Peter Honorious and Dinah Grebs

Peter Honorious and Dinah Grebs become a couple through a collision between compulsory matchmaking and a love that resists being calculated. Honorious approaches marriage as a state requirement to be managed efficiently; Grebs, already attracted to him, secretly inserts herself into a system designed to keep them apart. Their eventual recognition makes the computer’s forecast seem both uncannily accurate and inadequate: it can project a shared life, but it cannot explain the desire that brings them together or guarantee what comes next.

A relationship inside the marriage system

Honorious seeks help because marriage is not simply a private choice in his society. The State treats pairing as an obligation of social stability and loyalty, while the service industry around it promises to make the compulsory arrangement tolerable, even advantageous. At Clandestine Computer Services, the respectable language of compatibility disguises an underground operation: the company occupies dusty offices in the derelict Lincoln Center area under the cover name Used Softwear Jobbers, Inc. Its director, Euler, presents marriage as something the State requires but that an individual can still hope to make personally suitable.

Grebs is part of this machinery before she becomes Honorious’s prospective partner. As Euler’s secretary, she first appears to him in the everyday setting of his private office, not as a numbered candidate. Honorious’s later selection, however, is managed through data cards and a computer forecast. The change in how he encounters her—from a familiar employee to a possible wife identified by a number—shows how the system separates personal recognition from official eligibility.

Forecasting a possible life

Honorious arrives for his computer appointment carrying data cards for fifteen prospective wives. The candidates have been selected from the National Availability Pool of American Single Women by Computerized Marriage Matchup Services, which bases its choices on answers to 1,006 questions. They remain anonymous until an Official Pair-Bonding Decision; because each has chosen instant-available status, Honorious need only agree to marry one for the pairing to proceed. The process renders people as profiles, numbers, and forecasts before it permits them to meet as named individuals.

After fourteen previews leave him alarmed and despondent, Honorious goes to his final appointment almost resigned to choosing number eleven, the Giggler with the Two Stupid Brothers. Instead, the preview for candidate 6903 gives him an image of a life that feels compellingly shared. He and the brown-haired woman walk on a beach at Martha’s Vineyard, cross the George Washington Bridge, drink wine and eat goat’s cheese on a rock above the Aegean, and run through the rain in Miami. In the forecast’s final domestic scene, they are very much in love in a low white house, and Honorious walks the living room with their colicky baby. The projection covers five years, but its emotional force is immediate: he leaves the terminal convinced that he may be in love with 6903.

Dinah’s hidden place in the forecast

Honorious wants to formalize the pairing at once and asks Euler to identify the woman behind the number. The computer reveals that 6903 is Miss Dinah Grebs, Euler’s own secretary. Honorious recognizes her as familiar, and Euler reaches the same conclusion; when Grebs answers from the next room, the numerical identity becomes physically present. The coincidence is not merely that the woman in the forecast works nearby. She is the person who has already been visible to Honorious, though he has not understood her as a possible partner.

Euler immediately asks Grebs how her data card entered Honorious’s selected list. She refuses to explain in front of Euler and asks to speak to Honorious alone. Once they are private, she tells him that she fell for him the first time he came to the office and believed they were right for each other without needing a machine to confirm it. Her own card, she explains, would not have been processed by the high-class matrimonial service. She therefore interfered to place herself among Honorious’s candidates. Her action makes the apparent computer-generated match partly the result of human intention—and exposes the unequal access built into the system that claims to measure compatibility.

From calculation to confrontation

Honorious responds to Grebs’s disclosure by questioning whether she has any valid legal claim on him and offering a cash settlement for her time and trouble. He regards this as fair treatment, but the offer turns her declaration of love into a transaction and assumes that the problem can be resolved by compensating her. Grebs rejects the money and says that he has just lost her. When Honorious protests that he is the injured party, she points to what she has risked and done for him: she fell in love, cheated and perjured herself, and made a fool of herself in his presence, only to be treated as a claimant he can pay off.

The argument sharpens when Honorious accuses her of trying to trap him and tampering with the data cards. Grebs accepts that she tampered with the process and sarcastically recommends number three, the woman who does not talk. That barb recalls one of Honorious’s earlier forecasts: he remembered the third candidate as a shy, silent girl whose silences later provoked him to demand that she speak. Grebs thus turns the machinery of his previous previews against him, contrasting a predicted match that became intolerable with the real person standing before him.

Honorious curses and moves closer; Grebs swings at him, and he seizes her wrist. The encounter leaves them in direct physical contact, breathing hard and looking at one another. The scene does not resolve their disagreement through a legal ruling or a completed agreement. Instead, the conflict gives way to a shared look that the narration identifies as love’s preview: a moment that releases them from their previous positions and begins the mating process on which the State’s pairing system depends.

An uncertain future

The relationship’s decisive turn is not the five-year forecast but the unplanned recognition that follows their quarrel. The computer had shown Honorious a sequence of settings, domestic details, and an apparent future with 6903; it had not made him recognize Grebs before learning her number, nor could it account for her earlier attraction and deliberate choice to pursue him. Their story therefore distinguishes prediction from experience: the forecast can furnish a possible future, while the look between them makes that future emotionally consequential.

Honorious later asks whether their projected future was real or whether Grebs had altered her own data. She does not give him certainty, telling him that he will have to wait and find out. The ending preserves the difference between a simulated marriage and a lived one. The forecast’s baby and shared home remain projections, not confirmed outcomes, and the text does not establish that Honorious and Grebs complete a formal marriage. Their relationship closes instead on suspense: the official system has supplied a possible match, Grebs has admitted to shaping the route toward it, and the pair must discover whether the life the machine displayed can become their own.