"Why is it a joke when 1 don't think it's funny," said Robbie,
"But when I tell a joke and you don't think it's funny, then you say, 'That's not a joke'?"
"Because I'm the official funny-decider of America," said Step. "Back in 1980 when they elected Ronald Reagan to be president, I got elected to be the national funny-decider, and so if I say it's a joke it's a joke, and if I say it isn't it isn't. Next year they'll elect somebody else, though, because I'm not running again."
"Is that true, Mommy?" asked Robbie.
"What do you think?" asked DeAnne, her eyes wide in a mockery of innocence.
"I bet this is a joke, too," said Robbie.
"You are right indeed, my brilliant boy," said Step.
"If Mommy's laughing does that mean you aren't going to yell at each other anymore?" asked Robbie.
At the word yell, Betsy opened her mouth and let out a fullthroated holler.
"Betsy, don't do that!" said DeAnne. "They can hear you on the street. People will think we're child-abusers."
"We weren't yelling at each other," said Step.
"Yes you were," said Robbie.
"We were arguing because we didn't agree about something," said Step. "That happens sometimes. And maybe we got too loud because we both care very much about the thing we were discussing."
"What were you discussing?"
Thank heaven he didn't understand the actual words we said, thought Step. "We were talking about stuff that only grownups talk about."
Robbie chanted derisively: "Grown. Up. Grown, up."
"Yeah, well, someday you'll be a grownup and then you won't think it's so cute. Now play with your sister."
That's where they left the question of taking Stevie to a psychiatrist-nowhere. It was the first clause in article one of the unspoken constitution of their marriage: If they disagreed about something it was a tie vote, and no one had the power to break a tie, but they both had to promise to think about the other person's side. So Step was thinking about DeAnne's point of view, and DeAnne was thinking about Step's, but this time Step knew that he would never, never agree with her, and he knew that she would never see things his way, either.
Except that in the back of his mind, he knew that he would see things her way. That somewhere in the future he would realize that they really were out of their depth in dealing with Stevie's problem, that Stevie wouldn't just give up on these imaginary friends, and Step would end up walking through the door of a psychiatrist's office one day, taking his own son to the witch doctor to get an incantation that would make the evil spirits go away. It made him angry to think about that, though, and so he put it to the back of his mind and hoped desperately that the whole issue would just stay there, would just go away along with Stevie's imaginary friends.
The memo finally came down from Ray Keene that it was time for all the creative staff to evaluate the IBM
PC and come up with a recommendation. This is it, thought Step. This is what will decide whether I can sign the contract with Agamemnon, the big one that will let me quit this job and never see Dicky Northanger or Ray Keene again. As long as Eight Bits Inc. decides not to support the IBM machine.
And there were plenty of reasons not to support it. The biggest reason was that it was a crippled machine from the start. The operating system was a kludged-together imitation of CP/M; color graphics was only an option, and even if you paid some obscene amount extra to get it, all you got was four colors on the screen at a time, and it was no compensatio n that you could switch between a set of cool colors and a set of warm colors.
The only sound came from a repulsive little onboard speaker that made you want to answer the door whenever it buzzed. It was like somebody had examined the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and said, "How can we strip these machines down so there is nothing left that would be remotely interesting to any human being?"
And that's what the other programmers were all saying. It would be easy enough for Step just to let their words go unchallenged. Dicky would take his negative report to Ray, the machine would be dropped, and Step would walk away clean.
Only he would not be clean. Because he knew that a failure to support the IBM PC would be the death knell, in the long run, for Eight Bits Inc. If he didn't speak the truth as he saw it during this time when Eight Bits Inc. was paying for his expertise, then he was a cheat and a liar, even if no one ever knew it, and Step couldn't live with that.
So he spoke up. "OK, it's crippled," said Step. "But it has one feature that no other microcomputer made today has."
"What's that?" asked Glass. His voice was full of challenge, since he was the most vociferous opponent of the PC.
Step pointed to the letters IBM on the case.
"What is that!" demanded Glass. "That's nothing!"
"That's everything," said Step. "That's a vast national sales force, that's credibility, that's reputation, that's big corporations being willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars or half a million dollars putting these things on people's desks."
"We don't do business software," said Dicky quietly.
"Business software will be done by somebody," said Step. "Somebody will do a terrific word processor loaded with features because you can put 256K of RAM in this thing, 512K, you can have a word processor that will stand up and dance if you want it to."
"Nobody will ever put 512K on this thing," said Glass. "You can't fill 512K with meaningful code!"
"Don't get mad at me, Glass," said Step. "I'm just telling you what I think. The machine's a piece of shit, but it's an IBM piece of shit, and where we're looking at maybe half a million 64's in use today, we'll see a million, two million, three million of these on people's desks."
"What does it matter what's on people's desks?" said Dicky contemptuously. "We don't do business software. We write programs for the home market."
"You think a businessman doesn't want to play a game now and then? You think a businessman doesn't want to have a real computer at home?"
"Not for this price," said Dicky. "Not when he can get a Commodore 64 with a printer and a monitor for half what he pays for this overpriced box alone."
It occurred to Step that by being honest he had accomplished what he really wanted. With Step firmly committed to voting for developing software for the IBM PC, Dicky would be even more firmly committed to killing any possibility of Eight Bits Inc. turning to the IBM. I couldn't have set it up better if I had planned it, he realized. So it was with a light heart that he said, "You're wrong, Dicky. We're going to see the IBM market take off until it's the only market."
"Except Apple," said Glass. "That piece-of-junk company just won't die no matter how useless its computers are."
"You're forgetting the Lisa," said Dicky. It was a joke, and so everybody laughed. The poor, pathetic Lisa, a vast overpriced machine whose only selling point was that it made pictures of your disk files instead of just giving them names-as if you needed a picture of a file folder to tell you that your file was a file! "Step probably thinks there'll be nothing around but the IBM and the Lisa."
"Make whatever recommendation you want," said Step. "I can't disagree with a single bad thing anybody's said about the IBM PC. Just tell Ray that I cast a dissenting vote, OK?"
"Oh, I'll be sure to tell him," said Dicky. "I'll tell him that you agree with our assessment as programmers, but that in your great wisdom and vast experience as a businessman you think we should support the IBM PC
based solely on business considerations. I'll go see Ray right now, I think."
Dicky left the room, almost swaggering.
Step could have shouted for joy.
"Man, you just been shat on," said one of the programmers.
"But it was only Dickyshit," said Glass, "so it smells like little roses."