He knew she was, as usual, right, but was offended, slightly, to realize that she was not above considering her material position. She wanted him to earn money, if not for herself, then for her children. She wanted to get out of military housing and into an apartment, a place all their own. Childbearing had thickened Phyllis; her face, no less delicate a silverpoint than before, sat atop a broader pillar, her nightgown falling from her milk-stuffed breasts in straight Doric folds.

She was right: what he had learned with SAGE led nicely, in his job at the IBM complex on Madison Avenue in New York City, into work on what came to be called SABRE, the nationwide computerized reservation system being developed with American Airlines. The largest civilian computerization task ever undertaken, it involved a million lines of program code, two hundred technicians, ten thousand miles of leased telecommunication lines, and a thousand agents using desktop terminals connected to two IBM 7090 mainframes north of the city, in Briarcliff Manor. One computer was live and the other was duplexed, waiting in case of breakdown. A tiny fraction of those million lines of code were Owen’s creation; because of him the AND and OR gates and the IF … THEN forks shuttled flight numbers, abbreviated terminal names, prices, and individual seats into the right electronic slots half a continent away. His inborn Scots thrift became a passion for electronic economy—for reformulations that would bypass an elaborate subroutine or redundant loop and save a sliver of time he could clearly sense as the monitor screen, like a wearying boxer, responded to the tapped keys.

Phyllis, for the free hour of evening when the two babies were at last asleep and the dinner dishes sang in the dishwasher, could follow his explanations, though this was not her kind of math, these electrons flying around and around the algorithmic circuit like horses plodding around a millstone, and she could sometimes suggest, in a weightless leap of insight, a fresh way around some linear difficulty; Owen would be quite dazzled, and fall in love with her anew.