Bellwether (14 page)

There was a shriek from the living room. “It’s
my
birthday!” Brittany wailed.

I tucked the tablet back under the bed.

“My, Peyton,” Lindsay’s mother said. “What a creative way to show your need for attention.”

pyrography (1990—05)—–
Craft fad in which designs were burned into wood or leather with a hot iron. Flowers, birds, horses, and knights in armor were branded onto pin cases, pen trays, glove boxes, pipe racks, playing card cases, and other similarly useless items. Died out because its ability threshold was too high. Everyone’s horses looked like cows.

Thursday the weather got worse. It was spitting snow when I got to work, and by lunch it was a full-blown blizzard. Flip had managed to break both copy machines, so I gathered up my flagpole-sitting clippings to be copied at Kinko’s, but as I walked out to my car I decided they could wait, and I scuttled back to the building, my head down against the snow. And practically ran into Shirl.

She was huddled next to a minivan, smoking a cigarette. She had a brown mitten on the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette, her coat collar was turned up, a muffler was wrapped around her chin, and she was shivering.

“Shirl!” I shouted against the wind. “What are you doing out here?”

She clumsily fished a piece of paper out of her coat pocket with her mittened hand and handed it to me. It was a memo declaring the entire building smoke-free.

“Flip,” I said, shaking snow off the already wet memo. “She’s behind this.” I crumpled the memo up and threw it on the ground. “Don’t you have a car?” I said.

She shook her head, shivering. “I get a ride to work.”

“You can sit in my car,” I said, and thought of a better place. “Come on.” I took hold of her arm. “I know someplace you can smoke.”

“The whole building’s been declared off-limits to smoking,” she said, resisting.

“This place isn’t in the building,” I said.

She stubbed out her cigarette. “This is a kind thing to do for an old lady,” she said, and we both scuttled back to the building through the driving snow.

We stopped inside the door to shake the snow off and take off our hats. Her leathery face was bright red with cold.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, unwrapping her muffler.

“When you’ve spent as much time studying fads as I have, you develop a hearty dislike for them,” I said. “Especially aversion fads. They seem to bring out the worst in people. And it’s the principle of the thing. Next it might be chocolate cheesecake. Or reading. Come on.”

I led her down the hall. “This place won’t be warm, but it’ll be out of the wind, and you won’t get snowed on, at least. And this antismoking fad should be dying out by spring. It’s reaching the extreme stage that inevitably produces a backlash.”

“Prohibition lasted thirteen years.”

“The law did. The fad didn’t McCarthyism only lasted four.” I started down the stairs to Bio.

“Where exactly is this place?” Shirl asked.

“It’s Dr. O’Reilly’s lab,” I said. “It’s got a porch out back with an overhang.”

“And you’re sure he won’t mind?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “He never pays any attention to what other people think.”

“He sounds like an extraordinary young man,” Shirl said, and I thought, He really is.

He didn’t fit any of the usual patterns. He certainly wasn’t a rebel, refusing to go along with fads to assert his individuality. Rebellion can be a fad, too, as witness Hell’s Angels and peace symbols. And yet he wasn’t oblivious either. He was funny and intelligent and observant.

I tried to explain that to Shirl as we went downstairs to Bio. “It isn’t that he doesn’t care what other people think. It’s just that he doesn’t see what it has to do with him.”

“My physics teacher used to say Diogenes shouldn’t have wasted his time looking for an honest man,” Shirl said, “he should have been looking for somebody who thought for himself.”

I started down Bio’s hall, and it suddenly occurred to me that Alicia might be in the lab. “Wait here a sec,” I said to Shirl, and peeked in the door. “Bennett?”

He was hunched over his desk, practically hidden by papers.

“Can Shirl smoke out on the porch?” I said. “Sure,” he said without looking up. I went out and got Shirl.

“You can smoke in here if you want,” Bennett said when we came in.

“No, she can’t. HiTek’s made the whole building nonsmoking,” I said. “I told her she could smoke out on the porch.”

“Sure,” he said, standing up. “Feel free to come down here anytime. I’m always here.”

“Oh?” Shirl said. “You work on your project even during lunch?”

He told her he didn’t have a project to work on and he had to wait for his funding to be approved before he could get his macaques, but I wasn’t paying attention. I was looking at what he was wearing.

Flip had been right about Bennett He was wearing a white shirt and a Cerenkhov blue tie.

“I’ve been working on this chaos thing,” he said, straightening the tie.

“Did Alicia decide chaos theory was the optimum project to win the Niebnitz Grant?” I said, and couldn’t keep the sharpness out of my voice.

“No,” he said, frowning at me. “When she was talking about variables the other day, it gave me an idea about why my prediction rate didn’t improve. So I refigured the data.”

“And did it help?” I said.

“No,” he said, looking abstracted, the way he had when Alicia’d been talking. “The more work I do on it, the more I think maybe Verhoest was right, and there is an outside force acting on the system.” He said to Shirl, “You’re probably not interested in this. Here, let me show you where the porch is.” He led her through the habitat to the back door. “When my macaques come, you’ll have to go around the side.” He opened the door, and snow and wind whirled in. “Are you sure you don’t want to smoke inside? You could stand in the door. Leave the door open at least so there’s some heat.”

“I was born in Montana,” she said, wrapping her muffler around her neck as she went out. “This is a mild summer breeze,” but I noticed she left the door open.

Bennett came back in, rubbing his arms.
“Brr
, it’s freezing out there. What’s the matter with people? Sending an old lady out in the snow in the name of moral righteousness. I suppose Flip was behind it.”

“Flip is behind everything.” I looked at the littered desk. “I guess I’d better let you get back to work. Thanks for letting Shirl smoke down here.”

“No, wait,” he said. “I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about the funding form.” He scrabbled through the stuff on his desk and came up with the form. He flipped through pages, looking. “Page fifty-one, section eight. What does
Documentation Scatter Method
mean?”

“You’re supposed to put down
ALR-Augmented,”
I said.

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. It’s what Gina told me to put.”

He penciled it in, shaking his head. “These funding forms are going to be the death of me. I could have
done
the project in the time it’s taken me to fill out this form. HiTek wants us to win the Niebnitz Grant, to make scientific breakthroughs. But name me one scientist who ever made a significant breakthrough while filling out a funding form. Or attending a meeting.”

“Mendeleev,” Shirl said.

We both turned around. Shirl was standing inside the door, shaking snow off her hat. “Mendeleev was on his way to a cheesemaking conference when he solved the problem of the periodic chart,” she said.

“That’s right, he was,” Bennett said. “He stepped on the train and the solution came to him, just like that.”

“Like Poincaré,” I said. “Only he stepped on a bus.”

“And discovered Fuchsian functions,” Bennett said.

“Kekulé was on a bus, too, wasn’t he, when he discovered the benzene ring,” Shirl said thoughtfully. “In Ghent.”

“He was,” I said, surprised. “How do you know so much about science, Shirl?”

“I have to make copies of so many scientific reports, I figured I might as well read them,” she said. “Didn’t Einstein look at the town clock from a bus while he was working on relativity?”

“A bus,” I said. “Maybe that’s what you and I need, Bennett. We take a bus someplace and suddenly everything’s clear—you know what’s wrong with your chaos data and I know what caused hair-bobbing.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” Bennett said. “Let’s—” “Oh, good, you’re here, Bennett,” Alicia said. “I need to talk to you about the grant profile. Shirl, make five copies of this.” She dumped a stack of papers into Shirl’s arms. “Collated and stapled. And this time don’t put them on my desk. Put them in my mailbox.” She turned back to Bennett. “I need you to help me come up with additional relevant factors.”

“Transportation,” I said, and started for the door. “And cheese.”

ironing hair (1965—68)—–
Hair fad inspired by Joan Baez, Mary Travers, and other folksingers. Part of the hippie fad, the lank look of long straight hair was harder to obtain than the male’s general shagginess. Beauty parlors gave “antiperms,” but the preferred method among teenagers was laying their heads on the ironing board and pressing their locks with a clothes iron. The ironing was done a few inches at a time by a friend (who hopefully knew what she was doing), and college girls lined up in dorms to take their turns.

During the next few days, nothing much happened. The simplified funding allocation forms were due on the twenty-third, and, after donating yet another weekend to filling them out, I gave mine to Flip to deliver and then thought better of it and took it up to Paperwork myself.

The weather turned nice again, Elaine tried to talk me into going white-water rafting with her to relieve stress, Sarah told me her boyfriend, Ted, was experiencing attachment aversion, Gina asked me if I knew where to find Romantic Bride Barbie for Bethany (who had decided she wanted one just like Brittany’s and whose birthday was in November), and I got three overdue notices for Browning,
The Complete Works.

In between, I finished entering all my King Tut and black bottom data and started drawing a Barbie picture. I didn’t have a box of sixty-four crayons, but there was a paintbox on the computer. I called it up, along with my statistical and differential equations programs, and started coding the correlations and plotting the relationships to each other. I graphed skirt lengths in cerulean blue, cigarette sales in gray, plotted lavender regressions for Isadora Duncan and yellow ones for temps above eighty-five. White for Irene Castle, radical red for references to rouge, brown for “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”

Flip came in periodically to hand me petitions and ask me questions like, “If you had a fairy godmother, what would she look like?”

“An old lady,” I said, thinking of
Toads and Diamonds
, “or a bird, or something ugly, like a toad. Fairy godmothers disguise themselves so they can tell if you’re deserving of help by whether you’re nice to them. What do you need one for?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not supposed to ask interdepartmental communications liaisons personal questions. If they’re in disguise, how do you know to be nice to them?”

“You’re supposed to be nice in general—” I said and realized it was hopeless. “What’s the petition for?”

“It’s to make HiTek give us dental insurance, of course,” she said.

Of course.

“You
don’t think it’s my assistant, do you?” Flip said. “She’s an old lady.”

I handed her back the petition. “I doubt very much that Shirl is your fairy godmother in disguise.”

“Good,”
she said. “There’s no way I’m going to be nice to somebody who
smokes.”

I didn’t see Bennett, who was busy preparing for the arrival of his macaques, or Shirl, who was doing all Flip’s work, but I did see Alicia. She came up to the lab, wearing po-mo pink, and demanded to borrow my computer.

“Flip’s using mine,” she said irately, “and when I told her to get off, she
refused.
Have you ever met anyone who was that rude?”

That was a tough one. “How’s the search for the Philosopher’s Stone going?” I said.

“I’ve definitely eliminated circumstantial predisposition as a criterion,” she said, shifting my data to the lab table. “Only two Niebnitz Grant recipients have ever made a significant scientific breakthrough subsequent to their winning of the award. And I’ve narrowed down the project approach to a cross-discipline-designed experiment, but I still haven’t determined the personal profile. I’m still evaluating the variables.” She popped my disk out and shoved her own in.

“Have you taken disease into account?” I said.

She looked irritated. “Disease?”

“Diseases have played a big part in scientific breakthroughs. Einstein’s measles, Mendeleev’s lung trouble, Darwin’s hypochondria. The bubonic plague. They closed down Cambridge because of it, and Newton had to go back home to the apple orchard.”

“I hardly see—”

“And what about their shooting skills?” “If you’re trying to be funny—”

“Fleming’s rifle-shooting skills were why St. Mary’s wanted him to stay on after he graduated as a surgeon. They needed him for the hospital rifle team, only there wasn’t an opening in surgery, so they offered him a job in microbiology.”

“And what exactly does Fleming have to do with the Niebnitz Grant?”

“He was circumstantially predisposed to significant scientific breakthroughs. What about their exercise habits? James Watt solved the steam engine problem while he was taking a walk, and William Rowan Hamilton—”

Alicia snatched up her papers and ejected her disk. “I’ll use someone else’s computer,” she said. “It may interest you to know that statistically, fad research has absolutely no chance at all.”

Yes, well, I knew that. Particularly the way it was going right now. Not only did my diagram not look nearly as good as Peyton’s, but no butterfly outlines had appeared. Except the Marydale, Ohio, one, which was not only still there, but had been reinforced by the rolled-down stockings and crossword puzzle data.