George made the reservation. "You're all set," he said. "The monorails run right
into the hotel lobby, every ten minutes. Anyone with a name tag can show you to
the nearest stop. Here's a tip -- try the football panzerotto: it's a fried
pizza turnover as big as a football, with beef-jerky laces. It's _my_ favorite!"
"I want a football!" the youngest said.
"We'll have it for dinner," the eldest said, looking off at the skyline of
coaster-skeletons in the distance. "Let's go on some rides first."
George beamed his idiot's grin at them as they left, then his face went slack
and he went back to wiping down the surfaces. A moment later, a hand reached
across the counter and plucked the cloth from his grip. He looked up, startled,
into Joe's grinning face. Unlike his brothers', Joe's face was all sharp angles
and small teeth. Nobody knew what a child of a tongue was supposed to look like,
but George had always suspected that Joe wasn't right, even for a third son.
"Big guy!" Joe shouted. "Workin' hard?"
George said, "Yes." He stood, patiently, waiting for Joe to give him the cloth
back.
Joe held it over his head like a standard, dancing back out of reach, even
though George hadn't made a grab for it. George waited. Joe walked back to his
counter and gave it back.
"We're dozing the FreakZone," Joe said, in a conspiratorial whisper. He put a
spin on _We're_, making sure that George knew he was including himself with the
Island's management.
"Really," George said, neutrally.
"Yeah! We're gonna flatten that sucker, start fresh, and build us a new theme
land. I'm a Strategic Project Consultant! By the time it's over, I'll be an
Imagineer!"
George knew that the lands on Pleasure Island were flattened and rebuilt on a
regular basis, as management worked to stay ahead of the lightspeed
boredom-threshold of the mainland. Still, he said, "Well, Joe, that's marvelous.
I'm sure you'll do a fabulous job."
Joe sneered at him. "Oh, I know I will. We all do just _fabulous_ jobs, brother.
Just some of us _have_ fabulous jobs to do."
George refused to rise to the bait. He could always outwait Joe.
Joe said, "We're thinking of giving it a monster theme -- monsters are testing
very high with eleven-to-fourteens this year. Dragons, ogres, cyborgs, you know.
We may even do a walk-through -- there hasn't been one of those here since the
sixties!"