Ball Lightning(32)

“And then I came here, with the first group of scientists, and it looked like what you just saw outside. It was snowing that day, and this open area had just been cleared out, and there were still stumps on the ground.

“I won’t go into detail about what happened later. Even if we had time, I don’t think my mind could take it. All you need to know is that right where we’re standing was the world’s largest ball lightning research center. The study of ball lightning took place here for thirty years, employing, at its height, more than five thousand people. The Soviet Union’s greatest physicists and mathematicians were all involved to varying extents.

“To demonstrate just how much was invested into this project, I’ll give you one example. Look at this.”

Gemow shone his flashlight behind us, and just beside the tunnel we had come out of we saw another massive tunnel entrance.

“That tunnel is twenty miles long, but for secrecy, all shipments to the base were unloaded on the other end and then brought here through the tunnel. This led to large quantities of goods unaccountably disappearing over there. To keep this fact from attracting attention and questions from the outside world, they built a small city there. Only—likewise for secrecy—the city was not inhabited. It was just a useless ghost town.

“To hide the radiation produced during artificial lightning research, the entire base was constructed underground. We’re standing in a medium-sized lab. The rest of the base has been sealed up or demolished, and there’s no way to get to it now.

“Large experimental equipment was once installed here, like the world’s largest lightning simulator, a complex field generator, and a large-scale wind tunnel, to model the environment producing ball lightning on the largest possible scale and from every angle. Take a look at this.”

We had arrived at a massive trapezoidal cement platform.

“Can you imagine a platinum electrode several stories high? There used to be one installed on this platform.”

He bent down to pick something up and passed it to me. It was heavy, a metal ball. “It looks like it’s from a ball mill,” I said.

Gemow shook his head. “During testing of the lightning simulator, metal structures at the top of the tunnel were melted by the lightning, and the drips cooled to form these.” I examined the ground with a flashlight and found many of the metal balls. “The lightning produced by the massive simulator in the central lab was an order of magnitude more powerful than natural lightning in the wild, enough for NATO’s nuclear monitoring system to detect the shock wave. NATO believed that it was from an underground nuclear test, and the Soviet government admitted to that, taking a major hit in nuclear disarmament talks. When the lightning tests were in progress, the mountains shook, and the ozone produced by underground lightning vented above ground, giving the air within a hundred-kilometer radius an unusually fresh scent. While the simulations were ongoing, the electric field generator, microwave emitter, and large-scale wind tunnels were run to simulate lightning under every condition, and then the results were input into a huge computer system for analysis. Parameters for some of the tests far exceeded the most extreme natural conditions: super-powerful lightning was triggered in a complicated maze of electric fields, or amid microwaves capable of boiling away a pond in a brief period of time....?Lightning research continued here for three decades.”

I looked up at the trapezoidal platform that had once supported a massive electrode, illuminated by the three beams of our flashlights against the backdrop of the depths of the night, like an Aztec altar in the thick jungle, somehow sacred. We pitiful ball lightning chasers had come here like pilgrims to the highest temple, full of fear and awe. Watching the concrete pyramid, I thought about how many people, over the past thirty-odd years, had been sacrificed here.

“And the final outcome?” I asked. At last, the critical question.

Gemow took out another cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, but did not speak. The flashlight didn’t give me a clear look at his expression, but he reminded me of how Zhang Bin had looked when describing his unspeakable pain as a ball lightning researcher. So I answered for Gemow. “There was never any success, was there?”

But immediately I realized I was wrong, because Gemow laughed. “Young man, you’re thinking too simplistically. Holmes said, ‘It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious.’ It would have been very weird if there were not a single success in thirty years of research, weird enough to encourage people to continue. The tragedy was the lack of even that weirdness. All we had was a frustrating boredom. We succeeded, over the course of thirty years, in producing ball lightning twenty-seven times.”

Lin Yun and I were stunned, and for a moment had nothing to say.

Gemow laughed again. “I can imagine you are feeling two different things right now. Major Lin Yun is no doubt pleased, since all a soldier cares about is the possibility of making a weapon. You, however, are despondent. You’re like Scott reaching the South Pole at last, only to see the Norwegian flag that Amundsen left behind. But neither feeling is necessary. Ball lightning remains a mystery. No more is certain than when we first came here more than thirty years ago. Truly, we came out of it with nothing.”

“What does that mean?” Lin Yun asked in wonder.

Gemow let out a slow cloud of smoke and stared at its transformations in the beams of light, sunken into memory of the past. “The first successful generation of ball lightning was in 1962, the third year after research began. I personally witnessed it. After a discharge from the lightning simulator it appeared in midair, light yellow in color, dragging a tail behind it as it flew for around twenty seconds before vanishing without a sound.”