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combinations—in Ray’s opinion all the software they offered was second-rate and way too expensive. So he came up with Scribe 64 and sold it for twenty-nine bucks, discounted to nineteen bucks including postage if you ordered it direct from Eight Bits Inc.
    There were a couple of bad times early on. Right at first, Ray’s lack of business experience nearly killed the company—he was paying so much for packaging that in fact he was actually losing 22c with each unit sold. So when he ran out of that first run of a thousand boxes, he began shipping in a much smaller box with no printing on the outside, just a sticker that said “The only word processor you’ll ever need—$29” and began making four dollars a unit. It sold even faster, and the profit per unit got even better, and one day his wife said, “Ray, I got no house left, it’s all Eight Bits Inc. Either me and the kids move out or the company does.”
    That’s when Ray Keene bought the ugly building on Palladium. It had originally been a climate-controlled clean shop for the assembly of calculators in the mid-70s, but it had been standing empty for a couple of years and the owner sold it to Ray at a price that said he was just glad to get it off his hands. Ray had the whole thing rewired and half the big factory space cut up into offices. There weren’t any windows and the place was ugly but everybody in the company, which was up to ten employees by then, was so happy to have enough room to turn around that they loved it like a mama loves an ugly baby.
    When Step came down for interviews six weeks before, all he got from everybody was that sense of exuberance and excitement. But this first day at work there was something else. Ray Keene had remodeled his office since Step was there before, and it showed signs that Ray had apparently read that book about power that was on the lists the year before. Ray now sat behind a massive desk in a rock-back chair while all the chairs that visitors had to sit on were hard and too low and didn’t have enough space from front to back, so that you always felt like you were sitting on the edge of the seat because, in fact, you were.
    â€œYou won’t report to me,” said Ray. “I’ve made Dicky Northanger the vice-president in charge of the creative end of things, and you’ll report to him , but send me memos from time to time. We’ll be hiring an assistant for you as soon as we can, but for now all the manuals for all our software will come through you, but pass it all by Dicky for final approval.”
    Dicky Northanger was the guy who used to do all the manuals. He was the first person Ray Keene had hired, and he and Ray were now great buddies, going every Sunday afternoon to pick up the New York Times at the Magazine Rack bookstore. He was genial, heavy-set, and middle-aged, probably the oldest man in the company, and Step didn’t see any problem with reporting to him. But he felt a vague sense of disappointment, since the job had been represented to him as one that would report directly to Ray. Of course Ray couldn’t have everybody report to him, but the company only had twenty-five employees right now, and it seemed weird in a company that size that Step was already being told that he was not to contact Ray except by memo.
    After Step met with Ray alone for that half hour of physical discomfort, they went straight on in to a staff meeting, where the new health plan was explained to everybody and, as an incidental at the end, Step and a new guy in the art department were introduced around. Dicky introduced him, and Step was a little embarrassed when Dicky made a great point of talking about what a genius Step was for having programmed Hacker Snack—and then, even more embarrassing, he pointed out to everyone in excruciating detail that Step would report only to him, and that while Step must have access to every programmer at every stage of