On Tuesday night, I took a walk.
I'm going to be precise about this, because it would become a point of some discussion: I stayed on the trail. The loop trail around the retention pond is a common area, open to every resident from dawn until eleven p.m. according to a laminated sign Glenda put up herself. It runs along the back fence of the amenity center, about forty feet from the pump house. I walked it with Splice, the way I'd walked it a few hundred times before. Ozzie came along, because he said a man who'd been at Khe Sanh didn't need to sit home watching the Rangers lose. Lamont came, because he said he wanted to see for himself.
And I brought my thermal camera.
It's a handheld unit, the kind lineworkers use to find hot spots on connections before they fail. I'd bought my own when I retired, because after thirty-one years I couldn't imagine not having one.
At 10:40 p.m., the night was about eighty degrees and dead still. The pool pump had shut off at ten, like it did every night; I could tell, because the water in the pool had gone glassy. The clubhouse was dark. And the pump house was roaring.
You could hear it from the far side of the pond. A high, steady whine, many fans at once, like a room full of hair dryers. When we got close, I could feel the air coming off the louvered vent on my face from the trail, hot and dry, smelling of warm dust and electronics.
I lifted the camera.
The pump house is a cinder block building about twelve by sixteen. On the thermal screen, most of it was a dull orange, holding the day's heat. The louvered vent was white. Not warm. White. The camera read a hundred and twenty-two degrees at the face of the louver. The metal roof above it was glowing a bright yellow in a spreading fan shape, like something underneath was breathing fire against it.
"What does that mean?" Ozzie asked.
"It means there's a lot of heat in a small room," I said. "About thirteen and a half kilowatts of it. Every watt that goes into a computer comes out as heat. That's like running nine space heaters in there on high. Around the clock."
Lamont said nothing. He was looking past the pump house, at the gravel service drive that ran behind the pool fence to the pump house door.