Bellwether (11 page)

That creep or fly or run,

After me so as you never saw!”

diorama wigs (1750—60)—–
Hair fad of the court of Louis XVI inspired by Madame de Pompadour, who was fond of dressing her hair in unusual ways. Hair was draped over a frame stuffed with cotton wool or straw and cemented with a paste that hardened, and the hair was powdered and decorated with pearls and flowers. The fad rapidly got out of hand. Frames grew as high as three feet tall, and the decorations became elaborate and men pictorial. Hairdos had waterfalls, cupids, and scenes from novels. Naval battles, complete with ships and smoke, were waged on top of women’s heads, and one widow, overcome with mourning for her dead husband, had his tombstone erected in her hair. Died out with the advent of the French Revolution and the resultant shortage of heads to put wigs on.

Rivers are not just wide streams. They are drainage basins for dozens, sometimes hundreds of tributaries. The Lena River in Siberia, for example, drains an area of over a million square miles, including the Karenga, the Olekma, the Vitim, and the Aldan rivers, and a thousand smaller streams and brooks, some of which follow such distant, convoluted courses it would never occur to you they connected to the Lena, thousands of miles away.

The events leading up to a scientific breakthrough are frequently not only random but far afield from science. Take the measles. Einstein had them when he was four and his father was only trying to amuse a sick little boy when he gave him a pocket compass to play with. And the keys to the universe.

Fleming’s life is a whole system of coincidences, beginning with his father, who was a groundskeeper on the Churchill estate. When ten-year-old Winston fell in the lake, Fleming’s father jumped in and rescued him. The grateful family rewarded him by sending his son Alexander to medical school.

Take Penzias and Wilson. Robert Dicke, at Princeton University, talked to P.J.E. Peebles about calculating how hot the Big Bang was. He did, realized it was hot enough to be detectable as a residue of radiation, and told Peter G. Roll and David T. Wilkinson that they should look for microwaves.

Peebles (are you following this?) gave a talk at Johns Hopkins in which he mentioned Roll and Wilkinson’s project. Ken Turner of the Carnegie Institute heard the lecture and mentioned it to Bernard Burke at MIT, a friend of Penzias. (Still with me?)

When Penzias called Burke on something else altogether (his daughter’s birthday party probably), he told Burke about their impossible background noise. And Burke told him to call Wilkinson and Roll.

During the next week several things happened:

I fed flagpole-sitting and mah-jongg data into the computer, Management declared HiTek a smoke-free building, Gina’s daughter, Brittany, turned five, and Dr. Turnbull, of all people, came to see me.

She was wearing a po-mo pink silk campshirt and pink jeans and a friendly smile. The jeans and camp shirt meant she was following HiTek’s dressing-down edict. I had no idea what the smile meant.

“Dr. Foster,” she said, turning it on me full force, “just the person I wanted to see.”

“If you’re looking for a package, Dr. Turnbull,” I said warily, “Flip hasn’t been here yet.”

She laughed, a merry, tinkling laugh I wouldn’t have thought she was capable of. “Call me Alicia,” she said. “No package. I just thought I’d drop by and chat with you. You know, so we could get to know each other better. We’ve really only talked a couple of times.”

Once, I thought, and you yelled at me. What are you really here for?

“So,” she said, sitting on one of the lab tables and crossing her legs. “Where did you go to school?”

“Getting to know you” at HiTek usually consists of “So, are you dating anybody?” or, in the case of Elaine, “Are you into high-impact aerobics?” but maybe this was Alicia’s idea of small talk. “I got my doctorate at Baylor.”

She smiled yet more brightly. “It was in sociology, wasn’t it?”

“And stats,” I said.

“A double major,” she said approvingly. “Was that where you did your undergrad work?”

She couldn’t be an industry spy. We worked for the same industry. And all this was up in Personnel’s records anyway. “No,” I said. “Where’d you do your graduate work?”

End of conversation. “Indiana,” she said, as if I’d asked for something that was none of my business, and slid her pink rear off the table, but she didn’t leave. She stood looking around the lab at the piles of data.

“You have so much stuff in here,” she said, examining one of the untidy piles.

Maybe Management had sent her to spy on Workplace Organization. “I plan to get things straightened up as soon as I finish my funding forms,” I said.

She wandered over to look at the flagpole-sitting piles. “I’ve already turned mine in.”

Of course.

“And messiness is good. Susan Holyrood and Dan Twofeathers’s labs were both messy. R. C. Mendez says it’s a creativity indicator.”

I had no idea who any of these people were or what was going on here. Something, obviously. Maybe Management had sent her to look for signs of smoking. Alicia had forgotten all about the friendly smile and was circling the lab like a shark.

“Bennett told me you’re working on fads source analysis. Why did you decide to work with fads?”

“Everybody else was doing it,”

“Really?” she said eagerly. “Who are the other scientists?”

“That was a joke,” I said lamely, and set about the hopeless task of trying to explain it, “You know, fads, something people do just because everybody else is doing it?”

“Oh, I get it,” she said, which meant she didn’t, but she seemed more bemused than offended. “Wittiness can be a creativity indicator, too, can’t it? What
do you
think the most important quality for a scientist k?”

“Luck,” I said.

Now she did look offended. “Lack?”

“And good assistants,” I said. “Look at Roy Plunkett. His assistant’s using a silver gasket on the tank of chlorofluorocarbons was what led to the discovery of Teflon. Or Becquerel. He had the good luck to hire a young Polish girl to help him with his radiation therapy. Her name was Marie Curie.”

“That’s very interesting,” she said. “Where did you say you did your undergrad work?”

“University of Oregon,” I said.

“How old were you when you got your doctorate?”

We were back to the third degree. “Twenty-six.”

“How old are you now?”

“Thirty-one,” I said, and that was apparently the right answer because she turned the brights back on. “Did you grow up in Oregon?”

“No,” I said. “Nebraska.”

This, on the other hand, was
not
Alicia switched off the smile, said, “I have a lot of work to do,” and left without a backward glance. Whatever she’d wanted, apparently witty and messy weren’t enough.

I sat there staring at the screen wondering what that had been all about, and Flip came in wearing an assortment of duct tape and a pair of backless clogs.

She should have used some of the duct tape on the clogs. They slopped off her feet with every step, and she had to half-shuffle her way down the hall to me. The clogs and the duct tape were both the bilious electric blue she’d worn the other day.

“What do you call that color?” I asked.

“Cerenkhov blue.”

Of course. After the bluish radiation in nuclear reactors. How appropriate. In fairness, though, I had to admit it wasn’t the first time a faddish color had been given a wretched name. Back in Louis XVI’s day, color names had been downright nauseating. Sewerage, arsenic, smallpox, and Sick Spaniard had all been hit names for yellow-green.

Flip handed me a piece of paper. “You need to sign this,” she said.

It was a petition to declare the staff lounge a nonsmoking area. “Where will people be allowed to smoke if they can’t smoke in the lounge?” I said.

“They shouldn’t smoke. It causes cancer,” she said righteously. “I think people who smoke shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs.” She tossed her hank of hair. “And they should have to live someplace where their secondhand smoke can’t hurt the rest of us.”

“Really, Herr Goebbels,” I said, forgetting that ignorance is the biggest trend of all, and handed the petition back to her.

“Second-secondhand smoke is dangerous,” she said huffily.

“So is meanness.” I turned back to the computer.

“How much does a crown cost?” she said.

It seemed to be my day for questions out of left field. “A crown?” I said, bewildered. “You mean, like a tiara?”

“No-o-o,” she said. “A
crown.”

I tried to picture a crown on top of Flip’s hank of hair, with her hair wrap hanging down one side, and failed. But whatever she was talking about, I’d better pay attention because it was likely to be the next big fad. Flip might be incompetent, insubordinate, and generally insufferable, but she was right there on the cutting edge of fashion.

“A crown,” I said. “Made out of gold?” I pantomimed placing one on my head. “With points?”

“Points?”
she said, outraged. “It better not have points. A
crown.”

“I’m sorry, Flip,” I said. “I don’t know—”

“You’re a scinentist,” she said. “You’re supposed to know scientific terms,” she said.

I wondered if
crown
had become a scientific term the way duct tape had become a personal errand.

“A
crown!”
she said, sighed enormously, and clopped out of the lab and down the hall.

It was my day for encounters I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and that included my hair-bobbing data. I was sorry I’d ever gotten the idea of including the other fads of the day. There were way too many of them, and none of them made any sense.

Peanut-pushing, for instance, and flagpole-sitting, and painting knees with rouge. College kids had painted old Model T’s with clever slogans like “Banana oil” and “Oh, you kid!”, middle-aged housewives had dressed up like Chinese maidens and played mah-jongg, and fads had seemed to come out of the woodwork, superseding each other in months and sometimes weeks. The black bottom replaced mah-jongg, which had replaced King Tut, and the whole thing was so chaotic it was impossible to sort out.

Crossword puzzles were the only fad that was halfway reasonable, and even that was a puzzle. The fad had started in the fall of 1924, well after hair-bobbing, but crossword puzzles had been around since the 1800s, and the
New York World
had published a weekly crossword since 1913.

And reasonable, on closer examination, wasn’t really the word. A minister had passed out crosswords during church that, on being solved, revealed the scripture lesson. Women had worn dresses decorated with black-and-white squares, and hats and stockings to match, and Broadway put on a revue called “Puzzles of 1925.” People had cited crosswords as the cause of their divorces, secretaries wore pocket dictionaries around their wrists like bracelets, doctors warned of eyestrain, and in Budapest a writer left a suicide note in the form of a crossword puzzle, a puzzle, by the way, which the police never solved, probably because they were already consumed with the next fad: the Charleston.

Bennett stuck his head in the door. “Have you got a minute? I need to ask you a question.” He came in. He had changed his checked shirt for a faded plaid one that was neither madras nor Ivy League, and he was carrying a copy of the simplified funding form.

“A two-letter word for an Egyptian sun god?” I said. “It’s Ra.”

He grinned. “No, I was just wondering if Flip had brought you a copy of the memo Management said they’d send around. Explaining the simplified funding form?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “I had to get one from Gina.” I fished it out from a pile of twenties books.

“Great,” he said, “I’ll go make a copy and bring this back.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “You can keep it.”

“You finished filling out your funding forms?”

“No,” I said. “Read the memo.”

He looked at it. “‘Page nineteen, Question forty-four-C.
To
find the primary extensional funding formula, multiply the departmental needs analysis by the fiscal base quotient, unless the project involves calibrated structuring, in which case the quotient should be calculated according to Section W-A of the accompanying instructions.” He turned the paper over. “Where are the accompanying instructions?”

“No one knows,” I said.

He handed the memo back to me. “Maybe I don’t have to go to France to study chaos. Maybe I could study it right here,” he said, shaking his head. “Thanks,” and he started to leave.

“Speaking of which,” I said, “how’s your information diffusion project coming?”

“The lab’s all ready,” he said. “I can get the macaques as soon as I finish this stupid funding form, which should be in about”—he pulled a calculator out of his threadbare pants and punched in numbers—“six thousand years from now.”

Flip slouched in and handed us each a stapled stack of papers.

“What’s this?” Bennett said. “The accompanying instructions?”

“No-o-o,” Flip said, tossing her head. “It’s the FDA report on the health hazards of smoking.”

dance marathon (1923—33)—–
Endurance fad in which the object was to dance the longest to earn money. Couples pinched and kicked each other to stay awake, and when that failed, took turns sleeping on their partner’s shoulder for as long as 150 days. The marathons became a gruesome spectator sport, with people watching to see who would have hallucinations brought on by sleep deprivation, collapse, or, in the case of Homer Moorhouse, drop dead, and the New Jersey SPCA complained that the marathons were cruel to (human) animals. Persisted into the first years of the Depression simply because people needed the money, which worked out to a little over a penny an hour. If you won.