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“Molybdenum, operator,” said a voice in Amy’s ear, “spelled m-o-l-y-b-d-e-n-u-m.”

The nasal Yankee voice hurt Amy’s ears—sounded, she said, like somebody beating a cracked bell with a chain. It was my voice.

“Clangbang,” said Amy to my voice.

“The unit comes with silicone gaskets throughout,” said my voice. “That’s s-i-l-i-c-o-n-e, operator.”

“Oh, you don’t have to spell silicone for me,” said Amy. “Isn’t anything I don’t know about silicones after six months in this bughouse.”

“Yours truly,” said my voice, “Arthur C. Whitney, Jr., Customer Relations Section, Boiler Sales Department, Heavy Apparatus Division, Room 412, Building 77, Pittsburgh Works.”

“ACW:all,” Amy typed at the bottom of the letter. She separated the letter and copies from the carbon paper, dropped them into her out-basket, and slipped my record from the spindle of her Dictaphone.

“Why don’t you bring your face around to the girl pool sometime, Arthur?” said my wife-to-be to my record. “We’d treat you like Clark Gable, just any man at all.” She put another record from her in-basket onto her spindle. “Come on, you old devil, you,” she said to the new record, “thaw out this half-frozen Alabama girl. Make me swoon.”

“Five carbons, operator,” said a new, harsh voice in Amy’s ear. “To Mr. Harold N. Brewster, Thrust-Bearing Division, Jorgenson Precision Engineering Products Corporation, Lansing 5, Michigan.”

“You are a hot-blooded old thing, aren’t you?” said Amy. “What makes you men up here so passionate—the steam heat?”

“Did you say something to me, Amy?” said Miss Hostetter, removing her earphones. She was a tall woman, without ornaments, save for her gold twenty-year-service pin. She looked at Amy with bleak reproach. “What’s the trouble now?”

Amy stopped her Dictaphone. “I was talking to the gentleman on the record,” she said. “Got to talk to somebody around here, or go crazy.”

“There are lots of nice people to talk to,” said Miss Hostetter. “You’re so critical of everything, when you haven’t really had time to find out what everything’s about.”

“You tell me what this is about,” said my wife-to-be, including the girl pool in a sweep of her hand.

“There was a very good cartoon about that in the Montezuma Minutes,” said Miss Hostetter. The Montezuma Minutes was the company’s weekly newspaper for employees.

“The one with the ghost of Florence Nightingale hovering over a stenographer?” said Amy.

“That was a good one,” said Miss Hostetter. “But the one I had in mind showed a man with his new Thermolux furnace, and there were thousands of women all around him and the furnace, kind of ghostly. ‘He doesn’t send orchids, but he should,’ the caption said, ‘to the ten thousand women behind every dependable Montezuma product.’ ”

“Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts,” said my wife-to-be. “Everybody’s ghosts up here. They come out of the smoke and the cold in the morning, and they rush around and worry about boilers and silicone gaskets and molybdenum all day, then they disappear at five, plain fade away without a word. I don’t know how anybody up here ever gets married or falls in love or finds anything nice to laugh about, or anything. Back home in high school—”

“High school isn’t life,” said Miss Hostetter.

“God help women, if this is life—cooped up all together, with a floor all to themselves,” said my wife-to-be.

The two women faced each other with antipathies they’d been honing to razor sharpness for six months. The little blades glinted in their eyes, while they smiled politely.

“Life is what you make it,” said Miss Hostetter, “and ingratitude is one of the worst sins. Look around you! Pictures on the walls, carpets on the floor, beautiful music, hospitalization and retirement, the Christmas party, fresh flowers on our desks, coffee hours, our own cafeteria, our own recreation room with television and ping-pong.”

“Everything but life,” said my wife-to-be. “The only sign of life I’ve heard of up here is that poor Larry Barrow.”

“Poor Larry Barrow!” said Miss Hostetter, shocked. “Amy—he killed a policeman!”

Amy opened her top desk drawer, and looked down