He groaned. She had to admit it, she was enjoying this. Was it any less than this man deserved?

“Let me try this again. I have some information that, if I pass it on to you, could save your friends down in Hollywood from terrible harm. I can only give you this information on the condition that you take great pains to keep me from being identified as the source.”

They’d come to the Magic Kingdom now. Behind them, the main gates loomed, and a pufferbelly choo-choo train blew its whistle as it pulled out of the station. Happy, exhausted children ran across the plaza, heading for the ferry docks and the monorail ramps. The stones beneath her feet glittered with rainbow light, and tropical birds called to each other from the Pirates of the Caribbean Adventure Island in the middle of the lake.

“Hum,” she said. The families laughed and jostled each other. “Hum. OK, one time only. This one is off the record.”

Sammy looked around nervously. “Keep walking,” he said. “Let’s get past here and back into the private spots.”

But it’s the crowds that put me in a generous mood. She didn’t say it. She’d give him this one. What harm could it do? If it was something she had to publish, she could get it from another source.

“They’re going to sue your friends.”

“So what else is new?”

“No, personally. They’re going to the mattresses. Every trumped up charge they can think of. But the point here isn’t to get the cops to raid them, it’s to serve discovery on every single communication, every document, every file. Open up everything. Root through every email until they find something to hang them with.”

“You say ’they’—aren’t you ’they’?”

It was too dark to see his face now, but she could tell the question made him uncomfortable.

“No. Not anymore.” He swallowed and looked out at the lake. “Look, I’m doing something now—something… amazing. The DiaB, it’s breaking new ground. We’re putting three-dee printers into every house in America. What your friend Lester is doing, it’s actually helping us. We’re inventing a whole new—”

“Business?”

“No, not just a business. A world. It’s what the New Work was missing—a three-dee printer in every living room. A killer app. There were personal computers and geeks for years before the spreadsheet came along. Then there was a reason to put one in every house. Then we got the Internet, the whole software industry. A new world. That’s where we’re headed. It’s all I want to do. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life suing people. I want to do stuff.”

He kicked at the rushes that grew beside the trail. “I want to be remembered for that. I want that to be my place in the history books—not a bunch of lawsuits.”

Suzanne walked along beside him in silence for a time. “OK, so what do you want me to do about it?”

“I thought that if—” He shut up. “Look, I tried this once before. I told that Freddy bastard everything in the hopes that he’d come onto my side and help me out. He screwed me. I’m not saying you’re Freddy, but—”

Suzanne stopped walking. “What do you want from me, sir? You have hardly been a friend to me and mine. It’s true that you’ve made something very fine, but it’s also true that you helped sabotage something every bit as fine. You’re painting yourself as the victim of some mysterious ‘them.’ But as near as I can work out, the only difference between you and ’them’ is that you’re having a little disagreement with them. I don’t like to be used as part of your corporate head-games and power-struggles.”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. I deserve that. I deserve no better. Fine. Well, I tried.”

Suzanne refused to soften. Grown men sulking did not inspire any sympathy in her. Whatever he wanted to tell her, it wasn’t worth going into his debt.

He gave a shuddering sigh. “Well, I’ve taken you away from your evening of fun. Can I make it up to you? Would you like to come with me on some of my favorite rides?”

This surprised her a little, but when she thought about it, she couldn’t see why not. “Sure,” she said.

Taking a guest around Disney World was like programming a playlist for a date or a car-trip. Sammy had done it three or four times for people he was trying to win over (mostly women he was trying to screw) and he refined his technique every time.

So he took her to the Carousel of Progress. It was the oldest untouched ride in the park, a replica of the one that Walt himself had built for GE at the 1964 World’s Fair. There had been attempts to update it over the years, but they’d all been ripped out and the show restored to its mid-sixties glory.

It was a revolving theater where robots danced and sang and talked through the American Century, from the last days of the coal stove up to the dawn of the space age. It had a goofy, catchy song, cornball jokes, and he relished playing guide and telling his charges about the time that the revolving theater had trapped a careless castmember in its carousel and crushed her to death. That juxtaposition of sunny, goofy American corporate optimism and the macabre realities of operating a park where a gang of half-literate minimum-wage workers spent their days shovelling the world’s rich children into modified threshing machines—it was delicious.

Suzanne’s body language told him the whole story from the second she sat down, arms folded, a barely contained smirk on her lips. The lights played over the GE logo, which had acquired an even more anachronistic luster since the last time he’d been. Now that GE had been de-listed from the NYSE, it was only a matter of time before they yanked the sponsorship, but for now, it made the ride seem like it was part time-machine. Transported back to the corporate Pleistocene, when giant dinocorps thundered over the plains.

The theater rotated to the first batch of singing, wise-cracking robots. Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head bemusedly. Out came the second batch, the third—now they were in the fabulous forties and the Andrews Sisters played while grandma and grandpa robot watched a bulging fish-eye TV and sister got vibrated by an electric slimming belt. The jokes got worse, the catchy jingle—“There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every daaaaay!”—got repeated with more vigor.

“It’s like an American robot performance of Triumph of the Will” she whispered to him, and he cracked up. They were the only two in the theater. It was never full, and he himself had taken part in spitball exercises brainstorming replacements, but institutionally, Disney Parks couldn’t bring itself to shut it down. There was always some excuse—rabid fans, historical interest, competing priorities—but it came down to the fact that no one wanted to bring the axe down on the robot family.

The final segment now, the whole family enjoying a futuristic Christmas with a high-tech kitchen whose voice-activated stove went haywire. All the robots were on stage for the segment, and they exhorted the audience to sing and clap along. Sammy gave in and clapped, and a second later, Suzanne did, too, laughing at the silliness of it all. When the house lights came up and the bored—but unsquashed—castmember spieled them out of the ride, Sammy had a bounce in his step and the song in his head.

“That was terrible!” Suzanne said.

“Isn’t it great?”

“God, I’ll never get that song out of my head.” They moved through the flashing lights of Tomorrowland.

“Look at that—no line on Space Mountain,” Sammy said, pointing.

So they rode Space Mountain—twice. Then they caught the fireworks. Then Sammy took her over to Tom Sawyer Island on a maintenance boat and they sat up in the tree house and watched as the park heaved and thronged, danced and ran, laughed and chattered.

“Hear the rustling?”

“Yeah, what is that, rabbits or something?”