"Sorry, I'm sorry," said Step. "But I told you, I need to sleep. I'm desperate to sleep. This is why I didn't want to share a room. I have to have time to myself, time alone, deeply and completely alone, or I can't sleep."

"Must be great for your wife," said Glass nastily.

"Don't be my enemy over this," said Step. "I make a lousy roommate, I'm a complete son-of-a-bitch, I know it. But I'm begging you, go down to the coffee shop or go smoke in the lounge or something but please, please, let me be alone here for thirty minutes, that's all I ask."

"Right," said Glass.

"Don't be mad at me, I didn't mean any offense, I'm just tired."

"Right," said Glass. He walked to the door. Then he stopped and turned to face Step, waiting, obviously ready to say some thing.

"What," said Step.

"Don't ever call me Rolly" said Glass.

"What? I don't call you Rolly, I call you Glass."

"You called me Rolly a minute ago. Nobody calls me Rolly."

"Did I? Why would I call you Rolly? I didn't even know that was your nickname."

"It's not my nickname. It's my father's goddam nickname."

Then Step remembered. "You used the name yourself. You said that's what the little girl called you. I must have used the name because you said it, that's all."

"I did?"

Step remembered now exactly the sentence in which Glass had used the name Rolly. Better wash down there, Rolly. He was not going to repeat it. "Why else would I have called you that?"

"Nobody ever called me Rolly," said Glass, sounding very annoyed. "My nickname as a kid was Bubba.

Ropy is my dad and nobody calls me that, ever."

"I never have before," said Step, "and I never will again. Sorry I've been so tense, I told you I'm not good at sharing a room. But better you than anybody else, right?"

Glass grinned. "Like, better to eat the cockroach than the scorpions, right?"

"Right," said Step.

Glass was gone.

Cockroach. That was exactly right. Being with Glass now was like eating a cockroach. Better wash down there, Rolly.

Step got up and took his clothes off, all his clothes, carefully folding away his underwear and putting it back in his suitcase, under the clean clothes. And then, standing there naked, he couldn't bear the idea of getting into his sheets. Why? He couldn't. They were so clean. He had to wash first.

So he got in the shower and soaped himself twice and then he felt clean enough to go to bed. Glass was still gone, and an hour later when Step looked at the clock Glass was still gone, and then Step must have fallen asleep because he never heard Glass come in at all. In the morning Glass was in the shower when Step woke up, and his sheets were open and swirled and wrinkled on the bed, so he must have come in sometime during the night. And when he came out of the bathroom Glass was back to his old cheerful self and Step could almost, almost put out of his mind the things that Glass had talked about last night.

In the morning everybody was trapped at the booth, just as they had been the day before. It had never occurred to Step that Ray would bring his people out to San Francisco and then never let them go see the rest of the show, but then a lot of things about Ray Keene had never occurred to Step until too late. It looked like the only chance he'd have to scout around would be at lunchtime, and that would be only a half hour. And he'd have the half hour only if he didn't eat, since the lines at the snack counters were even longer than the lines at the women's restrooms. It almost wasn't worth trying to meet anybody, since it would take that long just to spot where the software companies were. And then he'd have to find one that knew his name and thought Hacker Snack was hot stuff, which might take a lot of looking, since that game was last year's news. No, two years ago, and it was all played out. No point, none at all, Step was permanently trapped in Eight Bits Inc., a chicken outfit where he'd be surrounded by sneaks and cheats and thieves and skinflints and guys who dreamed of washing little girls.

He felt sick. He toyed with the idea of pretending to be really sick in order to get out of the booth, but then there'd be hell to pay if he were caught visiting around at other booths when he was supposed to be sick in his room. Besides, just because they were liars didn't mean he had to be. At least, no more than he already was, skulking around running the creative end of Eight Bits Inc. while pretending to Dicky that he still ran it.

In fact, that was one of the hardest things about working the booth. People would come up and want to talk about the games, especially the demos, and Step would show them stuff and tell them about features to come, and then he'd realize that Dicky was listening-Dicky always seemed to be listening, drifting silently from place to place within the booth like a ghost that never quite touched the earth-and that Step was talking about features in the games that only he and the programmers knew were going to be there, features that had never been in any version that Dicky had seen. And once he thought of a rule that a game ought to have and was talking about it to a buyer from Service Merchandise, even though nobody at Eight Bits Inc. had ever thought of having the game work that way, which would have been fine because Step pretty much got his way on these things, except that there was Dicky, staring off into space, maybe listening to him or maybe to somebody else or maybe to nobody at all. The Spy, thought Step. He recalled the old Authors cards from his childhood, the picture on the James Fenimore Cooper cards, the hatchet- faced weaselly picture that always summed up the essence of spy- ness in Step's mind. From now on Dicky would replace Cooper as Step's image of a spy. Dicky stood there looking lost in thought, his eyes heavy- lidded, his thick sensuous lips making vague movements, pursing and unpursing, as if he were drinking from an imaginary straw or kissing an imaginary aunt.

I've got to get out of here, thought Step. Not just out of this booth, but out of Eight Bits Inc.

He finished with the buyer from Service Merchandise, who didn't buy games anyway, he just wanted to know about them so he'd know which machines would have the hot software, and then Step walked straight to Dicky and planted himself in front of him, not sure until he started to speak what it was he planned to say.

"I've got to get out of the booth, Dicky," he said.

"Oh? We're all here to work this booth, Step." Dicky looked detached, uninterested. This subject was not even going to be an argument, because Dicky would never bend.

Step raised his voice a notch, to make sure the others in the booth heard him. "I have to see the other packages, Dicky I have to see what the competition is doing."

"We don't do packaging," said Dicky. "That is our packaging. And besides, that's the art department, not the manuals."

"I have to see the level of documentation," said Step. "I have to see the style. I have to see how much personality they're putting into their packages."

"If you want to try something new with our manuals, write it up and bring it to me and Ray and I will decide whether you can do it."

Step raised his voice yet another notch. "So what you're telling me is that Eight Bits Inc. went to the expense of flying me out to San Francisco and now you won't let me go around and see what ideas I can come up with to help us make our documentation keep up with the competition?"

"Nobody opens the packages to see what the documentation is like when they're deciding whether to buy a game," said Dicky "The documentation is irrelevant to competitiveness. And documentation is all you are responsible for."

"Word of mouth is what sells our products," said Step, "and word of mouth comes from the whole package.

If our manuals are just right, then that's part of what the customers tell their friends about."