Out in the car, Robbie was busy trying to make Betsy's life miserable, which wasn't hard because she could be brought to furious tears with a funny look. Only when they were on 421 heading west to the airport did he remember. "I left Name of the Rose back in the office," he said.
"What's that?"
"A book. I was going to read it at nights during the convention. While the others are all out getting drunk at parties."
"Don't you have anything else to read?"
"I'll buy a magazine."
"No, we have time," said DeAnne. "Your luggage is all carryon, isn't it?"
It was. She pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot and then swung back out onto 421 heading east, and in a few minutes turned right on Palladium and there he was at Eight Bits Inc. at two o'clock on a day when he was supposed to catch a two-thirty flight. Oh, well, he thought, this is as close as a Mormon can get to living on the edge.
The Name of the Rose wasn't in his office. Where had he last been reading it?
He burst into the pit, practically flying, saying, "Hi, can you believe I'm so stupid I'm probably going to miss my flight for a book?" And there it was on the counter. He picked it up, turned to leave-and realized that they were all looking at him strange ly. "What, my pants aren't zipped?" he asked.
Then he noticed that three of the screens showed views that were obviously from Hacker Snack.
"Is that what I think it is?" he asked.
"It was sort of a secret project," said one of the guys. "Kind of a surprise."
"Yeah," said Step. "I'm surprised."
They said nothing, and Step said "Bye," and then he was out the door, down the corridor, out the front door to where DeAnne was waiting in the car.
"What took so long?" she said. "I don't know if we can make it in fifteen minutes."
"Speed," he said.
"That's your talent," she said.
"Guess what I'm going to do in San Francisco," said Step.
"What?"
"Quit this damn job."
"What?"
"And when I get home I'm going to find me a lawyer and I'm going to sue their asses off."
DeAnne looked horrified. "Step, I know the kids are going to learn language like that but I'd rather they didn't learn it from you."
"Aren't you the teensiest bit curious as to why I'm going to sue their elbows off?"
"Thank you. And yes, I'm more than a little curious, yes."
"Because those sons-of-bitches have been adapting Hacker Snack for the 64 behind my back."
She winced.
"Pardon me. Not sons-of-bitches, kids, bastards."
She looked angry. "Give it a rest, Step."
"They never asked permission, they never offered to buy it, there's no contract, no agreement to a royalty, and they never once breathed a single word, and I thought these guys were my friends."
"That's no reason to take it out on me and the kids, Step."
"I'm not taking it out on you!"
"You're yelling and you're using language that I don't want to have to explain to the children."
Step leaned over and looked at the kids in the back seat. "I'm not mad at you kids. Some people at work have been doing something really sneaky and bad to me and so I'm angry at them. And as for the words I used, those are words that you shouldn't ever use except when somebody you trusted has stabbed you in the back, and on those occasions you have my permission to use those words but not in front of your mother."
"Thanks so much," said DeAnne.
"Like I'm sure they'll remember this conversation ten years from now."
"Somebody stabbed you?"
"It's a figure of speech, Robbie," said DeAnne. "Nobody stabbed your father. Though I might, in another minute."
"I'm sorry," said Step. "I was out of line. But I'm so ..." He hunted for the word.
"Mad."
"Mad." It wasn't the word he had wanted, but then the word he wanted probably didn't exist.
"So you're going to quit."
"Absolutely. I'm going to sue them for so much money I end up owning the company and then I'll fire them."
"Just a suggestion, Step," she said.
"Yes."
"Don't quit in San Francisco. They might cancel your ticket and we don't have enough on the Visa to let you charge a return fare."
"Yes, well," he said. "I suppose I'll wait till I get home."
"And maybe it was all a misunderstanding, did you think of that? Maybe somebody didn't realize that you had signed an agreement that excluded Hacker Snack. Maybe Mr. Keene didn't know that they were working on this."
"Maybe pigs have wings."
"Flying pigs!" cried Robbie. Flying pigs were a standing joke in the family-DeAnne even had two ceramic flying pigs and one stuffed one, which she kept on a shelf beside the mirror in the bathroom. "Watch out below!" The idea of flying pigs defecating on pedestrians had been Step's contribution to the family's flying-pig lore, and of course that was the part that Robbie loved best.
"Step, don't do anything rash."
In other words, thought Step, even when they're stealing from me, I have to stay at this lousy job with these weasels.
"It's not as if it should surprise you," said DeAnne. "I mean, if they have you sneaking around behind Dicky's back, why shouldn't Dicky be sneaking around behind yours?"
"Well maybe I don't want to be where anybody sneaks around anybody's back at all."
"Exactly," said DeAnne. "You think I don't want you to quit? But think about it-the fact that they're trying to adapt Hacker Snack for the 64 means that it's probably a very good idea, commercially speaking. And there you'll be at the Computer Faire, with the heads of every major software company. Maybe it's time for you to sell the rights to Hacker Snack yourself."
"You know," said Step, "you really are good at this."
"Yes, I am," she said.
"What I want to know is, how did you learn corporate politics? When you were a secretary in the CDFR
Department at BYU?"
"Nope," she said. "Everything I know about conniving I learned as a counselor in the Relief Society presidency, as we figured out how to get the bishopric to let us do what we needed to do even when they thought we didn't need to do it."
"So the plan is, I make nice in San Francisco, and come home with a deal to sell the program myself."
"And then you get to work first thing Monday morning, before anybody has a chance to tell anybody that you know what they're up to, and you get a copy of that agreement you signed that excludes Hacker Snack from your deal with Eight Bits."
"Right. I'll need that. Because they could just lose it, couldn't they-and claim that I'd signed the same agreement as everybody else but they lost it but look, here's the standard agreement and there's never been another..."
"Here we are," said DeAnne. "Have a wonderful flight. Now go. You have four minutes to get to the plane and you still have to get through the security gate!"
"I love you! Love you kids! Tell Stevie he still has a father."
"Kiss!" cried Betsy.
"There's no time, honey," said DeAnne.
But Step flung open the back door, gave both of the kids big loud smacks, then closed the door and ran for the plane. They were just closing the door when he got there, but they let him on. Compressed into his seat with his knees around his chin, he allowed himself to daydream a little about what might happen in San Francisco.
All he needed to do was sell the rights to Hacker Snack to somebody who would pay him enough of an advance against earnings that he could afford to quit. He wasn't sure whether this was the kind of thing he ought to pray about, especially because his mood was so angry and vindictive, but he still had to say it, silently: God, make this go, please. Make this work. Set me free. Send me home.
Although Step had lived in the Bay area during much of his childhood, he had never been inside the Cow Palace before. Now, entering it for the first time, Step saw that it lived up to its name-a great barn of a building filled with rows of display booths like milking stalls. And every booth seemed to be making as much noise as possible. This was survival time, as well as strutting time-the computer business had been booming, but there were rumors that IBM's new PC was already threatening to take over the whole microcomputer market, driving developers of software and systems built to run with CP/M on the old Z80 chip to adapt or die, and everyone knew that IBM's half-secret Peanut project was going to blow out the home computers like the Commodore 64, just as surely as the 64 had swept away the Atari. So all that noise had a purpose-to grab reviewers and journalists and computer store buyers by the ears and drag them over to have a look at the new computer or the new joystick or the new game or the new word processor or the new computer dust cover that was going to revolutionize the world and make its developers as rich as Jobs and Wozniak. Or, failing that, at least as rich as Ray Keene.