She recalled the seared polka-dot wounds that covered Luis Martin. Her breath was coming fast and she realized that her hand, moving toward the door handle, had slowed. She gripped and pulled the heavy steel portal open.

Yep, hell. Fire, sulfur, the whole scene.

The temperature in the room was overwhelming. Well over a hundred degrees and Sachs felt not only a painful prickle on her skin but a curious lessening of the pain in her joints as the heat deadened her arthritis.

The hour was late-it was close to eight p.m.-but there was a full staff at work in the Burn. The hunger for electricity might ebb and flow throughout the day but never ceased completely.

The dim space, easily two hundred feet high, was filled with scaffolding and hundreds of pieces of equipment. The centerpiece was a series of massive light green machines. The largest of them was long with a rounded top, like a huge Quonset hut, from which many pipes and ducts and wires sprouted.

"That's MOM," Sommers called, pointing to it. "M-O-M. Midwest Operating Machinery, Gary, Indiana. They built her in the 1960s." This was all shouted with some reverence. Sommers added that she was the biggest of the five electrical generators here in the Queens complex. He continued, explaining that when first installed, MOM was the biggest electrical generator in the country. In addition to the other electrical generators-they were only numbered, without names-were four units that provided superheated steam to the New York City area.

Amelia Sachs was indeed captivated by the massive machinery. She found her step slowing as she gazed at the huge components and tried to figure out the parts. Fascinating what the human mind could put together, what human hands could build.

"Those're the boilers." He pointed to what seemed to Sachs to be a separate building within a building. They must've been ten or twelve stories tall. "They produce steam, over three thousand pounds per square inch." He drew a breath. "It goes into two turbines, a high-pressure and a low-pressure one." He pointed to part of MOM. "Then into the generator. She's got a continuous output-thirty-four thousand amps, eighteen thousand volts, but it's stepped up once it gets outside for transport to over three hundred thousand."

Despite the squashing heat, she felt a shiver, hearing those figures and flashing on the memory of Luis Martin, his skin punctured by hot metal raindrops.

Sommers added with some pride, it seemed to Sachs, that the output of the entire Queens facility-MOM plus several other turbines-was close to 2,500 megawatts. About 25 percent of the city's entire usage.

He pointed to a series of other tanks. "That's where the steam is condensed to water and pumped back to the boilers. Starts all over again." Proudly he continued, shouting, "She's got three hundred and sixty miles of tubes and pipes, a million feet of cable."

But then, despite her fascination and the massive scale, Sachs found herself gigged in the belly by her claustrophobia. The noise was relentless, the heat.

Sommers seemed to understand. "Come on." He gestured her to follow and in five minutes they were out the other door and hanging up their hats. Sachs was breathing deeply. The corridor, while still warm, was blessedly cool after her minutes in hell.

"It gets to you, doesn't it?"

"Does."

"You all right?"

She diverted a tickling stream of sweat and nodded. He offered her a paper towel from a roll kept there for mopping faces and necks, it seemed, and she dried off.

"Come on this way."

He led her down more corridors and into another building. More stairs and finally they arrived at his office. She stifled a laugh at the clutter. The place was filled with computers and instruments she couldn't recognize, hundreds of bits of equipment and tools, wires, electronic components, keyboards, metal and plastic and wood items in every shape and color.

And junk food. Tons of junk food. Chips and pretzels and soda, Ding Dongs and Twinkies. And Hostess powdered sugar doughnuts, which explained the dandruff on his clothes.

"Sorry. It's the way we work in Special Projects," he said, shoveling aside computer printouts from an office chair for her to sit in. "Well, the way I work, at least."

"What exactly do you do?"

He explained, somewhat abashedly, that he was an inventor. "I know, sounds either very nineteenth century or very infomercial. But that's what I do. And I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I do for a living exactly what I wanted to when I was a kid and building dynamos, motors, lightbulbs-"

"You made your own lightbulbs?"

"Only set fire to my bedroom twice. Well, three times, but we only had to call the fire department twice."

She looked at a picture of Edison on the wall.

"My hero," Sommers said. "Fascinating man."

"Andi Jessen had something about him on her wall too. A photo of the grid."

"It's Thomas Alva's original signature… But Jessen's more Samuel Insull, I'd say."

"Who?"

"Edison was the scientist. Insull was a businessman. He headed Consolidated Edison and created the first big monopolistic power utility. Electrified the Chicago trolley system, practically gave away the first electrical appliances-like irons-to get people addicted to electricity. He was a genius. But he ended up disgraced. This sound familiar? He was way overleveraged and when the Depression came, the company went under and hundreds of thousands of shareholders lost everything. Little like Enron. You want to know some trivia: The accounting firm Arthur Andersen was involved with both Insull and Enron.

"But me? I leave the business to other people. I just make things. Ninety-nine percent amounts to nothing. But… well, I've got twenty-eight patents in my name and I've created nearly ninety processes or products in Algonquin's. Some people sit in front of the TV or play video games for fun. I… well, invent things." He pointed to a large cardboard box, brimming with squares and rectangles of paper. "That's the Napkin File."

"The what?"

"I'm out at Starbucks or a deli and I get an idea. I jot it down on a napkin and come back here to draw it up properly. But I save the original, toss it in there."

"So if there's ever a museum about you there'll be a Napkin Room."

"It has occurred to me." Sommers was blushing, from forehead to ample chin.

"What exactly do you invent?"

"I guess my expertise is the opposite of what Edison did. He wanted people to use electricity. I want people not to."

"Does your boss know that's your goal?"

He laughed. "Maybe I should say I want people to use it more efficiently. I'm Algonquin's negawatt maven. That's 'nega' with an n."

"Never heard about that."

"A lot of people haven't, which is too bad. It came from a brilliant scientist and environmentalist, Amory Lovins. The theory is to create incentives to reduce demand and use electricity more efficiently, rather than trying to build new power plants to increase supply. Your typical power station wastes nearly half of the heat generated-right up the smokestack. Half! Think about that. But we've got a series of thermal collectors on the stacks and cooling towers here. At Algonquin we lose only twenty-seven percent.

"I've been coming up with ideas for portable nuclear generators-on barges, so they can be moved around from region to region." He leaned forward, eyes sparkling again. "And the big new challenge: storing electricity. It's not like food. You can't make it and put it on the shelf for a month. You use it or lose it-instantly. I'm creating new ways to store it. Flywheels, air pressure systems, new battery technology…

"Oh, and lately I've been spending half my time traveling around the country linking up small alternative and renewable companies, so they can get onto the major grids like the Northeastern Interconnection-that's ours-and sell juice to us, rather than us selling to small communities."