Ball Lightning(40)

Lin Yun said, “This isn’t work. It’s a hobby.”

Then we turned toward some more casual topics. I learned that General Lin had been a top student at PLA Military Engineering Institute in Harbin, where he had studied electronics. But he hadn’t touched technology work since that time, transferring to pure military affairs and becoming one of the few senior generals in the army with a technical background.

“I suspect Ohm’s Law is the sum total of what you remember of your studies,” Lin Yun said.

The general laughed. “You underestimate me. But it’s computers, not electronics, that most impress me now. The first computer I saw was a Soviet one, I forget the clock speed but it had 4K of memory—magnetic core memory, mind you, held in a box taller than that bookshelf. But the biggest difference from today was in the software. Xiao Yun loves to boast how awesome a programmer she is, but on that machine, she’d find it hard to code a program for ’3+2’ without breaking a sweat.”

“You used assembly in those days?”

“No, just ones and zeroes. The machine had no compiler, so you had to write out your program on paper and then compile it into machine code, instruction by instruction, a string of ones and zeroes. Hand-coding, we called it.” As he was talking, the general turned toward the table behind him, picked up a pencil and paper, and wrote out a string of ones and zeroes for me. “See, this sequence of commands takes the contents of two registers and puts them into the accumulator, and then puts the result into another register. Don’t be skeptical, Xiao Yun. It’s entirely correct. I once used an entire month to code up a program to calculate pi. From then on I could remember the correspondence between instructions and machine code better than the times tables.”

I said, “There’s essentially no difference between computers back then and today. Ultimately, what’s being processed is still a string of ones and zeroes.”

“Right. It’s interesting. Imagine the eighteenth century, or even earlier—the scientists who were trying to invent computers would no doubt have imagined that the reason they failed was because their thinking wasn’t sophisticated enough. But now we know that it was because their thinking wasn’t simple enough.”

“It’s the same with ball lightning,” Lin Yun mused. “Dr. Chen’s grand idea just now made me realize we failed because we weren’t thinking simply enough.” Then she told my new idea to her father.

“Very interesting, and very plausible,” he said, nodding. “You really should have thought of it before. What’s your next step?”

Lin Yun talked through her thought process: “Build a lightning matrix. To obtain results in the shortest possible time, I’d say that it would have to be...?an area no smaller than twenty square kilometers. We’d install over one thousand lightning generators in that area.”

“Right!” I said excitedly. “For the lightning generators, we could use the lightning weapon you were developing!”

“But that leaves the question of money,” Lin Yun said, more soberly now. “At three hundred thousand yuan for a superconducting battery, we’d need a thousand of them.”

“That’s enough to fit out an entire Su-30 squadron,” the general said.

“But isn’t it worth it if we succeed?”

“Hey, cut it out with all of the ifs and maybes. How many of those did you have at the start of the lightning weapons project? And how did it turn out? I’d like to say a few words about that project. The General Armaments Department insisted on proceeding with it, and I didn’t interfere, but let me ask you: Is the role you’re playing in this project within the scope of a major’s authority?”

Lin Yun said nothing.

“As for ball lightning, you can’t mess around anymore. I’ll agree to setting up the research project, but there won’t be any money.”

Lin Yun was livid. “That’s the same as not doing anything. What can we do without money? The Western media says you’re one of the most technically minded top brass, but it looks like they have you wrong.”

“I’ve got a technically minded daughter, but can she do anything apart from taking money and washing it down the drain? Isn’t your lightning weapons lab on the outskirts of Beijing still around? Why not just do it there?”

“These are two separate things, Dad.”

“What two things? They’re both lightning, so there’s got to be overlap. So much experimental equipment. I can’t accept that it’s completely useless to you.”

“But Dad, we’ve got to build a large-area lightning matrix.”

General Lin shook his head with a smile. “If there’s an idiotic idea in the world, it’s this one. I really don’t get how you two PhDs are missing the obvious.”

Lin Yun and I exchanged a confused glance.

“Dr. Chen just came back from the ocean, am I correct? Did the fishermen you saw blanket the ocean in nets?”

“You mean...?make the lightning mobile? Ah! Dr. Chen’s idea got me so excited I lost my mind for an instant.”

“How do we make it mobile?” I asked, still confused.

“All we need to do is move the lightning weapon’s target from the ground to another helicopter. Then we’ll have a discharge arc in the air, and if the two helicopters fly at the same speed, we can sweep the arc through a wide area. It’ll have the same effect as a lightning matrix, but it will only require one superconductive battery.”