Would anybody get the joke? No, not pink slips, then. Too hard to show on the computer. No, they'll be left wearing Burger King uniforms!
That's it, that's it, he thought. It's still Hacker Snack, but it's a better game. This is going to blow Agamemnon away.
Step went into his office, pulled out a piece of paper, and began calculating how much memory the new graphics would eat up. He actually found himself wishing for the 128K of the IBM PC. Lousy as it was, the PC
would still give him the room to do it right, with better animation and more levels. It could be a bigger game, with large mazes that extended off the screen. And what if I had 256K? He could forget character-based graphics and do smooth full-screen animations, like that pirate ship game he had seen Stevie playing.
What was the name of that game? He had looked for it once before, and never found it. Sometime he'd have to borrow Gallowglass's disassembler program and figure out how the programmer of that game had done it.
DeAnne came sleepily into his office. "I must have dozed off," she said.
"That was the idea," said Step.
"We have to get to the Eight Bits Inc. party, don't we?"
"It's an all-day picnic," said Step. "We can show up anytime."
"Well, the kids might want to stay and play awhile, and I imagine they'll be serving the food around noon, won't they?"
Step shrugged. "What time is it now?"
"Eleven."
"So what's the rush?"
"No rush," she said. "Do you know what they'll be serving at the picnic?"
"Hot dogs and stuff," said Step. "And fried chicken, I think. Good old magnanimous Ray is having it catered by Colonel Sanders and Oscar Mayer."
"Don't be snide," said DeAnne. "I think having a company picnic is a good idea."
"I'm sure it is," said Step. "I'm just tired."
"Why didn't you sleep?"
"I tried," said Step. "And then I got to thinking."
"Oh, that's a mistake. I gave it up years ago.'
"Well, I'll finish this later," he said. "Let's get the kids ready and head out before the temperature gets up to a hundred. The humidity is already at a hundred percent by now, I'm sure."
"You're just a desert boy, Step."
"I'm not used to sweating and having it not evaporate until the next day." He turned off the computer and got up from the chair and stretched. "Now I think I could sleep."
"Well, then, go lie down," said DeAnne. "We'll go later in the day."
"No, let's go now and get it over with. At some point we'll see Dicky in a bathing suit and then we'll throw up the pancakes from this morning and we'll all feel much better."
Robbie and Betsy woke up sluggish, as much from the pancakes as from their nap, and it was almost one o'clock before they got to the picnic. Eight Bits Inc. had rented UNC-Steuben's private lake, and there were about a hundred people in the water or milling around on shore. The food was being served under a canopy, and they headed there from the car. Ray Keene himself was nowhere to be seen-he had been getting more and more reclusive over the past few months, and some of the programmers had started referring to him as Howard Keene, in reference to Howard Hughes. But Keene's wife was there, and their five-year- old daughter, and every other employee of Eight Bits Inc. had shown up. They knew this because Dicky greeted them by the condiment table with the cheery announcement, "At last, the Fletchers? Finally we have a hundred percent."
"I didn't know we were taking attendance," said Step with equal cheer. "I would have brought a note from my mom." And then he and DeAnne concentrated on getting hot dogs into the kids.
Afterward, since they couldn't swim, Step took the boys over to where people were playing games-horseshoes and lawn darts. After a few moments of watching, though, Step concluded that these were no safer than sending nonswimmers into the lake-the lawn darts were being thrown by careless, unsupervised children, and the horseshoes were dominated by adults, mostly from the business end of Eight Bits Inc., including Cowboy Bob, and the iron shoes were whizzing through the air with enough velocity to break a child's head open. Stevie, of course, was quite careful, but Robbie had a way of getting excited and running straight toward his goal without noticing things like darts and iron shoes flying through the air. So Step kept a firm grip on Robbie's hand and soon led both boys away from the games.
Which left precious little for them to do. Well, fine, thought Step. I'll go collect DeAnne and Betsy and we'll head on out of here. After all, attendance has now been taken and we won't be missed.
Step saw DeAnne standing near the food canopy, talking to Mrs. Keene, who had lit up a cigarette and was now puffing away as she talked. Even outdoors with a slight breeze, Step knew that the cigarette smoke would quickly make DeAnne sick and lightheaded, hardly a good thing for a pregnant woman in the afternoon heat.
So, with Stevie and Robbie in tow, Step headed over and broke into the conversation.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Keene, but DeAnne's probably just to shy to tell you that cigarette smoke really makes her ill. If she weren't pregnant, it wouldn't be a problem outdoors like this, but-"
"Oh, that's just fine," said Mrs. Keene pleasantly. "I was hardly smoking it anyway." She dropped the cigarette to the ground and twisted her foot on it. "You should have said something, you sweet girl, I just didn't even think, I smoked right through my own pregnancy with Allison and so I forget that some people just need to have fresh air all the time."
"It really wasn't bothering me outside in the breeze like this," said DeAnne.
"Oh, heavens, girl, I'm the boss's wife, you think I don't know that? But just between you and me, I'm not half so impressed with Ray as Ray is, and Ray isn't all that impressed with me, so kissing up to me won't help anybody keep on his good side anyway!" She chuckled, a low, throaty smoker's laugh.
Mrs. Keene was charming and funny and nice, but also dangerously disloyal. Was the marriage in trouble?
That would be no surprise, really, given the kind of autocratic, secretive man Ray Keene was becoming; the joke in the Pit was that Ray kept secrets so well that his wife had to hire a private investigator to find out where he kept his dick. But if the marriage was in trouble, Mrs. Keene could be a walking kiss of death, bestowing herself on selected employees and then leaving them behind without a thought of the consequences. Somebody was bound to be keeping track of whom she talked to.
"Dad," said Robbie.
Step turned away from the conversation. Robbie was excited about something. Behind him a little girl was standing in front of a clump of other little kids. "Allison wants me to go on the raft with them! Can I go, Dad?"
"No," said Step. "You know you can't go on the water, Robbie. You can't swim."
The little girl stepped forward and, in a voice that was accus tomed to getting results, said, "He can so go.
My daddy said it was perfectly safe."
"Then that means you can go," said Step. "But Robbie cannot go, because his daddy says that it is not safe."
"Well my daddy is the boss of this company and what he says goes!"
Step remembered the three precious pieces of paper in DeAnne's filing cabinet at home-his employment agreement, the contract from Agamemnon, and Ray's memo stating his intention not to support the IBM PC-and his smile broadened. "Well, little girl, your daddy may be the boss of this company, but he is not the boss of my family, and so when it comes to the safety of my children, what he says matters about as much as a mouse fart."