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would be. Utiliduck.
Casually Remo sauntered over to a great plastic hippopotamus with a yawning
mouth. A sign hung on the hippo's lower tusks. It said Trash.
As people passed by, they tossed their empty soda cans and candy wrappers into
the hippo's mouth. When the hippo's belly got full, it shut its mouth and,
with a whoosh, emptied its trashy guts into a pipe that led from its fat gray
rump to somewhere underground.
Remo watched the hippo's mouth reopen. So did a greeter dressed as Mongo
Mouse. He was pretending to ignore the curious questions of a little
ponytailed girl while trying to act nonchalant.
Instead, he looked like a human radar dish with those ridiculous ears zeroing
in on Remo Williams.
Remo ignored him and waited for the mechanical pink mouth to yawn its fullest.
When the little girl with the ponytail tugging on his spun-glass tail
succeeded in distracting Mongo for a moment, Remo dived into the hippo's
mouth.
The hippo, stomach counterweights responding to Remo's lean one hundred
fifty-five pounds, promptly shut its happy jaws.
Mongo Mouse looked up and muttered, "Shit."
"Don't say bad words, Mongo," the little girl cautioned. "Uncle Sam might be
listening."
"Get lost," Mongo Mouse growled, striding toward the hippo and whispering into
his snout mike, "I lost him. Anybody see where he went?"
"Not me," reported Screwball Squirrel.
"Not me," said Gumpy Dog.
Remo heard all this through the hippo's gray polystyrene shell. Then the
pneumatic pipe at his feet irised open, and with a whoosh he was sucked down.
The pipe was narrow, its sides slick Teflon. Remo just went with the flow,
legs straight, arms flat to his sides as he was drawn into the massive
trash-moving ductwork of Utiliduck, the underground complex that housed the
dark underbelly of Sam Beasley World, the place where the refuse was
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processed, power and electronics were generated, and the other systems needed
to keep the park operating year-round were hidden.
Remo just hoped that he hadn't picked a tube that fed directly into an
incinerator.
IF IT WASN'T for that damn figure skater with the big teeth, Godfrey Grant
would not have been consigned to the bowels of Utiliduck. That much he knew.
Oh, how the world had come to love her clean, graceful body as it flashed and
swirled over Olympic ice. Her face graced endless magazine covers and cereal
boxes and billboards.
And Godfrey Grant had come to hate her guts. And her damn jumbo teeth.
Grant's downfall had begun when the figure skater had been whacked in the knee
by dimwits in the pay of a rival figure skater. Overnight she had became an
object of sympathy the world over. America clung to her sobbing, piteous,
plaintive "Why me's?" until miraculously she had recovered enough to challenge
her rival at Lillehammer.
Godfrey Grant had cheered her on even when she won only the silver. At least
she had left her rival in the dust. Or the ice. Or whatever.
When the greeter-overseer had come to Grant the next day and informed him that
he would sit beside her in the post-Olympics parade through Sam Beasley World,
Grant was ecstatic. The fact that he would be encased in a polyurethane
Monongahela Mouse greeter's outfit didn't matter at the time. He was going to
share the spotlight for all the world to see. If only his girl and his
immediate family knew it was him wearing the lollipop ears, that was okay. It
was enough.
Came the glorious day, and the figure skater climbed into the pink-and-purple
Mousemobile for a turn around the Enchanted Village.
The cameras were rolling. They were waving to the cheering crowd. That part
was fine.
But some idiot in publicity had miked the Mousemobile and caught the damn
figure skater, a two-million-dollar Sam Beasley check stuffed down her flat
ice-princess chest, complaining to beat the band.
"This is cornball city," she had muttered for all the world to hear. "I can't
believe I'm sitting next to a giant mouse and people are taking it seriously.
Puhleeze!"
Under his mouse head, Godfrey Grant had gone white. He knew how image
sensitive the Mouseschwitz High Command was. So he gave the figure skater a
gentle nudge in the ribs.
A harmless nudge. That's all it was supposed to be. A nudge and a whispered
suggestion to cool it while you're a guest of Sam Beasley World.
Trouble was, the Mongo Mouse head didn't afford much peripheral vision. Grant
couldn't see as clearly as he should. And the gentle nudge in the ribs became
a hard elbow to the temple.
With a yelp the figure skater dropped right off the back of the Mousemobile,
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