did that little plane trigger the lightning?”

  “Yes. We brought the atmospheric electric field to a critical point, where any foreign object of sufficient size that enters the vicinity will trigger lightning. It’s like an airborne minefield.”

  “Have you conducted outdoor tests?”

  “Lots of them. But we can’t give you a demonstration, since a considerable investment is required each time the experiment is run. To release charged air outdoors, pipes with high and low nozzles are hung from tethered balloons that vent positively and negatively charged air. When building an atmospheric electric field, dozens of balloons—more than a hundred, sometimes—are lined up to form two lines of nozzles to produce the two charged air layers. Of course, this is only an experimental system. Other methods may be used in actual combat, such as release from aircraft, or from ground-launched rockets.”

  I thought about this, and said, “But the air outside isn’t still. Currents will blow away the charged air layers.”

  “That is indeed a major problem. Initially, we thought about continuous release upwind to form a dynamically stable atmospheric field over the defensive target.”

  “And the results of actual tests?”

  “Basically successful. And that success is why the accident occurred.”

  “What happened?”

  “Prior to conducting the atmospheric lightning generation tests, we considered all aspects of safety. Only if the wind direction was safe would we conduct the test. If, at any time during the test, the atmospheric field we created exceeded our expected stability threshold, it would be blown far downwind. During the test, there were constant reports of clear-sky lightning in the area downwind of the base, the farthest from around Zhangjiakou. But that lightning didn’t cause any damage, since it was the equivalent of a small thunderstorm. In most directions, the wind was safe. Even in the direction of the city we didn’t feel there was any particular danger, apart from one: toward Beijing Capital Airport. The atmospheric field is especially dangerous to aircraft, since, unlike thunderclouds, pilots and ground radar are unable to see it. To increase visibility, we added color, like what you just saw in the inside test, but we later discovered that over long distances the colored air separated from the charged air. Unlike the charged air, the colored air containing heavy aerosol ions dissipated quickly, so the color soon disappeared.

  “We set up our own meteorology team to recheck wind direction data with the air force and local meteorological bureaus before each test, but even so, there were many sudden, unexpected changes in wind direction. On the twelfth test, the wind suddenly changed direction after the field was established, and the atmospheric electric field began drifting toward the airport. The airport had an emergency shutdown, and we dispatched five helicopters to track the drifting field. It was difficult and dangerous, since after the colored air dissipated, it was only possible to locate it through the changes in interference on the helicopter radios. One helicopter accidentally entered the field and induced lightning, and exploded when it was struck. The captain who was killed was the ball lightning eyewitness you want to see.”

  The image of that young pilot came up clearly in my mind. For years, whenever I heard that someone died from a lightning strike, I felt an indescribable fear in my heart, and now this fear grew stronger. Looking at the red and blue fog hanging in midair, my scalp crawled.

  “Can you get rid of the field?” I asked.

  “That’s easy,” she said as she pressed a green key. Colorless air immediately issued from the nozzles. “The charge is being neutralized.” She pointed to the red digits indicating the field strength, which was dropping dramatically.

  But my anxiety persisted. I could feel the invisible electric field everywhere, the surrounding space pulled taut like a rubber band, about to snap, and I found it difficult to breathe.

  “Let’s go outside,” I suggested. Once out of doors, I could finally breathe a little easier. “That thing’s frightening!” I said.

  She didn’t notice anything unusual about me, but said, “Frightening? No, it’s a failed system. We ignored one important point. Although we repeatedly measured the dependence curve between the volume of charged air and the volume and strength of the electric field, with promising results, the curve could be determined to within a small range indoors. It wasn’t at all applicable to outside space, where creating a large, external atmospheric field consistent with combat conditions meant a geometric increase in the amount of air to measure. Maintaining a sustained atmospheric electric field by continuously releasing charged air requires an enormous system—one that, even setting aside economic factors, would be an easy target under combat conditions. So you see now that our two experimental systems were failures. Or maybe, they were partially successful in technical areas, but have no combat value. As for the reasons they failed, I expect you have a deeper notion.”

  “Oh … what?” I fumbled for an answer, too distracted to follow what she was saying.

  “You must have realized that the two systems failed due to a physical reason, one that underlying technological problems make it very difficult to solve. We’ve arrived at a conclusion: there is no hope for these two systems.”

  “Hmm … perhaps…,” I ventured half-heartedly, as I saw replayed before my eyes scenes of red-and-blue fields, brilliant lightning, plane fragments, and burning oil drums …

  “So we needed to devise a completely new lightning weapon system. Surely you can guess what it is.”

  … drifting atmospheric electric fields, the face of the pilot, an exploding helicopter …

  “Ball lightning!” she cried.

  I was jerked back to my senses to discover tha
t we had crossed the open space and had reached the door to the experimental base. I stopped in my tracks and looked at her.

  “If you could really generate that kind of artificial lightning, its potential far, far surpasses these two systems. It strikes targets with incredibly selective precision, and can be as accurate as a page in a book, something absolutely unachievable by any other weapon. And, more importantly, it isn’t affected by air movement—”

  “Did you see how lightning struck the helicopter piloted by that captain?” I interrupted her to ask.

  She paused, and then shook her head. “No one saw it. The aircraft was blown to pieces, and we only found part of the scattered wreckage.”

  “Then have you seen how other people have been killed by lightning?”

  She shook her head a second time.

  “So you’ve definitely never seen how a person is killed by ball lightning.”

  She looked at me with concern. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’ve seen it,” I said, doing my best to suppress my stomach cramps. “I’ve seen ball lightning kill. It killed my parents. I watched them turn to ash in a split second, and then the two human-shaped columns of ash collapse at a gentle touch of my finger. Back then I didn’t even tell the police, and they filed my parents’ case under ‘missing persons.’ For so many years I’ve kept it hidden in my heart and haven’t told a soul. But that night two years ago on the Skyway on Mount Tai, I told it to you. I’d never have thought you would draw this kind of inspiration from it.”

  She seemed flustered. “Please let me explain. I didn’t want to hurt you. I am truly sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter. When I go back I’ll report to my superiors on what I’ve learned today and your intention to cooperate, but as for myself, I have no interest in lightning weapons.”

  Lin Yun and I spent the trip back to the city in silence.

  * * *

  “I never thought you’d be one to have a nervous breakdown!”