Ball Lightning(13)

“As you’ve found out, since the day I saw ball lightning in Mount Tai, I’ve been fascinated with it. I was just an undergrad then, and my attitude was exactly like yours. No more need be said. I first looked for it in natural thunderstorms in tons of places. When I met her later on, it was ball lightning that brought us together. She was an obsessed researcher, and we ran into each other during a huge storm, then went out on searches together. Conditions were poor back then: we had to go on foot more than half the way, and we stayed most nights in local homes, or in crumbling temples or mountain caves, or even slept in the open. I remember once, when we were making observations during an autumn thundershower, we both contracted pneumonia in a remote area where there were no doctors and few drugs. She became seriously ill and nearly died. We crossed paths with wolves and got bitten by snakes, not to mention the frequent hunger. More than a few times, lightning struck the ground quite close to us. These field observations lasted eight years, and it’s impossible to sum up the total distance we walked, the pain we endured, and the danger we faced in that time. For the sake of our cause, we decided not to have children.

“Most of the time it was the two of us on the road, but when she was too busy with teaching or research, I would sometimes go out on my own. Once, in the south, I strayed into a military base and was seen carrying a camera and instruments. Since it was the height of the Cultural Revolution and my parents had been to Russia, I was suspected of being a spy gathering intelligence and was locked up, on no charges, for two years. During those two years, my wife continued field observations in thunderstorms.

“I heard of her death from the village elders. She finally found ball lightning in that thunderstorm, and chased the fireball right up to the edge of a raging flash flood. In her haste she touched the raised air terminal of the magnetic field meter to the fireball. Afterward, they said it was an accident, but they didn’t understand what it might feel like to finally see the ball lightning you’d spent almost a decade searching for, only to be on the verge of losing the opportunity to observe it.”

“I understand,” I said.

“According to eyewitnesses, who were quite far away, when the fireball contacted the terminal it vanished, and then traveled the length of the meter and emerged from the other terminal. She was unharmed at this point, but in the end she did not escape: the fireball revolved around her several times, and then exploded directly above her head. When the flash cleared, she was gone. All they found in the place she was last standing was this raincoat, spread untouched on the ground, and underneath it a pile of white ash, most of which was washed away by the rain in thin trickles of white...”

I looked at the raincoat, imagining it wrapped around that young, dedicated soul, and said softly, “Like the captain who dies at sea or the astronaut who dies in space, her death was worth it.”

Zhang Bin nodded. “I think so, too.”

“And the meter recording?”

“Also unharmed. And it was taken immediately to the lab to determine the residual magnetism.”

“How much?” I asked nervously. This was the first firsthand quantitative observational data in the history of ball lightning research.

“Zero.”

“What?”

“No residual magnetism whatsoever.”

“That means no current passed through the receptor conductor. So how was it conducted?”

Zhang Bin waved a hand. “There are too many mysteries about ball lightning that I won’t go into here. Compared to the others, this isn’t a big one. Now I’d like you to take a look at something even more incredible.” As he spoke, he pulled out a plastic-covered notebook from a pocket of the raincoat. “She had this in her raincoat pocket when she died.” He placed the notebook on a cardboard box with extreme care, as if it were a fragile object. “Use a light touch when you turn the pages.”

It was an ordinary notebook, with a picture of Tiananmen on the cover, blurry now from wear. I gently opened the cover and saw a line of graceful characters on the title page: The entrance to science is the entrance to hell.—Marx.

I looked at Zhang Bin, and he motioned for me to turn the page. I turned to page one, and realized why he told me to be gentle: this page was burned, partly turned to ash and lost. Very gently, I turned this burnt page, and the next one was completely intact, its dense data recordings easily visible, as if written yesterday.

“Turn another page,” he said.

The third leaf was burned.

The fourth was intact.

The fifth was burned.

The sixth was intact.

The seventh was burned.

The eighth was intact.

As I paged through the notebook, every other page was burned. Some of the burnt pages only had bits close to the binding remaining, but on the neighboring intact pages I could see no burn marks. I looked up and stared at Zhang Bin.

He said, “Can you believe it? I’ve never shown this to anyone else, since they’d certainly think it’s fake.”

Looking straight at him, I said, “No, Professor Zhang. I believe!”

Then I told a second person about my fateful birthday night.

After hearing my story, he said, “I guessed you had experience in this area, but I never imagined it would be so terrible. You ought to know, after all you personally witnessed, that the study of ball lightning is a foolish thing.”