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."
This began shortly after lunch, and continued through the afternoon. Step gave up on working, of course, and played with Robbie and Betsy between helping DeAnne and working on dinner and answering the phone and all the other things that kept coming up. Step couldn't understand how DeAnne could live with this, never able to concentrate on something, to follow through on it without interruption.
Stevie, of course, wasn't part of the little-kid games, but that was no surprise anymore. The surprise was when Step passed through the family room on the way to answer the doorbell and realized that Stevie wasn't playing computer games, either. Must still be in his room, wrapping presents, Step thought. He had borrowed the tape and scissors earlier in the day.
It was Bappy at the door. He had a kind of sheepish grin. "I don't mean to be a bother," he said, "but I'm just a sentimental old fool and I was driving by a couple nights ago and I saw y'all didn't have no Christmas lights up."
"We haven't had time," said Step.
"Well, time is all I got these days, and I still got the lights we put up on this house last year and the year before. I bet all the old nails and such are still right where I put 'em. Y'all won't mind if I haul my ladder out and tread your roof awhile? It doesn't add that much to the electric, specially seeing as how there's only a few days till Christmas."
"No, that's fine," said Step. "That'll be nice. Where will I plug them in?"
"There's an outlet out back, by the utility room door. I just run me a long extension cord up over the house.
Brought the same one I used last year, so I know it works."
"That's great. Thanks," said Step.
Bappy nodded and waved, even though he was standing right there by the door, and then he was off for his pickup truck and Step closed the front door.
Just as Step was heading for the kitchen to check the meatloaf he had made, Zap started throwing up again, proving that DeAnne's milk wasn't going to stay down any better than the formula had. And now Zap was getting fussy instead of just being complacent after he vomited. DeAnne checked his temperature again with the plastic forehead strip, and it was over a hundred. "I've got to take him to the doctor," she said. "If he was a normal kid I'd wait, but he's so weak." So once they got Zap cleaned up again, Step found the phone number and called Dr. Greenwald's office and the answering service relayed the message and a couple of minutes later he called back. DeAnne talked to him and then said, "He's going to go back to the office just to see Zap. Isn't that sweet of him?"
"What if he throws up while you're driving him there?" asked Step.
"I didn't think of that," said DeAnne.
"Do you think Mary Anne would come over and watch the kids while I drove you down?"
"She will if she can," said DeAnne.
She could, and since she didn't live far away, she would be there in only a few minutes.
Step remembered the meatloaf. "I can't believe the timer hasn't rung yet," he said.