This tired tirade, Owen was aware, related to Ian’s own increasing difficulty getting commissions for his flashy illustrations, full of induced verve and unfinished margins; many framed samples, once reproduced in the Post and Collier’s and Redbook, surrounded them on the cracked plaster walls. Owen was enough of an art-lover to take Ian’s art lightly, but did not want to reveal, in defending his own field of endeavor, this disregard. “A computer is a tool,” he said. “Its moving parts are electronic impulses, but the same identical actions could be worked out mechanically—in fact, that’s what Babbage and Pascal before him did do, but the machines got too complex to be machined. Ian, why do you need to imagine some whole new demonic order? Do you feel the same about the pop-up toaster, as opposed to frying bread in a skillet?”

“O., dear, let Ian talk,” Phyllis said. “I want to hear more about how we’re all becoming subhuman.”

“Speaking of more, does anybody want another drink?” Alissa asked. She sounded hopeful of the offer being declined.

Ian sardonically promised, “One more Scotch-on-the-rocks, my dear, will greatly clarify my insight into the pitch-dark future.”

“A very weak bourbon-and-water, Alissa,” Phyllis conceded. “Can I help?”

“Just water for me,” said Owen, to reprimand Phyllis and to please Alissa, who was worried about her husband’s deterioration. Her glance at Owen suggested that it was they, sober, against the others. Her plump bare legs, as she uncurled and pushed herself up from the sailcloth-covered sofa, excited him to thinking graphically; her convex thighs curved steeply inward where they met and transformed, without violating her fundamental homeomorphism, into a concavity delimiting another sort of space, beyond the sensitive V that he had, in one electric trespass, touched. It was late; cigarette smoke had pasted itself in eddying strips against the low ceiling, subdivided by boxed beams painted that custardy Williamsburg color.