Ball Lightning(57)
Nothing happened.
Ding Yi’s expression remained dead calm as he pointed at the space within the field generator and declared solemnly, “This is ball lightning in an unexcited state.”
There was nothing there.
For a moment there was silence, other than the faint hum of the field generator. Time passed sluggishly like sticky paste, and I ached for it to flow faster.
A sudden burst behind us made us jump, and we turned around to see Captain Liu doubled over. He’d taken a drink of water, but couldn’t hold back his laughter, and had sprayed it out.
Through his laughter he said, “Look at Professor Ding! He’s basically that tailor from ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’!”
It was an apt analogy, and we burst out laughing at the humor and sheer audacity of the physicist.
“Simmer down and listen up!” Colonel Xu said, waving his hand to suppress the laughter. “We ought to have a proper understanding and attitude toward the entire experiment. We knew that it would fail, but we arrived at the common understanding that a safe return of the experimental personnel would be a victory. Now that outcome has been satisfied.”
“But someone’s got to be responsible for the outcome!” someone shouted. “More than a million yuan has been put into it, and a helicopter and two lives were gambled on it. Is this farce all that we get in return?” The remark drew immediate rejoinders from the crowd.
Then Ding Yi raised up the Go board to a level higher than the generated magnetic field. His movement caught people’s attention, and the hooting quickly died down. When there was complete calm, Ding Yi eased the board downward until the bottom made contact with the generator.
People drew closer to look at the board, and what they saw turned them as still as statues.
Some of the squares on the board were deformed. There was a clear curve to their edges, as if the board had been placed behind an almost perfectly transparent crystal ball.
Ding Yi removed the board, and everyone bent down to peer straight on at the space. Even without the aid of the board, the bubble was visible, a faint circular outline vaguely described in the air, like a soap bubble lacking all markings.
Captain Liu was the first of the frozen crowd to move. He extended a trembling, fingernail-less hand to touch the bubble, but pulled it back in the end without making contact.
“Don’t worry,” Ding Yi said. “Even if you stuck your head in, it wouldn’t matter.”
And so the captain really did stick his head into the bubble. This was the first time that a human had looked at the outside world from within ball lightning, but Captain Liu saw nothing unusual. What he saw was a crowd cheering once again—only this time, their cheers were genuine.
Macro-Electrons
The base was close to the Kangxi Grasslands northwest of the city. To celebrate the experiment’s success, we took a trip to have roast whole mutton. Dinner was outdoors on the edge of that fairly small grassland.
Colonel Xu gave a small speech: “In olden days, there must have been a day when someone had a stroke of inspiration and understood that they were surrounded by air. Later, people learned that they were constrained by gravity, and that their surroundings were an ocean of electromagnetic waves, and that cosmic radiation passes through our bodies at all times....?Now we know something else: that bubbles are there around us, floating nearby in space that appears empty. Now, let me speak for us all, and offer Professor Ding and Major Lin my well-deserved admiration.”
Again, everyone cheered.
Ding Yi went over to Lin Yun, raised up a large saucer (he was a boozer as well as a smoker), and said, “Major, I used to have a prejudice against soldiers. I thought you were the epitome of mechanical thinking. But you have changed my ideas.”
Lin Yun looked at him wordlessly. I had never seen that expression in her eyes before toward anyone—not even, I’m willing to believe, Jiang Xingchen.
And then I realized that in the midst of all of the uniforms, Ding Yi stood out. In the hot summer wind on the grassland, he seemed formed of three flags: one, his wind-tossed long hair, and the two others his large sleeveless T-shirt and shorts that whipped constantly about his thin stalk of a body, like flags hung on a flagpole. Next to him, Lin Yun cut a lovely figure in the evening light.
Colonel Xu said, “Now you all must be brimming with anticipation for Professor Ding to tell us just what ball lightning is.”
Ding Yi nodded. “I know that lots of people have poured immense effort into unlocking the secret of nature, including the likes of Dr. Chen and Major Lin. They devoted their life’s energies to taking the EM and fluid equations and twisting them to mind-shattering degrees, until they nearly broke. Then they put in one patch after another to plug the holes, adding extra struts to support the teetering edifice, ultimately coming up with something far too huge and complicated, and incomparably ugly....?Dr. Chen, do you know where you failed? It wasn’t that you weren’t complex enough. It was that you didn’t think simply.”
It was the same thing I’d heard from Lin Yun’s father. Two uncommon men in two different fields had come up with the same profound observation.
“How simple could it be?” I asked, mystified.
Ding Yi disregarded my question and went on: “Next, I will tell you what ball lightning is.”
At this moment, the few scattered stars that had begun to appear in the heavens seemed to stop their twinkling, as if listening for God’s last judgment.