While she rendezvoused with Reimann among curving surfaces unto n dimensions, Owen was grinding away at the practical subjects that went into a degree in electrical engineering—power-system analysis, non-linear impedances as power modulators, wide-band amplifiers, photoelectric transducers, insulators, transistors, microwave triodes, reflex klystrons, power relations in an electron beam under small-signal excitation, and such formulas that render invisible electrons visible, audible, and convertible to useful work. One advanced course took Owen for a week to Raytheon in Waltham, and another on repeated visits to the Harvard Computation Laboratory, where Mark I reigned in its lordly bulk and overheated obsolescence. As the Korean police action bogged down in cold and bloody mud, Owen and his schoolmates maintained exemption from the draft by passing a government test only cretins could fail: in the lecture hall called 10-250, at a signal, they presented aloft their pencils like tiny substitute guns. Brains won wars. IBM was enlisting manpower in a massive push to counter Remington Rand’s triumphant UNIVAC; a business market as well as an industrial-military one was dawning for computers. Amid these heady promises of the future, while technical breakthroughs were coming faster than the professors of electrical engineering could teach them, Owen’s overprogrammed neurons began to hum with brain-fatigue. It was like a message emerging from a veil of static when Phyllis, the week after she graduated (her honors thesis, questioning a nuance of Riemannian topology, having been cited for its originality and rigor), said to him, at a table for two in the tiny smoky Indian restaurant, just before he was heading south for another summer surveying with the crew and probing Elsie’s responses, “My parents kept bugging me about what I was going to do with myself now, so I told them I was engaged to you.”

“You did?” His face went hot, abruptly immersed in his life, his only life.

“Well, darling, aren’t we? You’re always talking about it.” Her eyes, with a shade of nervous challenge, sought his.

In trying to persuade her of his devotion he had often imagined aloud their married life together. But he did not remember exactly proposing; he had feared he would be rejected and his hard-won advances into her enchanted terrain negated.

“Well, I guess we are,” he admitted. “That’s thrilling.” What would his mother say? What would Elsie? Well, serve them right. Nature is flux and transformation, MIT had taught him.

vi. Village Sex—III