10: Independence Day

This is what the Fletchers did on the Fourth of July: The 1st Ward had a flag-raising ceremony at dawn, along with a pancake breakfast. Step could think of about three thousand things he'd rather do than get up before dawn on the Monday morning of the only three-day weekend of the summer, but the elders quorum was cooking the pancakes and DeAnne was conducting the choir's singing of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Having a southern church choir sing that song was in itself remarkable enough to be worth getting up early just to hear it.

In the weeks since the Cowpers had moved, the choir leader, Mary Anne Lowe, had been cultivating DeAnne's friendship. To Step it seemed almost as if Sister Lowe had been waiting for Jenny to get out of the picture before she moved in, as if there were room for only one friend in DeAnne's life at a time. And maybe it was so. DeAnne didn't exactly have a surplus of time and energy. Still, it seemed to Step that this friendship was different from the friendship with Jenny. Where Jenny had seemed to revive DeAnne, to buoy her up, Mary Anne's ebullient energy only made DeAnne seem more tired. Most annoying to Step was the way that being friends with Mary Anne Lowe meant having more and more duties in the ward music program. Like conducting the choir for the sunrise flag raising and all those practices on Satur days and Sundays getting ready for it.

When DeAnne had done compassionate service with Jenny, it almost always happened during the day, but the choir practices took place during the few hours that Step had home with DeAnne, with the family, and so he ended up either going to choir practice himself, as the only tenor, or staying home trying to tend the children while typing Hacker Snack code into the Commodore 64.

Even with Jenny gone, the compassionate service assignments continued. Sister Bigelow was still on the phone with DeAnne a couple of times a week, so that Step would come home from work and find DeAnne ready to rush over to Sister Something-or-other's house with a salad or a casserole or a plate of biscuits and a tub of gravy and could Step please just watch the kids for an hour and maybe slice up the cucumbers for the salad?

Sure, DeAnne. And I'll finish Hacker Snack in December, about three months after we're bankrupt.

Then he'd feel bad about being so childishly resentful and he'd go ahead and do the things she had asked and, usually, more, so she'd get back and find dinner ready to eat, or the kids already bathed, or whatever else he figured he could accomplish to make her feel cared for and help her get some rest because, after all, wasn't she the one carrying their child? What right did he have to think that she somehow wasn't doing enough?

After the sunrise service and the pancakes, which tasted like they were cut from cardboard and went down like lead, the Fletchers came home and the kids began to fuss and fight with each other. Step solved the problem by sending them all back to bed, since they were obviously too tired to get along in human society; and then he took DeAnne by the arm and dragged her back to bed. Within fifteen minutes Robbie and Betsy were both asleep and so was DeAnne. Stevie, of course, stubbornly lay there in bed with his eyes open until Step walked in and quietly told him he could read if he wanted to. Finally Step went to bed and lay there feeling physically worn out and very sleepy. He continued to feel that way for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, until he gave up and went into the family room and slipped the Hacker Snack disk into the drive and turned on the computer.

It made the usual horrible grinding sound as it activated the disk drive-though it was not as bad as the metallic chewing noise the Commodore disk drive made-and then the familiar screen came up and Step began to move his little cartoon character, Rodney, with his nerdy glasses and perpetual melvin, through the maze of computer chips and hamburgers.

This is boring, thought Step. Not the first time, but each level is really just more of the same. You don't get that much pleasure out of the tenth time you play it.

The normal solution to this problem was to make each suc ceeding level so hard that you kept playing just to try to beat the machine and get your name on the vanity board. But for Step that wasn't enough. It had to be fun the first time, and yet the game had to be rich enough that at higher and higher levels better stuff happened, so that the game became its own reward.

What could he change without eating up too much memory? Well, it didn't have to be computer chips and burgers. He could work in other stuff-maybe different computer brands! Eating a VIC-20 and a Timex and an Apple II on the way to finally reaching an Atari and then maybe a mainframe or something.

If I'm going to do an evolutionary sequence like that, why not do evolution itself? Instead of starting with Rodney, I start with a salamander or something that climbs up out of primordial ooze and then at each level he becomes something else. A dinosaur. A mammal. A shrew, maybe. And then a chimp. And then Homo habilis, and then some big athletic- looking guy, and then finally, as the crowning pinnacle of evolutio n, the computer hacker, the nerd with glasses and a melvin! OK, that would be fun, but it would chew up disk space, especially since he couldn't very well have dinosaurs collecting computer chips, so he'd have to change the thing they ate at every level. Leaves for the dinosaurs-and maybe salamanders, the guys from the previous level! And the shrews could eat dinosaur eggs. And the athletic guys could trample Homo habilis guys and leave them in a cartoony pile of arms and legs like Beetle Bailey after the sergeant gets through beating him up. And then Rodney could leave athletic guys behind him holding pink slips!

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.'