The face was turned almost away, but the flat cheek and a suggestion of a mustache were visible. It was frosty white. Bob Beasley's mustache was dark brown. It was said he dyed it to seem youthful.
He was talking low and vehemently into his mike, and the words he spoke were repeated by Mickey Weisinger, several miles away.
Then a cold gray eye rolled in Moise's direction, and a frosty voice said, "What the fuck are you looking at, Moose? Get back to work!"
Marc Moise shifted in his seat, trying to keep the contents of his bladder from escaping his body.
The man behind him was not Bob Beasley. That man in the field was. And the voice that had called him by the hated nickname, Moose, made the short hairs at the back of his neck bunch up and squirm.
He knew that voice. It was imprinted on his brain, a part of his earliest childhood experiences. It was the voice that had cheered him up on Sunday nights before a flickering TV screen and assured him that even though school started the next day, all was right with the world.
It was the long-dead yet immortal voice of Uncle Sam Beasley!
Chapter 15
Bilious black smoke was still rising above the Norman ramparts of the Sorcerer's Chateau of Euro Beasley when the first five-seat Gazelle utility helicopters swarmed over the theme park. They did not land. They merely dropped like clatter-winged dragonflies and moved through the park's airspace, cockpits sealed, pilots heavily goggled and gasmasked as their beating rotors whipped up and dispelled the combination of black camouflage smoke and pepper gas that lay like a pall over the so-called Enchanted Village.
When the helicopters had beat the pungent exhalation into harmless dissipating rags, the SuperPumas came floating in.
They did not land, either. Instead, red-bereted French Foreign Legion paratroopers rappeled down in full combat gear.
When their black boots touched ground, they deployed through the deserted Main Street, U.S.A., encountering no resistance.
Before a grid of video monitors Chief Concepteer Rod Cheatwood groaned and said, "We're screwed. They're onto us."
And he reached for the button marked Supergreen.
YEARS from 1995 learned historians would convene at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, to settle the question of the root cause of the Great Franco-American Conflict.
They would argue and hold rancorous panels for five solid days and still reach no consensus, although there would be a memorable fistfight in the apple orchard adjoining the John Hay Library where one professor would repeatedly crack the forehead of a colleague against the ancient monument dedicated to the illustrious H. P. Lovecraft until he had won his particular point.
One side said it had all started with a mouse. A reasonable argument, since the Sam Beasley Company lay at the heart of the conflict and it had started with Mongo Mouse.
Another school of thought held that twentiethcentury French cultural chauvenism exacerbated a minor dispute until it erupted into a full-scale international imbroglio.
And a third said US. cultural imperialism naturally created the friction. America was as unpopular then as now, the visiting professor from Harvard pointed out.
None of them got it right. It did not start with Sam Beasley's famous mouse, any more than it did with U.S. cultural imperialism or French snobbery.
It started with Rod Cheatwood of Vanaheim, California.
More specifically it started the sunny spring day Rod Cheatwood misplaced his TV remote control for the forty-eighth time.
Rod was a concepteer at Beasleyland in Vanaheim, California. By that it was meant that he was a technician.
Although he worked out of Beasleyland, he was no maintainer of attractions. No designer of rides. Instead, Rod was strictly research and development.
Five years out of Cal Tech, Rod was a specialist in lasers. The downsizing of the defense industry put him on the street. He answered a blind ad and was surprised to see a happy cartoon mouse grinning back from the door when he showed up for the interview.
"Why do you need a laser technician for a theme park?" Rod asked the interviewer, a suit with a blank face. "You can order all the light-show lasers you could ever want."
"We want our own lasers."
"I'm strictly into lasers as a military application."
"You could do that here," the interviewer said, his glassy smile matching his glassy eyes. Did they all become so fatuous working here? Rod wonder.
"I could perfect military lasers working for Sam Beasley?"
"In a manner of speaking. We have a problem at our French base."
"Base?"
"Euro Beasley."
"Never thought of it as a base."
"The French hate us. Won't stand in line in the cold weather. Won't buy our souvenirs. They take day trips so our hotels are practically empty. We've lost billions."
"So close the park."
"You don't understand. We have a great track record in France. Our magazine, Journal de Mongo, has been a bestseller since 1934. The French love us. They just haven't warmed up to the park yet."
"Lower your prices."
"We've tried everything," the interviewer went on as if Rod's suggestion was out of the question. "Aroma therapy. Coupons. Nondiscount inducements. We even broke a long-standing rule and allowed beer and wine to be served in our park restaurants. Nothing seems to staunch the hemorrhaging."
"A laser light show won't do it, either."
"We'll give you a lab to work in, a full staff and anything you could want."
Rod stood up. "Sorry. If I'd known this was you Beasley boys, I'd never have come in for the interview. I hear you treat your employees like dirt."
"If you change your mind, give us a call, won't you?" the inteviewer said without taking offense or losing his fixed smile.
Rod Cheatwood did come around in time. There were no defense jobs in California, true. And he was loath to move out of state, also true.
But the real reason-entirely lost to posterity-that Rod came back to the Beasley Corporation was that he lost his TV remote and it was the forty-eighth time by actual count. It was also the last straw.
The UHF band of the TV dial could not be accessed without the remote clicker, and while Rod flung sofa cushions about with wild abandon and raged at the cruel and unjust gods who had turned their faces from his simple wants and desires, he missed the twopart final episode of "Star Trek: the Next Generation."
The next morning Rod was back in the Beasley employment office.
"I'd take the job on one condition," he said.
"We don't do conditions here at Beasley, but I'm willing to listen."