Owen blushed; he wanted to believe that his adventure with Faye, if not secret, was conversationally off-bounds with Ed, who had known him and Phyllis so long he seemed part of the marriage. “Computerwise,” he primly clarified. “This OS/360 of IBM’s is turning into a fucking disaster. It’s costing them tens of millions, and still they can’t take it to market for all the bugs. They got a thousand programming people on it out there in Poughkeepsie and it’s more and more a mess, I hear.”

Ed asked, through his chewing, “What are they gonna do? They gotta work it through if they’re going to get any of their investment back out. They tried to use multiprogramming and that made problems. The larger the program, the greater the tendency to crash. One bug is all it takes.”

“It’s more than problems, Ed, it’s a basic imbalance. The capacity keeps doubling; programming can’t keep up. Hardware development is industrial; it’s knitting mills. Software is still sitting in the cottage working on an old hand loom. It’s piecework.”

“It’ll catch up. Electrical engineering is everybody’s major; it’s everybody’s toy these days. Remember when metallurgy was the sexy thing? Not to mention nuclear physics. Why sweat it, if what we do is piecework? We’re getting paid.”

“Yeah, but look who can afford us: banks, insurance companies, airlines, the Pentagon. The world’s dreariest mentalities.”

Ed stopped chewing, and said across the table with mock solemnity, “It grieves me to hear you talk like this, O. Tell me, what do you want out of life you’re not getting?”

Owen pictured Phyllis, because he knew Ed was picturing her too. What more could a man want out of life than Phyllis? That was what Ed’s owlish stare, through glasses so thick a tint of skin was refracted into the bevelled edges, was asking. Owen didn’t know the answer but knew Ed’s estimation of Phyllis was unrealistic. “What I want is a little shelter from the trivial,” he answered. “My desk sits right in the thick of traffic; everybody keeps asking me things, to double-check this or that approach, to look over their schematics. We could keep the desk where it is, and I’ll be at it most of the time, but couldn’t I have another, at the other end of the floor, that would be private? I need to really think about the DigitEyes redo, to make it cutting-edge again.”