"Oh, that's a shame," said Step.
"What do you mean?" asked Dicky.
"I already sold it to another publisher."
Dicky sat there in stunned silence as the blood flowed into his face, turning it red. "You sold Hacker Snack to a competitor?"
"No one here made me an offer for it. It's not as if I was hard to find. So I figured you weren't interested."
"Don't give me that bullshit," said Dicky. "I know perfectly well that you've been aware of our interest in Hacker Snack for months."
"On the contrary," said Step. "I knew that Glass had disassembled my code and that the programmers had been goofing around with it, but since I had not sold the rights to anybody and no one at Eight Bits Inc. had ever so much as whispered the name of Hacker Snack to me, it never occurred to me that there was any official interest in it at all."
"Well, now I'm telling you tha t Ray has decided to publish Hacker Snack."
"And I'm telling you that I've signed a contract selling those rights to someone else."
"You had no right to sign such a contract," said Dicky. "Your employment agreement specifically gives the rights to any and all—"
"My employment agreement specifically excludes all games I published before coming to Eight Bits Inc., Dicky. Before you go quoting people's employment agreements, you ought to read them. They aren't all the same."
Dicky looked as though his face was going to explode. "You ungrateful little shit."
"Grateful for what?" asked Step. "I've worked here for more than four months, and not once did anyone make any kind of offer about Hacker Snack. You even forbade me to do any programming, remember? It has been crystal clear to me all along that Eight Bits Inc. valued me only for my manual writing. Or am I mistaken in that? Should I have thought of myself as a gamewright all along?"
"Do you realize what you've just done?"
"I've done nothing," said Step. "You're the ones who went behind my back and invested time in developing a product for which you hadn't the decency even to ask about the rights. Is that my fault? All I did was sell what was mine to a company that expressed an interest in it."
"Who! Who did you sell it to!"
"There is nothing in my employment agreement that obligates me to tell you what I do with my property, Dicky."
"We're going to sue their asses off!"
"Which is precisely why I have no intention of telling you."
"Ray will fire you for this."
"He'll fire me?" asked Step. Actually, he thought this was quite likely. But to Step being fired wasn't that bad a prospect. DeAnne could hardly blame him for leaving his job if he got fired, could she? So he even found himself enjoying this confrontation. There was nothing Step valued that Dicky could take away from him. "I don't think I'm the one whose job is on the line. I think the person whose job is on the line is the one who suggested developing an adaptation of my game behind my back. The one who didn't even bother to find out that my employment agreement is different before committing Eight Bits Inc.'s resources to a game that you didn't own."
"You fool," said Dicky. "That was Ray himself who did all that."
"Oh?" asked Step. "And is that the way Ray will remember it? Will he remember all the times you advised him against such a dangerous course of action?"
Dicky looked at him in livid silence.
"Dicky, now's a good time for you to lift your fat cheeks out of that chair and carry them through that door.
If Ray's going to fire me, then have him send me a memo to that effect and I'll be out of here collecting unemployment in a hot second. And if he's not going to fire me, then I've got work to do and you are in my way."
Step turned back to the page proofs he was checking.
After a while he heard Dicky get up out of his chair and leave the room. Softly, softly, on little cat feet.
When Dicky was gone, Step got up on shaking legs and gently closed the door. Then he leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. He felt so light- headed. Is this how a soldier feels when he has leapt from the trench and run toward the enemy lines and reached them and discovered that not one bullet touched him? Step had missed Vietnam with a draft lottery number of 225-a number that sounded as magical to him now as 7 or 3 or
12 or 40 sounded to other people. He had no experience of war, of real courage, of struggle between man and man. But this might just have been a taste, he thought. Dicky came in here prepared to bestow some pittance on me as if it were a great gift from Eight Bits Inc., and I laughed in his face and dared him to do his worst. I don't know how I did it without wetting my pants.
He went about his business as best he could, considering that he expected at any moment to have Dicky come in with his pink slip. At the end of the day he hadn't seen Dicky again at all, and he hadn't been fired. It was almost a disappointment.
The Cowpers moved on the tenth of June. "I wish you could have waited till Saturday," DeAnne told Jenny.
"Step wanted to help load up the truck. You've been so good to us, and we've never been able to give anything back."
"Nonsense," said Jenny. "I've had a wonderful time since you got here. In fact, if you had been living here when Spike accepted the transfer, I don't know if we would have taken it. But that's the way it goes, don't you know? We were each other's best friends--except for our husbands-I had to say that real quick to get it in before you said it, I know-anyway we were best friends, as long as it lasted, and I'll never forget you. But don't bother promising to write, you know we won't. Except Christmas cards every year., I'll never be bored reading your year-end family newsletter, you hear?"
"Can't I write if I want to?"
"Phone me. I'm not a writer. If you're broke, phone me collect."
"And vice versa," said DeAnne. "You're the one who knows my phone number, so you have to call first."
"Of course," said Jenny. "How else will you know where to send the five hundred dollars for the Datsun?"
"Eight hundred dollars," said DeAnne.
"Make it ten thousand if you want," said Jenny. "But we think the price was five hundred dollars and we don't really care if you never pay that. Think of it as a law-of-consecration car, a churchservice car. Take it out visiting teaching and take teenagers to youth activities in it. And whenever you do, think of us."
"I'll think of you more than you know," said DeAnne. "And I'll miss you more than you know."
"You'll make a new best friend within a month," said Jenny.
"Someone else can be my best friend," said DeAnne, "without ever being half as good a friend as you."
"Are you just trying to make me cry so I can't drive straight and I run us into a bridge abutment or something?" asked Jenny. "Now make sure none of your kids is standing behind the U-Haul or the car when we drive out." Jenny looked at the U-Haul in disgust. "They're a big enough company to transfer our family across the country and buy our stupid house, but they're not big enough that they can afford to pay for a real moving company. Tell Step to quit his lousy job, they're all thieves." Then Jenny kissed DeAnne on the cheek and they hugged each other and then Spike finally locked the house and got into the cab of the U-Haul with two of the kids as Jenny go t into their nice car with the rest of the kids. DeAnne made sure that Stevie and Robbie and Elizabeth were in plain sight and nowhere near the cars, and then she waved and the Cowpers pulled out into the road.