So DeAnne placed her hand firmly on top of Dolores's, pinning her there, and moved her face in very close to Dolores's face. Then, in a quiet but extremely intense voice, DeAnne said, "My son Jeremy is a child of God like any other, and he will have to pass through the same trials and choices in this life as any other. If he gets to the celestial kingdom, it will be because he chose righteousness. Furthermore, Sister LeSueur, if you ever again speak to me or anyone else on this planet about any vision or inspiration you think you have had about my family I promise you that when we are both dead and you are standing before the judgment bar of God, I will leap to my feet and tell the Lord all about your horrible, selfish behavior this morning as you bullied the bishoprics into letting your husband read that wretched story for the fifteenth year in a row, and I assure you that if God is just, he will send you straight to hell."
Through about the last half of this, Sister LeSueur had been trying to withdraw her hand from DeAnne's arm, but since DeAnne had her pinned, Sister LeSueur could only turn her head away like a child refusing to listen to a stern parent. When DeAnne finally released her, Sister LeSueur staggered a couple of steps away and then turned back and spat out the words, "I forgive you, Sister Fletcher! And I will pray for you!" The words themselves were, by habit, a blessing; but her tone was so loud and nasty and hateful that everyone still remaining in the chapel turned and looked at her. DeAnne couldn't have composed a better picture if she had choreographed it: DeAnne herself, standing calmly with a rather surprised look on her face, and Dolores LeSueur, leaning toward her, her face a mask of fury, her mouth open with her lip in a sneering curl, her eyes glaring, and her face so red that it actually showed pink through her makeup.
The vignette remained only for a moment. Then DeAnne said, "Thank you, Sister LeSueur." Dolores recovered her composure and turned to float out of the building, but from the way people averted their gaze, DeAnne could see that if anyone in this group, at least, had any delusions about Sister LeSueur's sincerity and balanced temperament, those delusions were now destroyed. "I'll regard it as my Christmas present to the ward," DeAnne told Step later.
On Wednesday night, Step was pounding away at the vanity-board subroutine in Hacker Snack, which was causing the program to hang about a quarter of the time for no discernible reason. He was aware, in the back of his mind, that DeAnne was getting the kids to bed and having a little trouble doing it, partly because tomorrow was not a school day and Stevie and Robbie didn't seem to think that they should have any bedtime at all.
Finally, Step heard DeAnne telling Stevie, "I've asked you three times to turn off the computer and go to bed, Stevie, and you always say yes and then I come back a half- hour later and you haven't budged. Now just because there's no school tomorrow doesn't mean that our one-hour rule about computer games is over."
The tone of her voice was really agitated, and Step was already upset at the program because he couldn't seem to find an error anywhere, so he got up from his desk and rushed out into the hall to use the full power of the wrathful male voice to get some obedience. He and DeAnne had long since learned that while the children tuned out her voice quite easily, Step seemed to get the same results one would expect from the voice of God.
He strode into the family room, stood behind Stevie's chair, and said, "Your mother shouldn't have to ask you three times to do anything, Stevie."
While he said this, though, Step could see that there was a new game on the screen, one he couldn't remember seeing before. A train was speeding along a track, with the scenery passing behind it very rapidly.
The animation was every bit as fast, the graphics just as realistic as in the impossible pirate game, and, just as in the pirate game, there were characters swarming over the train. Now he remembered that between DeAnne's bedtime calls, he had heard Stevie calling out the names of his friends and saying things like, "You can do it.
You've got to do it!" But the game itself didn't really look all that fun-the kids were just running along the top, jumping from car to car, with no enemies or obstacles or anything. Just each other. Beautiful graphics, but pointless.
Stevie was reaching his hand behind the machine to turn it off.
"Stop!" cried Step. "Don't move your hand. Don't turn off the machine. Just stand up, right now, and go to your bedroom. I'll shut everything down in here."
Stevie held his pose there for a moment. Step could see that he was deciding whether to obey or not. Step could have reached down and physically coerced him, but he did not. It had to be Stevie's choice, and after that moment of hesitation, Stevie left the room, leaving the computer on.
"I wish I could just borrow your voice at bedtime," said DeAnne. "I yell at them and bellow at them till I feel like some kind of fishwife, and you come in and say three sentences and they go."
Step was barely listening as he slid into Stevie's chair, trying to resume the play of the game. But somehow the people had all disappeared from the screen. There was just a train speeding along the track. As Step moved the joystick to see what would happen, the background stopped, too, so there was just a train and nothing else.
And then the track disappeared, and the wheels stopped turning.
Then the screen turned blue. Blank.
"Step, why did you make him leave it on if you were just going to turn it off."
Step reached for the keyboard, typed "list." He pressed the return key, hoping that some part of this program's extraordinary code might remain in memory for him to examine. But nothing happened. Not even an error message. The cursor just went to the left margin of the next line. Step typed some more, hit the return key a lot of times. The screen started scrolling, but that was all. "There's no program," said Step.
"What do you mean?"
"The Atari's in memo-pad mode. It's dead."
"Well, you're typing."
"That's all it'll do. You can't run a program from memo-pad mode."
"Can't you boot it up again?" asked DeAnne.
Step popped open the disk drive. No disk. He popped open the cartridge bay. No cartridges. "There never was a program here."
"What are you talking about?" said DeAnne. "There are disks all over around here."
"Have you ever seen that train game before?"
"No," said DeAnne.
"Well, I haven't bought any games since Stevie's birthday. And we sure never saw that train game at Eight Bits Inc. before I left. I've been all through these disks looking for the pirate ship game, and I sure didn't see any train-game disks."
"Stevie's eight years old, Step. He didn't program it himself."
"DeAnne, nobody programmed it. Don't you understand? There was no program in this machine."
DeAnne stood there, staring at the blue screen. "I wish you hadn't turned it off," she said. "I wish I could have looked at them longer."
"Who?" asked Step.
"The boys. The lost boys. His friends."
They both looked at the screen for a while longer, and then Step sighed and stood up. "I don't know," he said.
"Don't know what?"
"What to do. What to think. Anything."
On Thursday, Zap got sick. It was the first time he had ever been ill, apart from his neural condition, and DeAnne and Step weren't quite sure how to handle it. For one thing, even at almost five months of age, Zap still couldn't consistently turn his head at will. If he was lying on his back when he threw up, there was a risk that he wouldn't be able to turn his head to empty his mouth, and he'd choke on it, drown in it. But if he was lying on his stomach, then his face would be in it and it would get in his nose and eyes and he still might end up breathing it in. He wasn't crying, though, and he didn't seem to have much fever, if any. DeAnne called the doctor anyway, and he told her over the phone to do exactly what she was already doing. So she just kept holding him and rocking him, waiting for him to throw up again, or not to throw up for long enough that she could feel safe in laying him back in bed. "No formula for a while," she told Step. "But maybe he can keep down my milk."