do you want for breakfast?"
"Cream of Wheat!" cried Robbie.
DeAnne let him help make the mush, and within moments the list was forgotten.
Dicky came into Step's office on Tuesday afternoon. "Good news," said Dicky.
"Oh, really?" Step immediately felt a thrill of dread: Ray had decided to support the PC after all.
"Ray has decided to publish a Commodore 64 version of Hacker Snack."
How ludicrous! thought Step. No one had ever spoken to him about Hacker Snack, not even after he walked in on the programmers working on it as a secret project just before the San Francisco trip. He had assumed that the programmers told Dicky and Dicky told Ray and they just dropped the whole thing. But no, apparently it was still alive and now Dicky had the gall to walk in here and say that Ray had decided to publish a game that didn't belong to him.
"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