Ball Lightning(50)

“Hmm? Oh, right. You called this morning?” Ding Yi said, smacking away saliva. “There’s tea in the bookcase. Pour it yourself if you want some.” After sitting up, he suddenly burst out shouting: “Why did you mess up my calculations? I had them lined up, and now they’re out of order!” He got up and busied himself pushing about the paper we had cleared, blocking our retreat.

“Are you Professor Ding?” Lin Yun asked. She was clearly disappointed by her first impression of him.

“I am Ding Yi.” He opened up two folding chairs and motioned for us to sit down, then returned to his chair. He said, “Before you tell me why you’ve come, let me discuss with you a dream I’ve just had....?No, you’ve got to listen. It was a wonderful dream, which you interrupted. In the dream I was sitting here, a knife in my hand, around so long, like for cutting watermelon. Next to me was this tea table. But there wasn’t an ashtray or anything on it. Just two round objects, yea big. Circular, spherical. What do you think they were?”

“Watermelon?”

“No, no. One was a proton, the other a neutron. A watermelon-sized proton and neutron. I cut the proton open first. Its charge flowed out onto the table, all sticky, with a fresh fragrance. After I cut the proton in half, the quarks inside tumbled out, tinkling. They were about the size of walnuts, in all sorts of colors. They rolled about on the table, and some of them fell onto the floor. I picked up a white one. It was very hard, but with effort, I was able to bite into it. It tasted like a manaizi grape....?And right then, you woke me up.”

With a bit of a sneer, Lin Yun said, “Professor Ding, that’s a schoolboy’s dream. You ought to be aware that protons, neutrons, and quarks would exhibit quantum effects, and they wouldn’t look like that.”

Ding Yi stared at her for a few seconds. “Oh, of course. You’re totally right. I tend to oversimplify things. Imagine how wonderful life would be for me if protons and neutrons really were that big. They’re so tiny in reality that a knife to cut them open would cost billions. So this is just a poor child’s dream of candy. Don’t mock it.”

“I’ve heard that the state didn’t include the large hadron accelerator and collider in the latest sci-tech five-year plan,” I said.

“They said it was a pointless waste of resources, so we physicists have to continue to go cap in hand to Geneva and beg them for a pitiful scrap of experiment time.”

“But your neutron decay project was quite successful. They say you nearly won a Nobel.”

“Don’t go bringing that up. That’s why I’m in the state I’m in today, with nothing to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, just a few innocuous remarks. It was last year at...?I’ve forgotten where. Definitely Europe. On a prime-time talk show, the host asked me for my thoughts as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics, and I said, ‘The Nobel? It’s never been given to superior minds, but favors competence and luck, like Einstein, who won for the photoelectric effect. Today, the Nobel is just a withered old whore, her charm gone, relying on flashy clothing and intricate tricks to win the favor of clients. I’m not interested in her. But the state invested a mint into the project, so I wouldn’t reject the prize if it was forced upon me.’ ”

Lin Yun and I looked at each other in surprise, and then burst out laughing. “That’s not cause for termination!”

“They said I was irresponsible, grandstanding, and wrecking it for everyone. Naturally, they all see me as a weirdo. ‘Those whose courses are different cannot lay plans for one another.’* So I left....?Okay, why don’t you two tell me why you’ve come.”

“We’d like to invite you to take part in a national defense research project, to be in charge of the theory portion,” I said.

“Research on what?”

“Ball lightning.”

“Great. If they’ve sent you here to insult me, then they’ve succeeded.”

“Why don’t you listen to our explanation before forming a conclusion? Maybe you’ll be able to use this to insult them,” Lin Yun said, opening up the laptop she had brought. She played a recording of the excitation of ball lightning, and explained it briefly to Ding Yi.

“So you’re saying that you’re using lightning to excite some undiscovered structure in the air?” Ding Yi said, staring at the ball lightning floating faintly on the laptop screen.

Lin Yun affirmed that that was the case. I showed Ding Yi Zhang Bin’s notebook with the alternating burnt pages and described its provenance. He took it and looked it over closely and carefully before returning it to me.

He took a bunch of tobacco from the glass, stuffed it into a large pipe, and lit it. He pointed at the loose cigarettes and said, “Take care of those for me.” Then he walked over to a wall and began to smoke. And so we extracted the tobacco from the cigarettes and put it into the glass.

“I know a place that sells pipe tobacco,” I said, looking up at him.

He didn’t seem to hear me, but stood there exhaling smoke. His face was practically pressed against the wall, so that the smoke he blew against it seemed to be issuing from the wall instead. His eyes were focused on the distance, as if the wall was the transparent border of another vast world and he was surveying the profound sights it held.