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Well, as I said, we went ahead and used EPICAC anyway. My wife, the former Pat Kilgallen, and I worked with him on the night shift, from five in the afternoon until two in the morning. Pat wasn’t my wife then. Far from it.

That’s how I came to talk with EPICAC in the first place. I loved Pat Kilgallen. She is a brown-eyed strawberry blond who looked very warm and soft to me, and later proved to be exactly that. She was—still is—a crackerjack mathematician, and she kept our relationship strictly professional. I’m a mathematician, too, and that, according to Pat, was why we could never be happily married.

I’m not shy. That wasn’t the trouble. I knew what I wanted, and was willing to ask for it, and did so several times a month. "Pat, loosen up and marry me."

One night, she didn’t even look up from her work when I said it. "So romantic, so poetic," she murmured, more to her control panel than to me. "That’s the way with mathematicians—all hearts and flowers." She closed a switch. "I could get more warmth out of a sack of frozen CO2."

"Well, how should I say it?" I said, a little sore. Frozen CO2, in case you don’t know, is dry ice. I’m as romantic as the next guy, I think. It’s a question of singing so sweet and having it come out so sour. I never seem to pick the right words.

"Try and say it sweetly," she said sarcastically. "Sweep me off my feet. Go ahead."

"Darling, angel, beloved, will you please marry me?" It was no go—hopeless, ridiculous. "Dammit, Pat, please marry me!"

She continued to twiddle her dials placidly. "You’re sweet, but you won’t do."

Pat quit early that night, leaving me alone with my troubles and EPICAC. I’m afraid I didn’t get much done for the Government people. I just sat there at the keyboard—weary and ill at ease, all right—trying to think of something poetic, not coming up with anything that didn’t belong in The Journal of the American Physical Society.

I fiddled with EPICAC’s dials, getting him ready for another problem. My heart wasn’t in it, and I only set about half of them, leaving the rest the way they’d been for the problem before. That way, his circuits were connected up in a random, apparently senseless fashion. For the plain hell of it, I punched out a message on the keys, using a childish numbers-for-letters code: "1" for "A," "2" for "B," and so on, up to "26" for "Z," "23-8-1-20-3-1-14-9-4-15," I typed—"What can I do?"

Clickety-click, and out popped two inches of paper ribbon. I glanced at the nonsense answer to a nonsense problem: "23-8-1-20-19-20-8-5-20-18-15-21-2-12-5." The odds against it being by chance a sensible message, against its even containing a meaningful word of more than three letters, were staggering. Apathetically, I decoded it. There it was, staring up at me: "What’s the trouble?"

I laughed out loud at the absurd coincidence. Playfully, I typed, "My girl doesn’t love me."

Clickety-click. "What’s love? What’s girl?" asked EPICAC.

Flabbergasted, I noted the dial settings on his control panel, then lugged a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary over to the keyboard. With a precision instrument like EPICAC, half-baked definitions wouldn’t do. I told him about love and girl, and about how I wasn’t getting any of either because I wasn’t poetic. That got us onto the subject of poetry, which I defined for him.

"Is this poetry?" he asked. He began clicking away like a stenographer smoking hashish. The sluggishness and stammering clicks were gone. EPICAC had found himself. The spool of paper ribbon was unwinding at an alarming rate, feeding out coils onto the floor. I asked him to stop, but EPICAC went right on creating. I finally threw the main switch to keep him from burning out.

I stayed there until dawn, decoding. When the sun peeped over the horizon at the Wyandotte campus, I had transposed into my own writing and signed my name to a two-hundred-and-eighty-line poem entitled, simply, "To Pat." I am no judge of such things, but I gather that it was terrific.