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 competitions. 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 circumstance, 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 gassed 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 gassed 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.

He groaned and thumped himself on the forehead. All he wanted to do was have good ideas and make them happen.

Basically, he wanted to be Lester.

Then he knew who he had to call.

“Ms Church?”

“We’re back to that, huh? That’s probably not a good sign.”

“Suzanne then.”

“Sammy, you sound like you’re about to pop a testicle. Spit it out.”

“Do you think I could get a job with Lester?”

“You’re not joking, are you?”

“Freddy found out about the buyout offer.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So I’m gonna be in search of employment. All I ever wanted to do was come up with cool ideas and execute them—”

“Shush now. Freddy found out about this, huh? Not surprising. He’s got a knack for it. It’s just about his only virtue.”

“Urgh.”

“However, it’s also his greatest failing. I’ve given this a lot of thought, since my last run in with Rat-Toothed Freddy.”

“You call him that to his face?”

“Not yet. But I look forward to it. Tell you what, give me an hour to talk to some people here, and I’ll get back to you.”

An hour? “An hour?”

“He’ll keep you squirming for at least that long. He loves to make people squirm. It’s good journalism—shakes loose some new developments.”

“An hour?”

“Have you got a choice?”

“An hour, then.”

Suzanne didn’t knock on Lester’s door. Lester would fall into place, once Perry was in.

She found him working the ride, Hilda back in the maintenance bay, tweaking some of the robots. His arm was out of the cast, but it was noticeably thinner than his good left arm, weak and pale and flabby.

“Hello, Suzanne.” He was formal, like he always was these days, and it saddened her, but she pressed on.

“Perry, we need to shut down for a while, it’s urgent.”

“Suzanne, this is a busy time, we just can’t shut down—”

She thumped her hand on his lemonade-stand counter. “Cut it out, Perry. I have never been an alarmist, you know that. I understand intimately what it means to shut this place down. Look, I know that things haven’t been so good between us, between any of us, for a long time. But I am your dear friend, and you are mine, no matter what’s going on at this second, and I’m telling you that you need to shut this down and we need to talk. Do it, Perry.”

He gave her a long, considering look.

“Please?”

He looked at the little queue of four or five people, pretending not to eavesdrop, waiting their turn.

“Sorry, folks, you heard the lady. Family emergency. Um, here—” He rummaged under the counter, came up with scraps of paper. “Mrs Torrence’s tearoom across the street—they make the best cappuccino in the hood, and the pastries are all baked fresh. On me, OK?”

“Come on,” Suzanne said. “Time’s short.”