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?