“Would you be game, then,” he asked her, while Manhattan traffic bleated and roared below them on East 63rd Street, “to leave the city and let me and Ed try this? If it fails, we can pocket our losses and get salaried jobs again.”

“Why would you fail?” Phyllis asked, in one of those casual verbal gestures that set the vectors of his life. “I think it sounds like fun. Ed’s a slob,” she added, “but he’s solid. And he knows how the world works.”

Meaning that Owen didn’t? “You’re great,” he told his wife. “How would you feel about Connecticut? There’s a town Ed knows of, in the middle of nowhere an hour from Hartford, where there’s cheap factory space and good public schools. An aunt of his came from there; she used to work in the local light-bulb factory, when it still made light bulbs. Small-town innocence, honey. Whitespired Congregational church. Cannonballs and a statue on the village green. Playmates for Gregory and Iris.”

“But—how much factory space do you need?”

“We don’t know yet, but we have to have an address to put on the letterhead. Ed even has a name for us, using our initials. E-O Data Management.”

“It sounds,” Phyllis said, feigning or truly feeling enthusiasm, “very impressive.”

DigitEyes, it should be explained, was a method of drawing with a light pen on a computer screen. Owen had been impressed by the way that the cathode-ray tubes on Whirlwind could display T, for target, and F, for fighter, and track them; the process had been elaborated to include radar sightings in the SAGE project, on which he had worked in his military interval. His instinct was that the CRT, the speckly basis of television, was the natural real-time interface for the computer operator, bypassing switches, punched tapes, and code-language command lines. In the early ’sixties, there was already enough complexity in the transistorized circuits for the computer games undergraduates were inventing, and for vector graphics to be plotted, enlarged, worked on, and stored. The images, all in straight lines, could be zoomed, to be worked on in detail, and then returned to standard scale, marvellously refined. They could not yet be turned in a virtual third dimension, but Owen could conceive of this coming, as computer power doubled and redoubled. Engineering and architectural firms were the first customers for the program, but mainframe computers were still out of most firms’ financial reach, and the huge future that Owen could glimpse for graphics interaction waited for more powerful chips. When he showed Phyllis the first primitive light-pen plotting, she said, giving it a glance, “Some day every pixel could have an address, and serve as a communication point.” Even for Owen it was hard to picture such an abyss of calculation, of electronic information—as if every atom in the universe were an individual, with its own private story.

viii. Village Sex—IV