"Leave the hall light on!" said Robbie loudly.

"Are you still awake, Road Bug?" asked Step.

"Don't nobody go to school tomorrow," said Robbie. "Not Stevie and not you either, Dad!"

"Don't I wish," said Step. He left the hall light on.

5: Hacker Snack

Here is how Step's days were spent: Most days he drove to work, leaving the car for DeAnne only when she knew she was going to need it for shopping. He would rather have left it all the time, but he was never sure when he'd be coming home, and it was hard to carpool with such an uncertain schedule.

He always began the workday by drifting into the programmers' pit, a large room with even more computers than Gallowglass's office. Most of the machines were already up and running, usually with lines and lines of assembly language on the screen, though sometimes there was a screen filled with the faded-looking colors of the 64. As he moved from machine to machine, the programmers would point out what they were doing, and sometimes they'd have a problem and Step would pull up a chair beside them and help spot the flaw in the code or find some simple, elegant solution. Step usually felt inadequate at this, because all the programmers knew the workings of the 64 better than he did and quite often he had to ask, What are you getting from this register? Or, What does it mean to store that value in that location? And they'd kind of laugh and say That's the current location of the character set, or, That's the wave- form for the sound, and the tone of their voices always suggested that everybody knew that.

But the truth is that while they knew the 64, Step had a gift for code and he knew it and they knew it. He could look at a routine for a few minutes and then rewrite it to cut the amount of memory it used in half, or make it run twice as fast, or make it smoother and more responsive on the screen. Back when he'd been working alone on programming, he thought of himself as a clumsy amateur, and he was always vaguely ashamed of his code. But now he realized that he was pretty good after all, or at least good enough to be better than the caliber of programmer that Eight Bits Inc. was able to attract.

Still, it wasn't too smart for him to keep thinking of himself as a programmer. Because whenever Dicky poked his head into the pit, Step had to drop back into manual-writer mode, asking questions of the programmer he was with about how the game worked. As often as not, he was asking about the very things he had just shown the programmer how to do, and as soon as Dicky left, the others in the room would erupt in silent laughter. But Step didn't think it was funny. It made Step feel dirty and cheap, to be playing a continuous trick on Dicky like that. And so many people knew about it he could not believe it was possible that Dicky would never find out. In fact, he suspected that Dicky already knew. Yet he dared not test the hypothesis, because what if he was wrong? So Step kept up the charade.

Usually this took till noon, and he would go to lunch with a group of programmers and that was the good time during the day, because he wasn't lying to anybody then, he wasn't hiding anything, he was just himself, talking about stuff with these guys. It dawned on him during one of those lunches, as they sat there bantering with each other or swapping stories across the table at Swensen's or Pizza Inn or Libby Hill, that this was really the first time in his life that he had been part of a group of guys like this. He had never been an athlete, part of the team or even part of a pickup game at school or in the neighborhood. His friends during his school years had always been girls. He liked the way they talked, he had things to say to them. And they didn't despise him for being smart and getting good grades, they weren't ashamed being smart the mselves, and so they could talk about ideas in a way that he never heard guys talking about anything, as if they mattered, as if they cared. His only male friends during high school and on into college had been the few who were like him, who hung out with the smart girls.

But these programmers were all male, and it was definitely a male kind of conversation, and yet there was none of that hierarchical one-upmanship that had made Step so uncomfortable with "the guys" in school. Or rather, there was, but it was centered around programming rather than athletics or cars, and on that playing field Step was a star-with Gallowglass, he shared the preeminent position in the hierarchy, and since he and Glass got along so well themselves there was no rivalry at all. Step belonged, and it felt good.

Lunch ended, though-supposedly after half an hour, but they always took an hour or more-and then back they went to Eight Bits Inc., where now Step usually went to his own office and actually worked on manuals, often for ga mes that weren't even finished yet. In fact, in the process of writing the manual he would really be designing the game, describing rules and features of the game that the programmer hadn't yet thought of. Or if he was writing about a game that was nearly done, he'd play the game over and over again to find bugs in the code or annoyances in the play of the game. Then he'd make notes and pass them on to the programmers.

Because every game had to pass through his hands in order to get its documentation written, Step had his finger on the pulse of every project in the company. He knew, he knew what was going on. And since Dicky did not, it meant that in a way Step was the real head of the creative division of Eight Bits Inc. Dicky had the title and the salary and the Sunday afternoon visits with Ray Keene at the Magazine Rack, but Step had the respect and the influence and-most important to him- the results, the games with his fingerprints all over them.

The only program he never fiddled with was Scribe 64. That was Glass's bailiwick, and Step had no intention of intruding. He was writing the documentation for the new update, which was adding right-and- left justification and Glass's new 60-character screen, and while he still tested it and found bugs and passed them on to Glass, Step never, never touched the code. Because he didn't need to-Glass knew what he was doing. And because that was the unspoken basis of their alliance, that Step would do nothing to weaken Glass's position at Eight Bits Inc. So even when Step found a bug, he would pass the information to Glass in private, never giving a clue to anybody else that there had been the slightest flaw in the kid's original code.

Five o'clock came and went every day, but it had nothing to do with Step's schedule. He was always in the middle of something. There was always a section of code that he had to finish fiddling with before he went home, so he could leave it for the programmer to look at in the morning. Or a game that he had to finish play-testing at the highest levels, while the programmer hung 'around and kibitzed with him. Supper-time meant going around the corner to the candy machine and dropping in quarters. After a l few candy bars there'd be a bag of potato chips because there was once a potato involved, which made it health food. And then a can of pop or even tomato juice, when Step was feeling really unrighteous about what he was doing to his body.

He was gaining weight, he could feel it. Some of his shirts were beginning to show a gap between the buttons when he sat down. His belt was getting less comfortable; he let it out a notch. Six weeks, and he was going to seed. But when during the day could he get any exercise? Back in Indiana he had ridden his bike fifty miles a week during the warm months and kept up on the exercise bike in the winter, but he could do that because he was keeping an academic schedule, which gave him plenty of free daylight hours.

Seven, eight, nine o'clock at night, depending on how stub born the bug was or how fascinating the game, and Step would at last go outside into the darkness and find the Renault, pop the locks and climb in. Then he'd head for home, saying to himself, I should have gotten away sooner, I should have been home for dinner. Most nights the kids were already in bed, or going to beds, before he got there; he could kiss them goodnight and hear a little bit about their day, but that was it, that was all.