“I don’t have time.” He bent down and cut the atomizers back to a pilot flame.

“You mean you want extra pay, damn you. All right. You give me a complete inspection report by morning, day after tomorrow, and I’ll give you two hundred. If you can write, that is.”

Paul walked over and threw a wall switch and one incandescent light bloomed over the old leviathan of a fire-tube boiler—a giant drum, seven feet in diameter and twenty feet long, lying in a brick cradle and run through end to end with two-inch-diameter flue pipes, hundreds of tubes to carry the fire’s heat through the water. “That means I’ll have to go to work now.”

“That’s right.”

Paul put on a tool belt, climbed up to the doors of the smoke box, and beat on the handle with a ball-peen hammer. He swung the doors wide, rust flakes falling like brown snow from the inside surface. He turned on a flashlight and saw a dozen lower tubes corroded shut. Lime deposits from old leaks formed stalactites at the ends of higher tubes, and all surfaces were wet with condensation. The breaching had rusted through over the firebox. He climbed back down. “This is a piece of junk. It hasn’t been fired in twenty years at least.”

“Anything can be fixed.” Bucky put his hands in his pockets and smiled.