Buffeted by the worst recession and coldest European winters in living memory, Euro Beasley underperformed with crushing losses, and Mickey Weisinger watched his stock-both personal and professional-plummet.
"We're pulling out of Euro Beasley," he told the board of directors one chilly morning at the corporate headquarters in Vanaheim, California, pounding the conference-room table emphatically.
"We can't! We own nearly fifty percent."
"Not if we default. Then the banks and the French government will be left holding the bag."
"We can't do that. It'll make the Beasley name mud."
"I don't care about the Beasley name. I care about my name! " roared Mickey Weisinger, who, like so many CEOs in the late twentieth century, cared more about his resume than the stockholders or the business he was charged to captain.
"If we pull out of France, we might as well surrender Europe to rival theme parks," complained Chairman Bob Beasley, the nephew of Sam and the only Beasley family member left on the board. "Already the Lego people have an outpost in Switzerland. And Banana-Berry Studios are looking at Berlin."
"I don't care. Let Lego have Europe. We'll concentrate on Asia and South America. We're too exposed in Europe."
"That wouldn't have happened if we'd have licensed the damn thing," a voice grumbled.
"Who said that?"
No one raised his hand.
"That sounded like a vice president's voice," Mickey Weisinger said suspiciously, patrolling the room. "Which vice president?"
No one volunteered.
So Mickey Weisinger fired all the VPs on the spot.
At the next meeting a flock of newly installed VPs voted to a man to pull out of France.
Until Bob Beasley quietly objected.
Mickey Weisinger hesitated. No one bucked Bob Beasley. He was considered all but the proxy of the dear departed spirit of Uncle Sam Beasley.
"I think we should lay this before a higher authority," he drawled, scratching at the trademark family mustache.
"Uncle Sam?"
"Uncle Sam."
Weisinger sighed. "What'll it be this time? Tarot? Ouija board? I Ching? Or do you want me to dim the lights while you try to channel him?"
It was New Age bullcrap, Mickey Weisinger privately thought, but this was southern California, where people took their poodles to shrinks at five hundred bucks an hour and arranged their furniture according to two-thousand-year-old Chinese superstition.
"I think we should pay Utiliduck a little visit," Bob suggested. "We have that new command-and-control wing down there. You know, the one we built in the event of thermonuclear exchange."
Mickey scowled. "The cold war's over. The wall fell. Hell, Moscow has been faxing us feelers on a Russo Beasley project, but we'll never bite. If French winters are this rough these days, Russia's bound to be an iceberg."
"Take a walk with me, Mickey," said Bob Beasley in his folksy voice, clapping an arm over Mickey Weisinger's broad shoulders and steering him out of the conference room.
They took the monorail over Beasleyland, walked through the park, and for a moment Mickey Weisinger's sour mood lightened. Even he was not immune to the spell of Beasleyland under a glorious California sun. Everyone seemed to be having a great time. Except the park employees-the only slice of the American public the Sam Beasley Corporation treated with naked disdain.
Mickey's good mood lasted until Screwball Squirrel minced up, bushy tail quivering, and stuck the cold steel muzzle of a MAC-11 into his back.
"What the hell is this?" Mickey growled.
"Just come along quietly, Mickey," said Bob Beasley in a new tone. One completely without respect.
"What is this, a furschlugginer coup?"
"Not exactly," said Beasley as Mickey was escorted to a turn-of-the-century apothecary shop on Main Street, U S.A., and into an open elevator.
Down in Utiliduck, where the trash was processed and the rides and attractions were controlled by massive mainframes, Mickey Weisinger walked along stainless-steel corridors to the hardened wing of Utiliduck.
A door emblazoned with the three overlapping black circles representing the silhouette of Mongo Mouse's round-eared head lifted like a dull guillotine, and he was pushed through.
A pleasant plastic sign featuring Mongo wearing a policeman's uniform and lifting a white-gloved hand traffic-cop style greeted them. The sign said Unauthorized Persons Not Allowed Beyond This Point. Intruders Will Be Shot.
"Isn't that a little extreme?" said Mickey Weisinger.
"Not down here," said Bob Beasley. "You've never been to this wing, have you?"
"No," said Mickey in a very small voice because he felt like a Brooklyn hood being taken for a ride in the trunk of a Buick.
The room Mickey Weisinger was taken to was as warm as a steam bath. He started sweating immediately. It was a control room, he saw. Grid after grid of wall video monitors showed every cranny of Beasleyland above, including, he saw with shock, his private office.
At the far end a man sat at a chair, punching buttons.
"Uncle, he's here."
"Give me a fucking minute," a grumpy voice said.
Then the chair turned, and Mickey Weisinger found himself staring at the man whose place in the Beasley corporate structure he had usurped.
"Uncle Sam?" he blurted.
"You were expecting Tinker-fucking-belle?"
It was Uncle Sam Beasley, all right. Not much older than on the day he had been buried three decades ago. His mustache was whiter, almost like hairs of frost. One eye looked glassy. The other was protected by a white eyepatch emblazoned with the corporate logo-Mongo Mouse's black silhouette. And where his right hand should be was a gauntlet of articulated steel.
"Wait a minute, you're radio-animatronic," Mickey blurted.
"That's right," said Uncle Sam Beasley.
Mickey breathed a hot sigh of relief. "Whew. For a minute I thought you-you, you know-" Mickey swallowed "-were back."
"I am."
"This is a joke."
"No, you're the joke."
"Hey, I won't have a robot talk to me like that."
"I'm not a robot, you bagel-munching moron."
"You can't talk to me." Mickey turned to the others. "Who programmed this anti-Semitic hunk of junk?"
Then the hunk of junk lifted itself out of his chair and walked across the room.
Mickey Weisinger stared. He knew the science of radio-animatronics. The concepteers at the Sam Beasley R pioneered the science of freestanding radio-animatronic marionettes. They could move, after a fashion, simulate motion and voice and the semblance of life well enough to make Buccaneers of the Bahamas the most popular attraction in any and all theme parks the world over.
But one thing they had never learned to do was walk.
Mickey Weisinger felt a chill climb his spine under his three-thousand-dollar raw silk Versace suit as the thing that should not walk came striding toward him.
"Somebody turn this thing off," Weisinger commanded.
"You can't," said Bob Beasley in an affable voice.
"Then shoot it."
"I couldn't do that," Beasley said. "Not to my Uncle Sam."
And before he could react, the thing that looked shudderingly like Uncle Sam Beasley reincarnate took Mickey's soft, fleshy hand in his steel grip and pumped it with hydraulic force.
Through his own screaming, Mickey Weisinger heard the famous voice of Uncle Sam Beasley croak, "Aren't you going to welcome me back into the fold, Mickey my boy?"
"Yahhh!" said Mickey Weisinger as the room turned a dull optic red before irising down into a smoldering blackness.
WHEN HE AWOKE, Mickey Weisinger lay on his back, blinking up at the hideous face of Uncle Sam Beasley.
"They tell me you're the fuck wit who's been running things in my absence."