By then the Russians had long-range aircraft capable of bringing a nuclear bomb across the North Pole, and coördinated air defense had achieved high priority and top-secret status. Whirlwind had been brought up to real-time speed with the installation of magnetic-core memory, and its prototype, the basic hardware of his education at MIT, had become the manufactured IBM AN/FSQ-7, installed at Direction Centers across the nation as part of SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Holding forty-nine thousand vacuum tubes and weighing two hundred fifty tons and housed in four-story concrete eyesores, these electronic dinosaurs were fed data from a global network of sources maintained by the U.S. Armed Forces; Owen, on loan to the Air Force, became one of hundreds of technologically trained servicemen stationed at blinking cathode-ray tubes, deciphering blips. Mistaken blips and misfiring input could be catastrophic in the delicately poised surveillance game; but he was struck, touched even, by the basic reliability of the machines, unwieldy though they retrospectively seemed after chip miniaturization had reduced their bulk, and program languages had made them easier conversational partners. There were still many switches to throw, and blinking lights on the consoles. Owen began to take a hand in the refinement and invention of programs—tedious lines of assembly code, which in the event of error had to be examined character by character, in printed memory dumps that strained the eyes and addled the mind. He showed competence enough to be invited to extend his hitch, with officer rank, and thereby to help hold at bay the dogged Soviets, who were lagging far behind in computer science.

But Phyllis hated military life, both the unpacificist idea of it and the khaki-drab daily reality. “The lowest common denominator rules,” she said. “And the wives—so vulgar, so obsessed with their little nests, with sex, which is all they have to offer.” Owen didn’t think this was such a meagre thing to offer, but said nothing. He respected his wife’s opinions. When he talked of reupping, it was to tease a reaction out of her; her pale cheeks flushed pink as her arguments became earnest. Without ever seeming to study him, she could dip into his psyche. “Don’t think like your father and stick to the safe thing,” she pleaded. “He thought a safe thing was the knitting mills, and look what happened to them. There is no safe thing. America’s the bastion of capitalism, that’s what all this is about, isn’t it? If computers are half the wonders you think they are, they’re going to make fortunes, and you’re in on the ground floor.”