Step hoped that his shudder didn't show. When he and DeAnne were house-hunting, they had had to rule out the whole eastern edge of town, where the Eldredge & Emerson Tobacco Company kept the air filled with the pungence of tar and nicotine, like being trapped forever on an elevator with someone who put out his cigarette just before stepping on.

What business did Mormons have moving into tobacco country? Especially since DeAnne was so allergic to tobacco smoke that it made her throw up even when she wasn't pregnant. The idea of somebody blowing smoke in a baby's face made Step angry. There's things you just don't do to children, if you have any decency.

And teaching a ten- year-old to blow smoke rings ...

"I don't want to sound like some kind of dumb fan or nothing, Mr. Fletcher, but I thought Hacker Snack was the best game anybody ever did on the Atari."

"Thanks," said Step.

"Of course, your A.I. routines really sucked."

It hit Step like a blow, that forced change from shyly, genially accepting a compliment to suddenly having to take criticism.

"A.I.?" he asked.

"You know-artificial intelligence."

"I know what A.I. stands for," said Step. "I just don't recall ever trying to incorporate any of it into my game."

"I mean, you know, the way the bad guys home in on the player," he said. "The machine intelligence routines. Way too predictable. It stayed too easy to dodge them until you finally beat the player down with sheer speed. Like bludgeoning them to death."

"Hey, thanks," said Step.

"No, really I loved the game, I just wished you had kept the bad guys moving in a kind of semi-random way, so the player wouldn't catch on that they were homing in. So you couldn't quite be sure where they were going to go. Then the game would have stayed fun into much higher levels, and you would never have had to include that killer speed level where you can't outrun the bad guys."

"There is no killer speed level," said Step.

"Really?"

"Not if you find all the back doors out of the different rooms."

It was the kid's turn to look embarrassed. "Back doors?"

"Hacker Snack isn't an arcade game, it's a puzzle game," said Step. "Don't tell me you were trying to outrun those little suckers at every level."

"I got up to half a million points doing it that way" said the kid.

"That is the most incredible thing I ever heard. You should've been creamed before you got twenty thousand points. You must have the reflexes of a bat."

The kid grinned. "I'm the best damn video wizard you'll ever meet," he said. "You got to show me those back doors."

"And you got to show me what you mean about randomizing."

"Come on inside, I've got your game up on one of my machines, just in case you came by."

"You got an Atari here?"

"Hey, there's not a soul here who doesn't know the Atari is ten times the computer the 64 is. The only reason we're all writing 64 software is that millions of them are getting bought and the Atari is still going for like a thousand dollars which means nobody buys it."

Step followed him into the building. "How come you came outside to smoke?" he asked. "I notice people smoking in most of the offices."

"Not in mine," said the kid. "I don't let anybody smoke around the machines. Fouls them up. Like pouring cokes on them."

The kid didn't let anybody smoke around any of the machines?

"What's your name?" Step asked.

"My parents call me Bubba, I was baptized Roland McIntyre, but I kind of think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass." He glanced back over his shoulder at Step and grinned. "You ever play D&D?"

"My brother tried to teach me Dungeons and Dragons one time, but after five hours the game itself hadn't actually started."

"Then he's a piss-poor dungeonmaster, if you ask me, no offense of course since he's your brother. A good dungeonmaster can get you into the game in half an hour and make it move along like you were watching a movie. Almost. Here's your office, by the way."

It was an empty room. They had known he was coming, and there wasn't even a desk inside.

"They had a desk in here but I made them move it out," said Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass. "I told them you weren't here to write prissy little maiden-aunt letters to your nieces and nephews, you were here to write manuals and for that you needed a full computer setup, complete with a word processor and at least one of every computer we do software for. So they're coming in this afternoon to put up a computer counter like the one I've got here. This is my office. You'll be sharing with me till yours is ready, if you don't mind."

Step walked into hacker heaven. Two desk- height counters ran along both the long walls of the room, with a couple of shelves above them. The lower shelf held monitors for a half-dozen computers, and the upper shelf held books and papers and stacks of disks. And the counter itself was crowded with 64s, a couple of VICs, a TI, a Radio Shack Color Computer, even one of those crummy little Timex computers. Also an old monochrome Pet, which was apparently used as a word processor. And an Atari, with Hacker Snack up and running in demonstration mode. Except that the demonstration mode was supposed to have the game at level one, and this one was running at level twenty.

"You broke into the code," said Step.

"I like to use the game as a screen saver, because everything shifts on it. But level twenty has the prettiest colors."

"That was copy-protected six ways from Tuesday."

"Yeah, well, it was a ten- minute job to break the scheme and another hour or so to disassemble the code."

Bubba Roland Saladin Gallowglass looked proud of himself, and Step couldn't disagree with him. Step was a pretty good programmer, but this kid was a true hacker, a boy genius of code. And somehow this same kid had the authority to make Eight Bits Inc. remodel Step's office.

"What's your job here, anyway?" asked Step.

"Oh, I just hang around and do some programming. I'm really supposed to be a student at UNC-S, but I'm sort of between semesters right now."

"Spring break?"

"Yeah, for about a year now. I tried taking computer classes to teach me COBOL, if you can believe it. Had to have FORTRAN or I couldn't graduate. Like making you study dinosaur anatomy in med school. A bunch of us are going to Richmond for the David Bowie concert this weekend. Want to come?"

Flattered at the invitation, Step had to decline. "We're still unpacking, and I'm more into good old- fashioned American rock and roll. Bowie's too disco for me."

"Oh, he's past disco now. He's past glitter, too. He's sort of in punk mode."

"Yeah, well ...

"I think of my D&D character, you know, Saladin Gallowglass, I think of him as looking like David Bowie.

Or like Sting."

"Sting?" asked Step.

"With the Police," said the kid. When Step still showed no sign of comprehension, the kid shook his head and went on. "I understand you're going to be doing kind of quality control for us."

"From what Dicky said this morning," said Step, "I have to get him to unzip my fly when I pee."

The kid giggled. "That's Dickhead for you. No, Ray told me that you're a precious resource. The only way he could get Dickhead to accept the idea of hiring you was to promise that you'd have nothing to do with programming, but in fact he wants your fingers in everything. He thinks of you as the computer wizard of the universe."

"Well, I'm not," said Step. "I'm a historian who taught myself programming in my spare time."

"All good programmers are self- taught, at least in the home computer business," said the kid.

"Look, what do I actually call you?"

"Around here they call me Roland and you probably should too," said the kid.

"But what would you prefer?"

He grinned. "Like I said, I think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass."