Arlette opened the door.
The noise came out first, a wall of it, and then the heat, and then the light. Somebody had built a box inside the pump house out of plywood and foam insulation board, the size of a big chest of drawers, with a flexible aluminum duct running from the top of it straight to the louvered vent in the wall. The front of the box was open. Inside, on a steel wire shelf, sat four gray metal machines about the size of shoeboxes, each with a fan at either end screaming at full speed, each with a cluster of blinking green lights. Each one with a heavy black cord running to a rack-mount power strip, and the power strip plugged into a new receptacle on the wall, and the receptacle fed by a length of cable stapled along the block wall to the pool equipment subpanel.
I knew what they were before Arlette said it. So did half the young people in the crowd. I heard someone behind me say, "Oh my God, those are miners."
Arlette put her hand flat near the cable without touching it and then pulled her thermal camera off her belt; I wasn't the only one who carried one. "Sixty-amp breaker," she said, almost to herself. "On cable that's rated for maybe forty. Running at continuous load." She turned the camera toward the shelf below the box, and I saw, on the floor, three blue jugs of muriatic acid and a big tub of chlorine tablets, maybe four feet from the hottest cable in the building. She looked at me, and I saw her face, and I knew we'd both been thinking the same thing. It hadn't been a question of if this building was going to burn. It had been a question of when.
"Can I shut it off?" she asked me, as if I were still a foreman.
"It's your inspection," I said. "But I would."
She reached into the subpanel and threw the breaker.
The silence was enormous. You don't realize how loud something is until it stops. The four sets of fans spun down, whining lower and lower, and the green lights went out, and in the ringing quiet afterward you could hear the cicadas in the oaks along the pond and the faint hum of the pool lights and somebody's dog barking three streets away.
And then a voice behind the crowd said, "Mom?"
Boone Ashworth was standing at the edge of the gravel drive, under the parking lot light, his laptop under his arm. He must have seen the miners drop offline on his phone. He looked at the crowd, and the open door, and the dark machines, and then he looked at his mother, who had followed us down from the clubhouse and was standing a little apart from everybody with her arms wrapped around herself.
"I told you," he said to her. His voice cracked on it. "I told you it was fine. I told you I'd pay it back."