And still it felt pretty good to be walking toward the door in Cowboy Bob's office.
"Wait a minute, Step," said Cowboy Bob.
Step turned around. The vice-president of finance was reaching into a drawer of his desk and pulling out another paper. "Since you didn't like that first one, try this one before you walk out on us and we have to sue you for breach."
Step came back and took the paper out of his hand. He read it without sitting down. To his disbelief, it was a version of the agreement that could only have been written for him- it excluded prior software, it excluded programming on computers for which Eight Bits Inc. was not publishing software, and the non-competition clause was for exactly one year.
"You already had this written," said Step.
"Yep," said Cowboy Bob.
"So why did you show me that other?"
"Because you might've signed it." Cowboy Bob grinned. "This is business, Step."
Step stood there looking at him, debating inside himself whether he wanted even to live on the same planet with this guy, let alone work with him.
"We've met every one of your objections, Step," Cowboy Bob prodded him.
"I'm just wondering whether there's another paper in that drawer."
"There is. It has our lawyer's phone number on it. How do I put this kindly, Step? Sign or be sued."
"Gee, Bob, is this the way you talk to all the boys?"
"Look at it this way, Step. You won't be working with me. The only thing you'll know about me is that I sign your paycheck, and after you get a few of those you'll like me just fine. You're pissed off now, but that'll pass, and in six months maybe we'll have a couple of beers together and laugh about how mad you were this first day."
"I don't drink," said Step.
"Yeah, I forgot, you're a Mormon," said Cowboy Bob. "Well, then, that's out. Because looking at you, I'd say you could never forgive me without a couple of beers in you."
He said it with such a twinkle in his eye that Step couldn't help but smile. So Cowboy Bob knew he was a son-of-a-bitch, and didn't particularly mind. Well, Bob, I know you're a son-of-a-bitch, and I guess I don't mind that much either.
Step laid the paper down on the desk, signed it, and walked out.
It was nearly noon, and even though he was probably sup posed to go find Dicky and ask where his office was, Step needed to stand outside this building for a minute and decide whether to scream or cry or laugh.
On the way to the staff meeting he had seen a back corridor that led to a door on the north side of the building-Dicky had told him in passing that everybody in the staff used that door, since that's where the parking lot was. That's where Step headed now.
The scenery wasn't all that pretty outside just a narrow parking lot, a high chain- link fence with barbed wire on the top, and then an overgrown pasture where the only things still grazing were old tires and a rusting refrigerator with the door off. Ray's Mercedes was in the only assigned parking place in the lot, directly across from the north door. Step felt a sudden urge to go pee on the tires like a dog, but he was satisfied just to imagine doing it.
I've been a free man for the past five years, he said to himself, not working for anybody. Living on student loans, I taught myself programming on the Atari just to get history out of my mind, and I ended up creating a program that gave some pleasure to a lot of people and it made me about a hundred thousand dollars in a year and a half. All that money is gone, I owe taxes on it that I can't pay, and I've just signed a contract to work for a company with byzantine internal politics, an owner on a power trip, a vice-president of finance who thinks that being in business means screwing anybody who'll let you screw him, and a supervisor who's so incompetent that they want me to clean up after him without letting him know I'm doing it. All for thirty thousand dollars a year. Twenty- five hundred a month. That's the price of my soul.
But it was no worse than what his dad had gone through, over the years. A sign company that went belly- up when Dad broke his back, and yet Dad refused to declare bankruptcy and paid it all off, slowly, over the space of ten years, during which time he went back to school, got his B.A., taught at San Jose State for a while, and ended up working at Lockheed designing training programs for missile operators. If Dad had ever had half as much money as I made last year, he would have made sure he was set up as a free man forever. He would have had money in the bank against a rainy day. I spent it like it was going to last forever, and now I'm right where my dad was, all those years at Lockheed, saying yessir to assholes and moonlighting weekends at a camera store in the Hillsdale Mall. Never heard him complain, except that he apologized to Mom when she had to go back to work as a secretary in the public schools.
That's why I signed that paper, Step realized. So I don't have to make that same apology to DeAnne.
And if I don't find a way to make some extra money in the next year or so, the IRS is going to put us in that situation anyhow.
The anxiety, the desperation, the memory of his father's defeats- it all surged through him and burned in his throat and he thought, If I let myself get emotional about all this, it'll show on my face when I go back inside.
He swallowed hard and breathed deeply, slowly, forcing himself to calm down.
Somebody opened the door behind him and came outside. Step didn't turn around at first, half afraid and half hoping that it was Cowboy Bob or even Ray Keene himself, worried about him, wanting to smooth things over with him.
It was just a kid, looked to be still in high school, who wandered a few yards away from him and lit up a cigarette. He took a deep drag, let the smoke out slow, and puffed it into rings.
"How long did it take you to learn how to do that?" asked Step.
The kid turned to face him. He had black-frame coke-bottle glasses so his eyes looked like they were swimming around in a specimen jar. "I been blowing rings since my mom taught me how when I was ten."
"Your mom taught you how to blow smoke rings? When you were ten?"
The kid laughed. "This is tobacco, country, Mr. Fletcher, and my people are all tobacco people. My mama used to blow smoke in my face when I was a baby, so I'd grow up knowing the difference between the cheap weed in Reynolds cigarettes and the good stuff in E&Es."
Step hoped that his shudder didn't show. When he and DeAnne were house-hunting, they had had to rule out the whole eastern edge of town, where the Eldredge & Emerson Tobacco Company kept the air filled with the pungence of tar and nicotine, like being trapped forever on an elevator with someone who put out his cigarette just before stepping on.
What business did Mormons have moving into tobacco country? Especially since DeAnne was so allergic to tobacco smoke that it made her throw up even when she wasn't pregnant. The idea of somebody blowing smoke in a baby's face made Step angry. There's things you just don't do to children, if you have any decency.
And teaching a ten- year-old to blow smoke rings ...
"I don't want to sound like some kind of dumb fan or nothing, Mr. Fletcher, but I thought Hacker Snack was the best game anybody ever did on the Atari."
"Thanks," said Step.
"Of course, your A.I. routines really sucked."
It hit Step like a blow, that forced change from shyly, genially accepting a compliment to suddenly having to take criticism.
"A.I.?" he asked.
"You know-artificial intelligence."
"I know what A.I. stands for," said Step. "I just don't recall ever trying to incorporate any of it into my game."
"I mean, you know, the way the bad guys home in on the player," he said. "The machine intelligence routines. Way too predictable. It stayed too easy to dodge them until you finally beat the player down with sheer speed. Like bludgeoning them to death."
"Hey, thanks," said Step.
"No, really I loved the game, I just wished you had kept the bad guys moving in a kind of semi-random way, so the player wouldn't catch on that they were homing in. So you couldn't quite be sure where they were going to go. Then the game would have stayed fun into much higher levels, and you would never have had to include that killer speed level where you can't outrun the bad guys."