“Yeah, and we’re going to fly to the moon on gossamer wings,” Jake scoffed. Owen wondered if their ganging up on Jake amounted to anti-Semitism; but his persistent aggression seemed to invite it, to relish it. He said, “There are molecular limits in thin-film they’ve reached already. Face it, guys and gals, computers are basically clunky energy-hogs so expensive they’ll only ever have one customer, and that’s Uncle Sam. Look at UNIVAC. Remington Rand finally got the kinks out, mostly, and now they can’t sell them. They run so hot they’ve got to put dry ice in the ductwork.”

“Well,” Owen pointed out, as mildly as possible in imitation of Phyllis, “UNIVAC picked Eisenhower over Stevenson right enough. And did it so early nobody believed it; the network had the results and didn’t broadcast them!”

“Predicting elections is a stunt,” Jake said.

“The first airplanes were stunts. The first horseless carriages,” said Bobby Sprock, with the agonized expression and near-stutter of those who feel all the justice of an argument heaped on their side. “The first t-telephone, right here in Boston!”

“Analog computers, I can see,” Jake conceded, with a tongue emboldened by his opponent’s sputtering. “Amplifiers, differentiators—that’s what I call electrical engineering. This digital, binary stuff is a toy—it’s one step up from tic-tac-toe.”

“Jacob, aren’t you funny?” Phyllis said, not smiling. Owen heard the soft familiar tone with which she addressed him, and felt—the jolt that went straight across his chest—certainty that these two were connected as more than friends. She was the passive, negative pole of a number of highly charged connections: this inference, there in the circuit of close-pressed bodies and tousled wool wraps jammed around a small table littered with the soy-scented ruins of a Chinese meal, did not unplug his insulated belief that the course of his life must flow through this particular girl, this woman.