Suzanne was impressed. This wasn't the same guy whom Rat-Toothed Freddy had savaged. It wasn't the same guy that Death Waits had described. He had come a long way. Even Guignol -- whom, she suspected, needed to be sold on the idea almost as much as Lester -- was nodding along by the end of it.

Lester wasn't though: "You're wasting your time, mister. That's all there is to it. I am not going to go and work for --" a giggle escaped his lips "-- Disney. It's just --"

Sammy held his hands up in partial surrender. "OK, OK. I won't push you today. Think about it. Talk it over with your buddy. I'm a patient guy." Guignol snorted. "I don't want to lean on you here."

They took their leave, though Suzanne found out later that they'd taken a spin around the ride before leaving. Everyone went on the ride.

Lester shook his head at the door behind them.

"Can you believe that?"

Suzanne smiled and squeezed his hand. "You're funny about this, you know that? Normally, when you encounter a new idea, you like to play with it, think it through, see what you can make of it. With this, you're not even willing to noodle with it."

"You can't seriously think that this is a good idea --"

"I don't know. It's not the dumbest idea I've ever heard. Become a millionaire, get to do whatever you want? It'll sure make an interesting story."

He goggled at her.

"Kidding," she said, thinking, *It would indeed make an interesting story, though.* "But where are you going from here? Are you going to stay here forever?"

"Perry would never go for it --" Lester said, then stopped.

"You and Perry, Lester, how long do you think that's going to last."

"Don't you go all Yoko on me, Suzanne. We've got one of those around here already --"

"I don't like this Yoko joke, Lester. I never did. Hilda doesn't want to drive Perry away from you. She wants to make the rides work. And it sounds like that's what Perry wants, too. What's wrong with them doing that? Especially if you can get them a ton of money to support it?"

Lester stared at her, open-mouthed. "Honey --"

"Think about it, Lester. Your most important virtue is your expansive imagination. Use it."

She watched this sink in. It did sink in. Lester listened to her, which surprised her every now and again. Most relationships seemed to be negotiations or possibly compet.i.tions. With Lester it was a conversation.

She gave him a hug that seemed to go on forever.

Sammy was glad he was driving. The mood Guignol was in, he'd have wrecked the car. "That was *not* the plan, Sammy," he said. "The plan was to get the data, talk it over --"

"The first casualty of any battle is the battle-plan," Sammy said, threading them through the press of tourist busses and commuter cars.

"I thought the first casualty was the truth."

They'd spent too long at the ride, then gotten stuck in the afternoon rush hour out of Miami. "That too. Look, I'm proposing to spend a tenth of the profits from the DiaB on this venture. In any other circ.u.mstance, I would do it with a *purchase order*. The only reason it's a big deal is --"

"That it carries enough legal liability to destroy the company. Sammy, didn't you listen to Hackelberg?"

"The reason I still work at Disney is that it's the kind of company where the lawyers don't *always* set the agenda."

Guignol drummed his hands on the dashboard. Sammy pulled over and ga.s.sed up. At the next pump was a minivan with Kansas plates. Dad was a dumpy Korean guy, Mom was a dumpy white midwesterner with a country-and-western denim jacket, and the back seat was filled with vibrating children, two girls and a boy. The kids were screaming and fighting, the girls trying to draw on the boy's face with candy-flavored lipstick and kiddie mascara, the boy squirming mightily and lashing out at them with his gameboy.

Dad and Mom were having their own heated discussion as Dad ga.s.sed up, Sammy eavesdropped enough to hear that they were fighting over Dad's choice of taking the toll roads instead of the cheaper, slower alternative route. The kids were shouting so loud, though --

"You keep that up and we're not going to Disney World!"

It was the magic sentence, the litmus test for Disney's currency. As it rose and fell, so did the efficacy of the threat. If Sammy could, he'd take a video of the result every time this was uttered.

The kids looked at Dad and shrugged. "Who cares?" the eldest sister said, and grabbed the boy again.

Sammy turned to Guignol and waggled his eyebrows. Once he was back in the car, he said, "You know, it's risky doing anything. But riskiest of all is doing nothing."

Guignol shook his head and pulled out his computer.

He spent a lot of time looking at the numbers while Sammy fought traffic. Finally he closed his computer, put his head back and shut his eyes. Sammy drove on.

"You think this'll work?" Guignol said.

"Which part?

"You think if you buy these guys out --"

"Oh, that part. Sure, yeah, slam dunk. They're cheap. Like I say, we could make back the whole nut just by settling the lawsuit. The hard part is going to be convincing them to sell."

"And Hackelberg."

"That's your job, not mine."

Guignol slid the seat back so it was flat as a bed. "Wake me when we hit Orlando."

It took IT three days to get Sammy his computer back. His secretary managed as best as she could, but he wasn't able to do much without it.

When he got it back at last, he eagerly downloaded his backlog of mail. It beggared the imagination. Even after auto-filtering it, there were hundreds of new messages, things he had to pay real attention to. When he was dealing with this stuff in little spurts every few minutes all day long, it didn't seem like much, but it sure piled up.

He enlisted his secretary to help him with sorting and responding. After an hour she forwarded one back to him with a bold red flag.

It was from Freddy. He got an instant headache, the feeling halfway between a migraine and the feeling after you bang your head against the corner of a table.

:: Sammy, I'm disappointed in you. I thought we were friends. Why do I have to learn about your bizarre plan to buy out Gibbons and Banks from strangers. I do hope you'll give me a comment on the story?

He'd left the financials with Guignol, who had been discreetly showing them around to the rest of the executive committee in closed door, off-site meetings. One of them must have blabbed, though -- or maybe it was a leak at Lester's end.

He tasted his lunch and bile as his stomach twisted. It wasn't fair. He had a real chance of making this happen -- and it would be a source of genuine good for all concerned.

He got halfway through calling Guignol's number, then put the phone down. He didn't know who to call. He'd put himself in an unwinnable position. As he contemplated the article that Freddy would probably write, he realized that he would almost certainly lose his job over this, too. Maybe end up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Man, that seemed to be his natural state at Disney. Maybe he was in the wrong job.