When he had spotted her floating through the crowds at MIT he had not foreseen the growing weight she would bring with her—the soggy diapers, the luggage of cribs and carriages, bibs and jars of Gerber’s puree, the clamor of unsleeping need, the cycles of fretful illness as germs ricocheted within the family, the multiplied responsibilities cantilevered far into the future into college and beyond. Bourgeois comfort took on girth in Eisenhower’s second term: big-finned cars, tall pastel refrigerators, roaring, dripping air-conditioners greedy for electricity. Phyllis’s spirited intelligence had nowhere to go within the sluggish, clogged dailiness of life in their succession of two-bedroom apartments. They moved from noisy East 55th Street between Lex and Third to 63rd, farther east; still they did not escape the metropolitan racket that kept her awake and left her to sleepwalk through her days with the two toddlers. In the intricate realm beneath the mid-town streets, into which helmeted men descended and from which puffs of steam escaped, there was endless revision; all-night jackhammers went on fixing the same thing week after week.

Somehow she was pregnant again. Owen couldn’t imagine how it had happened, he was keeping such brutally long hours at the airline project. SABRE was named in 1960, after a kind of Buick, but posing as an acronym: Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment. Before the system was operational, other airlines—Delta, Pan American—signed up with IBM, and the country’s banks and accounting offices were waking up to the computerized future. There arose a hungry market in even smaller companies for programs speeding their payrolls, inventories, invoices. In 1960 there were perhaps five thousand computers in the country, most of them in universities and scientific labs, and the programmers worked with paper-tape readers and punches and stayed up all night for computer time. The word “software” had arrived, and “bugs” and “debugging.” FORTRAN had been developed at IBM, for mostly scientific work; COBOL 60—Common Business Oriented Language 1960—opened the computer to business applications. The world of affordable PCs was two decades away, but a fellow IBM minion in the Madison Avenue hive, Ed Mervine, began to woo Owen, over lunches in the company cafeteria, with its eggshell walls each decorated by a deadpan sign bearing President Watson’s famous imperative. Ed, from the Bronx, had an offhand, stabbing way of speaking that was more efficient than it seemed. He confided above their trays, “You know, O., there’s a world out there of medium-sized companies that have paid a couple hundred thousand for hardware they don’t know how to operate. As the price comes down, there’s bound to be more of them. Manufacturers, distributors, these new franchises, lesser airlines, banks, architectural firms. IBM and Sperry Rand can’t be bothered with them; they farm them out, to assholes.”