Paul looked at him a moment longer than he should have, shrugged, and got a clipboard off a nail above the workbench. “It’s your money,” he said. Bucky left, dragging his cloud of aftershave with him, and Paul slithered into the fire door to inspect underneath the boiler. Next he climbed into the smoke box. It took him one hour to count all the leaking tubes and locate eroded sections of the tube sheet, testing for thin metal with careful taps of the hammer. After exploring the rear sheet, he mounted the top of the boiler shell, which was covered with two inches of fish-meal dust and asbestos powder. Under the sooty wooden roof beams, he struggled to get the manhole nut off its stem with a two-foot pipe wrench so he could climb down into the boiler. It wouldn’t budge. He climbed down to the floor to get a can of penetrating oil and a pipe to slip over the end of his wrench for more leverage. While he was slicing the plastic spout of the oil can, he thought he heard someone walking under the overhang. He listened, thinking that the watchman was beginning his rounds. Walking to the big sliding tin door, he looked to the parking lot, where the last worker’s car skidded away in a cloud of white dust. Paul turned around and went back through the boiler house and stared toward the buildings at the rear of the plant. Somewhere a loose piece of roofing banged in the wind, but he heard nothing else. He climbed back onto the boiler and wrestled the manhole cover open. A moist metallic breath rose from the hole, and he waited ten minutes for fresh air to flow inside. The blood rushed to his head as he slid through into the darkness, and he immediately became disoriented. He wound up kneeling on the top row of flue pipes, bending his head to clear the arching boiler shell. The chamber was dank and smelled of corrosion and calcium scale. Putting on his gloves, he reached out and pulled his tool belt through the manhole. He was now a doctor inside a body. Something about the rarity of what he was doing excited him, this getting into a machine, fitting inside the mechanism itself. He turned on his flashlight and crawled twenty feet over the flaky pipes to the forward tube sheet, where the flues would be thin from heat and rust. With his hammer, he tapped a flue where it joined the sheet, and it dented like a cheap pot. For the pipes to be weak this high in the boiler meant the whole apparatus was probably worn out. Paul grinned at the thought of Bucky wasting two hundred dollars for the inspection. He should have known better. Even from the outside, a fool could tell that the boiler was no good. Paul began to make notes on his clipboard. He banged an angle brace with a hammer and wrote again.