it was Sally’s job to analyze the program of which the printouts were the results. Somewhere in the program there was a bug, and the college admissions office, which had dreamed up the program in the first place, had asked Sally to find it. The program, designed to review the records of hopeful high school seniors, had disqualified every applicant for the fall semester. When Sally had suggested that perhaps the program was perfect and the applicants simply weren’t qualified, the dean of admissions had been less than amused. Soberly, he had handed Sally the program and the output, and asked her to find the problem by Monday morning.
And find it she would, for Sally Montgomery, as well as being beautiful, was brainy. Too brainy for her own good, her mother had always told her. Now, as she began analyzing the program in comparison to the printout it had produced, she could almost hear her mother’s voice telling her she shouldn’t be down here working in the middle of the night; she should be upstairs “loving her husband.”
“You’ll lose him,” Phyllis Paine had told Sally over and over again. “A woman’s place is in the home, loving her husband and her children. It’s not normal for a woman your age to work.”
“Then why did I go to college?” Sally had countered back in the days before she had given up arguing with her mother.
“Well, it wasn’t to major in mathematics! I’d always hoped you’d do something with your music. Music is good for a woman, particularly the piano. In my day, all women played the piano.”
It had gone on for years. Sally had finally stopped trying to explain to her mother that times had changed. She and Steve had agreed from the start that her career was every bit as important as his own. Her mother simply couldn’t understand, and never missed an opportunity to let Sally know that in her opinion—the only one that counted, of course—a woman’s place was in the home. “Maybe it’s all right for women to work down in New York, but in Eastbury, Massachusetts, it just doesn’t look right!”
And maybe, Sally reflected as she spotted the error in the program and began rewriting the flawed area, she’s right. Maybe we should have gone out to Phoenix last year, and gotten out of this stuffy little town. I could have found a job out there, probably a better one than I have here. But they hadn’t gone. They had agreed that since Sally was happy at the college, and Steve saw a glowing future for both of them in Eastbury’s burgeoning electronics industry, they should stay right where they were, and where they’d always been.
Until the last few years, Eastbury had been one of those towns in which the older people talked about how good things used to be, and the younger people wondered how they could get out. But then, five years ago, the great change had begun. A change in the tax structure had encouraged fledgling businesses to come to Eastbury. And it had worked. Buildings which had once housed shoe factories and textile mills, then lain empty and crumbling for decades, were bustling once again. People were working—no longer at slave wages on killing shifts, but with flexible hours and premium salaries, creating the electronic miracles that were changing the face of the country.
Eastbury itself, of course, had not changed much. It was still a small town, its plain façade cheered only by a new civic center which was a clumsy attempt at using new money to create old buildings. What had resulted was a city hall that looked like a bank posing as a colonial mansion, and an elaborately landscaped “town square” entirely fenced in with wrought iron fancy-work. Still, Eastbury was a safe place, small enough so the Montgomerys knew almost everyone in town, yet large enough to support the college that employed Sally.
The tea was cold, and Sally glanced at the clock, only slightly surprised to see that she’d been working for more than an hour. But the program was done, and Sally was sure that tomorrow morning it would produce the desired printouts. Eastbury College would have a freshman class next year after all.
She meticulously straightened up the desk, readying it for the onslaught of telephone calls that greeted Steve every morning. Using his talents as a salesman in tandem with the contacts he had made growing up in Eastbury, Steve had turned the town into what he