You wanna talk about tight with a dollar? That's my old man. Stingiest man I ever knew. Runs the family's asteroid mining station out past Hygeia. Stockpiles everything including silicates on the theory that someday someone will need them, even though nobody ever has.

 

You know how, after a while, the air in a small station starts to smell like rotten cabbage? It's those cheap commercial filters; they can't keep up. Most people end up buying high-end gas scrubbers. Not my dad. He figured out what caused it and honest-to-God started mining the air.

 

No, really. I'll tell you about it.

 

There's a story about this guy who ate a huge meal of cabbage and beans and ended up suffocating himself on his own farts while he slept. Obviously it's not true because, the amounts of methane and hydrogen sulfide in the average fart, it'd take over a year. But in a station that's been there twenty years, you get a buildup, enough that wiring starts to corrode.

 

Yeah, from farts. Stop laughing. I'm telling this, right?

 

So Dad, he figures this out, right? Turns out, back on Earth, they had the same trouble from drilling oil, only worse 'cause it's like millions of years worth instead of just ten people's Sunday beans. Used to be they'd just burn it, but that's bad for the air. So they invented this Claus process to clean it, and at the same time create tons of elemental sulfur.

 

Well. Dad reads that and you could just see the dollar signs in his eyes. The next day he's in the shop building this triple boiler thingie — no, I lie; what's one more than triple? — this fourple boiler — Don't laugh at me! This fourple boiler to distill the sulfur from outta the air. And us boys, we're put on cabbage and beans five days a week. Let me tell you, time he was done, the stink had got so thick you had to slice a hole just to walk through.

 

He fires up his machine, and at first everything's fine. Air goes in, hits the reactor, steam jets out, and this little stream of molten sulfur starts dribbling out the bottom.

 

Then the second boiler — more steam, more sulfur — then the third, then the fourth. And there's Dad, weighing up the sulfur and dreaming over all the money he's gonna make.

 

Well of course you saw this coming. He's got condensers set up to recover the steam, but there's just too much. Water's running down the walls, pooling on the floors, and shorting out the lights. Worse, you think sulfur gas is thick, just try mixing it with steam and twenty years of asteroid dust from the walls and ceilings. You couldn't see two feet. All the rats came boiling up out of the waste pipes just to suffocate to death on the deck. I'm not kidding; it was that bad.

 

My brothers ran for the mining skiff and took off, but I was too slow and got left behind. So I put on a daysuit, grabbed a spare oxygen tank and a ball of twine so I wouldn't get lost, and went hunting for Ma. Good thing, too. She'd been in the galley making dinner and between the smog and the cooker fumes she was almost a goner.

 

I got her to safety in the hydroponics garden, and then I went back in to look for Dad. By then it was a living hell in there. Greasy black soot was building up on every surface, and twice I slipped on the deck plates and almost fell. I wiped my face shield and my suit's arm came away black, not that I could see it.

 

I grabbed a work light and felt my way forward as best I could, tripping on dead rats and slip-sliding every which way. Eventually it got a little brighter and a lot hotter, and that's when I found the boiler.

 

And there, would you believe it, is Dad, breathing through a hankie, still tinkering with the valves and collecting the sulfur. He looked at me and said, "What've you got that thing on for?"

 

I explained best I could and tried to give him the oxygen mask. He just blinked and stared like I was speaking a different language. Eventually, I got through to him.

 

He muttered, "I suppose it is a little thick, now you mention it," and put the mask on.

 

We got the first boiler shut down and left the other three to scrubbing, since I figured the condensers could about handle that much steam. Then I towed Dad out to safety, stopping along the way to point out some sights he might otherwise miss, like the dead rats and the greasy stains everywhere.

 

I got him into the garden where the air was clear. He sat down and demanded my daysuit. "I know what I did wrong," he said.

 

Turns out he'd never realized why burning coal inside a station would be a bad thing. We'd brought in a volatile-rich C-type the other day that was almost identical in composition to anthracite without the lignin, and he'd been puzzling over what to do with it ever since. Dad being Dad, he figured he'd solve two problems at once, so his big boiler, instead of being solar powered like everything else, ran on coal.

 

You know the scary part? He actually found a market for all that greasy black slime. I'll tell you about it after I get a refill. Whose round is it?