It had grown quite dark all around us, the quiet night had begun. We could sense the smell of the wet earth, the fragrance of the grass and the grain refreshed by the rain and the storm, and we plunged on, making up time.
I noticed that Maltsev was driving the engine worse than usual; it swayed on the curves, and the speed went up to a hundred and more kilometers an hour, and then would drop to forty. I decided that Alexander Vassilievich was probably dead tired, and so I said nothing to him even though it was very hard for me to keep the firebox and the boiler running properly when the engineer was driving as he was. But we were supposed to stop in half an hour, to take on water, and Alexander Vassilievich could get something to eat there, and rest a little. We had already made up forty minutes, and by the end of our run we’d make up at least an hour.
But still I was worried by Maltsev’s tiredness and I started to stare forward myself, at the tracks and the signals. On my side, on the left, an electric light was hanging on a cord, lighting up the driving shaft machinery. I could see quite clearly the heavy, accurate working of the left-hand driving shaft, but then the light above it flickered and began to burn dimly, like a single candle. I turned around in the cabin. There, too, the lights were now burning at quarter strength, hardly illuminating the instruments. It was curious that Alexander Vassilievich had not signaled to me with his wrench, to point out what was wrong. It was obvious that the generator was not producing the required number of revolutions, and the tension had fallen. I started to adjust the generator, beyond the steam pipeline, and I was busy at this for quite a while, but the tension did not increase.
At this moment a foggy cloud of reddish light moved across the dials of the instruments and the ceiling of the cabin. I looked outside.
Ahead of us in the darkness—it was impossible to tell whether near or far away—a red beam of light was oscillating across our tracks. I didn’t understand what this was, but I knew what had to be done.
“Alexander Vassilievich!” I shouted and I gave three whistles to stop the train.
We could hear torpedoes exploding under our wheels. I rushed across the cabin to Maltsev, he turned his face toward me and looked at me with quiet, empty eyes. The needle on the dial of the speedometer showed a speed of sixty kilometers an hour.
“Maltsev!” I screamed. “We’re going over torpedoes!” And 1 reached out my hand toward the controls.
“Get away!” Maltsev exclaimed, and his eyes began to shine, reflecting the light of the flickering lamps hanging over the speedometer.
He immediately pulled the brakes on full and put the engine in reverse.
I was pressed up against the boiler, and I could hear the wheels of the engine grinding hard against the rails.
“Maltsev!” I said. “We’ve got to open the stopcocks of the cylinders, or we’ll blow up the engine.”
“Not necessary. It won’t blow up,” Maltsev answered.
We stopped. I started water running into the boiler through the injector, and looked outside. In front of us, about ten meters away, an engine was standing on our tracks, its tender toward us. A man was standing on this tender with a long poker in his hands which had been heated red-hot at its end, and he had been waving this in his effort to stop our express train. This engine had been pushing a freight train which was now stopped at this point between two stations.
It meant that while I had been working on the generator and not looking in front of us we had gone through a yellow signal and then a red one and probably more than one warning signal given us by trackwalkers. But why hadn’t Maltsev noticed all these signals?
“Kostya!” Maltsev called to me.
I walked over to him.
“Kostya! What’s this, in front of us?”
I told him.
“Kostya… From here on you drive the engine. I’m blind.”
The next day I took the train back on the return trip to our station and turned the locomotive in to the repair shops because the rims of our wheels had been slightly damaged in two places. Having reported on what happened to the head of the station, I led Maltsev by his hand to the place where he lived; Maltsev himself was in deep depression and had not gone to see the head of the station.
We hadn’t got to the house where Maltsev lived on a street grown over with grass when he asked me to leave him by himself.
“I can’t do that,” I answered. “Alexander Vassilievich, you’re a blind man.”
He looked at me with clear, thoughtful eyes.
“Now I can see. Go on home…. I can see everything. There’s my wife who’s come out to meet me.”
At the gate of the house where he lived a woman really was standing and waiting for him, Alexander Vassilievich’s wife, and her uncovered black hair was shining in the sun.
“And has she got something on her head or not?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” Maltsev answered. “Now who’s blind, you or I?”
“Well, once you can see, go on and look,” I decided, and I walked away from him.
[III]
Maltsev was arrested, and an investigation started. I was summoned as a witness, and asked what I thought about the happenings on that express train. I answered what I thought—that Maltsev was not guilty.
“He was blinded by a very close explosion, by the bolt of lightning,” I told the investigator. “He was shocked, and the nerves which control sight were damaged. I don’t know how to say this precisely.”
“I understand you,” the investigator said, “you’re talking very precisely. This is all possible, but not very likely. Because Maltsev himself gave evidence that he never saw the lightning.”
“But I saw it, and the fireman saw it, too.”
“That means, the lightning struck closer to you than to Maltsev,” the investigator reasoned. “Why weren’t you and the fireman shocked, why weren’t you blinded, while the engineer Maltsev suffered damage to his optical nerve and was blinded? What do you think?”
I felt as if I were in a blind alley, and then I thought it over.
“Maltsev couldn’t see the lightning,” I said.
The investigator listened to me in surprise.
“He couldn’t see it. He was blinded instantaneously, by the electromagnetic wave that always precedes the flash of lightning. The flash of lightning is the result of an explosion, and not the reason for the lightning. Maltsev was already blind when the lightning produced its flash, and a blind man cannot see light.”
“Interesting!” the investigator said, smiling. “I would close Maltsev’s case if he were still blind. But you know yourself, he can see now just as well as you or I.”
“He can see,” I confirmed this.
“Was he blind,” the investigator went on, “when he drove his express train at enormous speed almost into the rear end of a freight train?”
“He was,” I stated.
The investigator looked at me attentively.
“Why didn’t he turn over the control of the locomotive to you, or at the very least instruct you to stop the train?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“So you see,” the investigator said. “A grown-up, responsible man driving the locomotive of an express train, taking hundreds of people to certain death, avoids catastrophe only by accident, and then excuses himself on the grounds that he was blind. What’s this all about?”
“But he would have been killed himself,” I told him.
“Probably. But I’m more interested in the lives of hundreds of other people than in the life of one man. Maybe he had some reason to kill himself.”
“He had no reason,” I said.
The investigator had grown indifferent; he was already bored with me as a stupid fool.