gloom, until he came panting around a bend and saw Woch the Operator up ahead of him. Woch was going in the same direction but more slowly, pushing a bicycle along by the handlebars. When he heard steps behind him, he turned, recognized Stefan, and said hello. They walked side by side in silence for some time.
Woch was wearing dirty boots, a sweater, and a jacket with the collar turned up. Though Stefan was sweating heavily in a shirt and linen trousers, the man showed no sign of discomfort. His face was as expressionless and gray as usual, except for the red flap where his ear had been. Yellow clouds roiled above them. Stefan would happily have broken into a run, but it somehow inhibited him that Woch was marching along at such an even pace.
The road widened and came up even with its banks. They had turned off onto a sandy path when the first big drops began pocking the dust at their feet. The substation was in sight.
“Why don’t you come with me? It’s going to pour,” Woch said. Stefan agreed. They made for the substation without a word. Heavy drops hit Stefan’s hands and face and blotted his shirt and trousers.
A few steps from the door, Woch stopped and looked back, leaning on the handlebars. Stefan also turned. A shelf of turbulent black-bottomed cloud was heading toward them, streams of it reaching down toward the ground.
“Where I come from, they call that a male cloud,” Woch said, squinting at the sky. Stefan wanted to laugh, but Woch’s face was gloomy. Then the downpour broke with a roar.
Stefan got inside the substation in two bounds. Woch, water streaming off him, seemed to defy the rain and deliberately lifted first the front, then the rear wheel of the bicycle into the building. Only when it rested against the wall did he take out a handkerchief and carefully wipe his eyes and cheeks.
Through the open door they could see the gray deluge drowning everything in sight. Stefan inhaled the wonderfully cool air deeply, delighted to have escaped the flood. Only when Woch opened a second, inner, door did he realize that he had been granted a unique opportunity.
He followed Woch into the building’s main, modestly sized room. Rain beat against the three windows, and it would have been dark but for the ceiling lamps. Their steady light revealed a stand against one wall and a control board with gauges; the opposite wall looked like a zoo. It consisted of cages made of wire screens painted gray; they stood side by side and extended to the ceiling. Stefan could not tell what was in the narrow cages, but it was certainly nothing alive, for there was no movement. In the middle of the room stood a small table, two chairs, and several boxes. A rubber mat covered the stone floor.
“Isn’t there anyone here?” Stefan asked.
“Poscik’s here. It’s his shift. Please wait. And don’t touch anything!”
Woch went to a door in the corner of the room where the screens ended, opened it, looked inside, and said something. Stefan heard a muffled reply. Woch went in and closed the door behind him. Stefan was alone for perhaps a minute. The dull indeterminate hum filled the air, which was thick with the smell of hot oil, and the rain whipped across the tin roof in waves.
As he looked around, Stefan noticed something shining behind the metal screens. He moved closer and in the darkness saw vertical copper rails and the knobs of porcelain insulators. Then he heard voices from behind the wall.
“Have you been drinking, Wladek?” Woch was saying. “You want to take it out now?”
“Let’s wait outside,” said a second, lower voice.
“Outside. If it doesn’t work, we’re dead anyway. Do you realize how much there is? Get out, right now!”
“Okay, Jasiu, okay. Jasiu, in the woods maybe?”
“In the woods, wonderful! Come on, we have a guest.”
“What?”
The voices dropped to an indistinct murmur. Stefan quickly moved back to the center of the room. Woch and old Poscik came in. They both looked at the gauges. The operator said something, but a crash of thunder drowned him out. Woch took a few steps, stopped on tiptoe, and looked again at the apparatus.
“Well?” asked the old man.
The answer was a wave of the hand that signaled: forget it. Woch bowed his head, held his own shoulders with his hands across his chest, and slowly rocked back on his heels, standing as Stefan imagined a ship’s captain would when braving a storm. Then Woch noticed Stefan and gave a start. He picked up a chair, carried it through the door, and put it down in the corridor saying, “Please sit here. You’ll be safe here.”
Stefan obeyed. The door to the room was open, creating a strange sort of stage, Stefan sitting in the dark narrow corridor, the only spectator.
The two men inside weren’t doing anything. The old man sat on a box, while Woch remained standing. No longer watching the apparatus, they seemed to be waiting for something. Their faces glowed more and more brightly in the yellow lamplight; Stefan felt nauseated from the oppressive smell of oil; outside, the storm roared and thundered with steady intensity. At one point Woch rushed to the black stand and looked closely at a gauge, then at another, before returning to his place and sinking back into immobility. Stefan began to feel disappointed— but then he sensed some changes, though he did not know how. His uneasy impression mounted until he suddenly discovered its source.
There was movement in the depths of the cages along the wall. He heard a kind of scraping, a hiss; it grew to an impatient gnashing, fell quiet, then came back. Woch and Poscik must have heard it, for they both looked around, and the old man glanced at Woch with what Stefan thought was fear. Yet neither of them moved.
Minutes passed as the rain beat on the roof and the low electric hum persisted, but the noise coming from the cages did not let up. Something was rustling, scraping, buzzing, as if a living being was dashing about and pushing in all directions: the strange sounds came from opposite ends of the cage in turn, from the bottom and then from the top near the ceiling. The mysterious thing seemed to be jerking more and more violently behind the steel screen. A blue flash suddenly filled two of the cages, grew stronger, casting distorted shadows of the two men against the opposite wall, then vanished. An acrid, searing smell burned Stefan’s nostrils. There was another sharp hiss and a crackling flame winked in the depths of another cage; a flurry of sparks shot from the metal bar that stuck out under the screen.
Old Poscik stood up, stuffed his pipe into his apron pocket, and, standing rigidly erect, looked silently at Woch. The operator grabbed him tightly by the arm and, his face twisted into what could have been anger, shouted something that was swallowed up by the clap of a nearby thunderbolt. A sudden flash ripped through three of the cages, extinguishing the lights for an instant, and the whole wall looked as if it was on fire. Woch pushed the old man toward Stefan and with his hands in front of him slowly went to the control panel. It sounded as though someone was shooting a pistol in the cages, and blue and red flames poured through the screens. Choking on the smell of ozone, Stefan backed off down the corridor, stopping at the door. The old man hunched beside him and Woch, after taking a last look at the apparatus, sprang after them with a youthful stride. They stood together in the corridor. Things quieted down behind the screens. A few small blue flames still danced in the comers. The thunder was receding, but the rain still drummed steadily on the roof.
“It’s over,” the old man finally said, taking the pipe out of his pocket. His hands seemed to be trembling, but it was too dark to tell.
“Well, we’re still alive,” Woch said. He walked back into the room, stretched as though awakening from a good sleep, slapped his hands against his hips, and sat down abruptly on a stool.
“It’s all right now,” he nodded to Stefan, “you can come in.”
The thunder stopped completely but the rain still fell as though it might go on forever. The old man shuffled around the room, making notes on a sheet of graph paper. Then, opening a door in the comer that Stefan had not noticed, he disappeared inside and rummaged around, making a lot of noise that sounded like metal clattering. He came back carrying a frying pan, a spirit stove, and a pot of peeled potatoes. He put things on the table and the floor and set about preparing a meal. Murmuring “What can I offer you” over and over, he tiptoed around, disappeared, came back, put the pan on, and, enveloped in a cloud of burning fat, broke and sniffed the eggs with an expression of devout concentration. In the meantime, Woch formally invited Stefan to wait out the rain in the substation.
Stefan asked what had happened. Woch explained about the lightning rods that protected them, about circuit breakers, and about the excess current, and although Stefan did not understand everything, he felt that something else had happened and that Woch was minimizing the danger for reasons known only to himself. Stefan had no doubt that there had been danger—he could tell that from the way the two operators had acted. Woch showed him
