Bellwether

by Connie Willis

  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.

  Tuesday I met the new assistant interdepartmental communications liaison. I’d decided I couldn’t wait any longer for the accompanying instructions and was working on the funding forms when I noticed that the bottom of read, “List all,” and the top of the next page read, “to the diversification quotient.” I looked at the page number. It read “42.”

  I went down to see if Gina had the missing pages. She was sitting in a tangle of sacks, wrapping paper, and ribbons. “You are coming to Brittany’s party, aren’t you?” she said. “You have to come. There are going to be six five-year-olds and six mothers, and I don’t know which is worse.”

  “I’ll be there,” I promised, and asked her about the missing pages.

  “There are missing pages?” she said. “My funding form’s at home. When am I going to be able to fill out missing pages? I’ve still got to go buy plates and cups and decorations and fix the refreshments.”

  I escaped and went back to the lab. A gray-haired woman was sitting at the computer, rapidly typing in numbers.

  “Sorry,” she said as soon as I came in the room. “Flip said I could use your computer, but I don’t want to get in your way.” She began rapidly touching keys to save the file.

  “Are you Flip’s new assistant?” I asked, looking at her curiously. She was thin, with tan, leathery skin, like Billy Ray would have after another thirty years of riding the range.

  “Shirl Creets,” she said, shaking my hand. She had a grip like Billy Ray’s, and her fingers were stained a yellowish brown, which explained how Sarah and Elaine had known she was a smoker “just by looking at her.”

  “Flip was using Dr. Turnbull’s computer,” she said, and her voice was hoarse, too, “and she told me to come up here and use yours, that you wouldn’t mind. I’ll be off this as soon as I save the file. I haven’t been smoking,” she added.

  “You can smoke if you want,” I said. “And you can use the computer. I’ve got to go over to Personnel anyway and pick up a different funding allocation form. This one’s missing pages.”

  “I’ll go get it for you,” Shirl said, getting up immediately and taking the form from me. “Which pages is it missing?”

  “Twenty-nine through forty-one,” I said, “and maybe some at the end, I don’t know. Mine only goes up to page sixty-eight. But you don’t have to—”

  “What are assistants for? Do you want me to make an extra copy so you can do a rough draft?”

  “That would be nice, thank you,” I said, in shock, and sat down at the computer.

  I had been nice to Flip, and look what it had gotten me. I took it back that Browning knew anything about trends, Pied Piper or no Pied Piper.

  The data Shirl had been typing in were still there. It was some kind of table. “Carbanks—48, Twofeathers—34,” it read. “Holyrood—61, Chin—39.” I wondered what project Alicia was working on now.

  Shirl was back in five minutes flat, with a stack of neatly collated and stapled sheafs. “I put copies of the missing pages in your original, and made you two extra copies just in case.” She set them gently down on the lab table and handed me another thick sheaf. “While I was in the copy room, I found these clippings. Flip didn’t know who they belonged to. I thought they might be yours.”

  She held up a stack of clippings on dance marathons, neatly paper-clipped to a set of copies.

  “I assumed you wanted copies,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I said, astounded. “I don’t suppose you could talk Flip into assigning you to me?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “She seems to like you.” She set the clippings on the lab table and began straightening the top of it. She fished the chaos theory book out of the mess.

  “Mandelbrot diagrams,” she said interestedly. “Is that what you’re researching?”

  “No,” I said. “Fad origins. I was just reading that out of curiosity. They are connected, though. Fads are a facet of the chaotic system of society, with a number of variables contributing to them.”

  She stacked Brave New World and All’s Well that Ends Well on top of the chaos theory book without comment and picked up Flappers, Flivvers, and Flagpole-Sitters. “What made you choose fads?” she said disapprovingly.

  “You don’t like fads?”

  “I just think there are more direct ways of influencing society than starting a fad. I had a physics teacher who used to say, ‘Pay no attention to what other people are doing. Do what you want, and you can change the world.’”

  “Oh, I don’t want to discover how to start them,” I said. “I suppose HiTek does, and that’s why they keep funding the project, although if the mechanism is as complex as it’s beginning to look, they’ll never be able to isolate the critical variable, at which point they’ll probably stop funding me.” I looked at the dance marathon notes. “What I want to do is understand what causes them.”

  “Why?” she said curiously.

  “Because I just want to understand. Why do people act the way they do? Why do they all suddenly decide to play the same game or wear the same clothes or believe the same thing? In the 1920s smoking was a fad. Now it’s antismoking. Why? Is it instinctive behavior or societal influences? Or something in the air? The Salem witch trials were caused by fear and greed, but they’re always around, and we don
’t burn witches all the time, so there must be something else going on.

  “I just don’t understand what,” I said. “And it doesn’t look like I will anytime soon. I don’t seem to be getting anywhere. You don’t happen to know what caused hair-bobbing, do you?”

  “It’s going slowly?” she said.

  “Slow isn’t the word,” I said. I gestured with the marathon dancing copies. “I feel like I’m in a dance marathon contest. Most of the time it’s not dancing at all, it’s just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to hang on and stay awake. Trying to remember why you signed up in the first place.”

  “My physics teacher used to say that science was one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” she said.

  “And fifty percent filling out nonsimplified funding forms,” I said. I picked up one of the extra copies. “I’d better take one of these over to Gina.”

  “I’ve already taken one to Dr. Damati,” she said. “Oh, and I need to get back there. I promised her I’d wrap Brittany’s presents for her.”

  “You’re sure you can’t persuade Flip?” I said.

  After she left, I started work, but it didn’t make any more sense than when it had been missing, and I was starting to feel vaguely itch again. I took one of the extra copies and went down to Bio to Bennett’s lab.

  Alicia was there, head to head with Bennett at the computer, but he looked up immediately and smiled at me.

  “Hi,” he said. “Come on in.”

  “No, that’s okay. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, smiling at Alicia. She didn’t smile back. “I just wanted to bring you a complete funding form.” I handed him the funding form. “There were pages missing in the ones Flip passed out.”

  “Incompetent,” he said. “Incorrigible. Incapacitating.”

  Alicia was actively glaring at me.

  “Intruding,” I said. “Which is what I’m doing on your meeting. I’ll talk to you later.” I headed for the door.

  “No, wait,” he said. “You’ll be interested in this. Dr. Turnbull was just telling me about her project.” He looked at Alicia. “Tell Dr. Foster what you’ve been doing.”

  “I’ve taken the data on all the previous Niebnitz Grant winners: scientific discipline, project area, educational background—”

  That explained the third degree I’d gotten from her yesterday. She had been trying to determine if I fit the profile, and from the look she was giving me, I must not have even placed.

  “—age, gender, ethnic group, political affiliation.” She scrolled through several screens, and I recognized a chart like the one Shirl had just been working on. “I’m running regressions to determine the relevant characteristics and men analyzing those to construct a profile of the typical Niebnitz Grant recipient and the criteria the Niebnitz Grant Committee uses to make their choices.”

  The committee’s criteria were originality of thought and creativity, I thought. Assuming there is a committee.

  “I haven’t completed the regressions yet, but some patterns are emerging.” She called up a spreadsheet. “The grant is given at a median interval of one point nine years apart, but the closest two grants have ever been given is one point two years, which means the grant won’t be given until May at the earliest.”

  It didn’t mean any such thing, and I would have said so, but she was into it now.

  “Distribution of the awards follows a cyclical pattern, with academic institutions, research labs, and commercial corporations alternating, the next one being a corporation, which gives us an advantage, and”—she switched to a different spreadsheet—“there is a definite bias toward scientists west of the Mississippi, which is also an advantage, and a bias toward the biological sciences. I haven’t determined the specific area yet, but I should have that part of the profile by tomorrow.”

  All of which sounded suspiciously like science on demand. I looked at Bennett to see what he thought about all this, but he was watching the screen intently, abstractedly, as if he’d forgotten we were there.

  Well, of course he was interested. Why wouldn’t he be? If he could win the Niebnitz Grant, he could go back to the Loue River to work on chaos theory and forget all about forms and Flip and the uncertainties of funding.

  Except science doesn’t work like that. You can’t handicap significant breakthroughs like they were a horse race.

  But this wouldn’t be the first time somebody’d convinced himself of something that wasn’t true where money was involved. Take the stock market fad of the late twenties. Or the Dutch tulip craze of the 1600s. In 1634, the prices of tulips that were fancier or prettier or rarer than others started going up, and suddenly everybody—merchants, princes, peasants, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—was buying and selling bulbs like mad. Prices skyrocketed, speculators made fortunes overnight, and people hocked their wooden shoes and the dike to buy a bulb that might cost as much as twelve annual incomes. And then for no reason, the market collapsed, and it was just like October 29, 1929, only with no skyscraper windows for Dutch stockholders to fling themselves out of.

  Not to mention chain letters, pyramid schemes, and the Florida land boom.

  “The other factor that needs to be considered is the name of the grant,” Alicia was saying. “Niebnitz may refer either to Ludwig Niebnitz, who was an obscure eighteenth-century botanist, or to Karl Niebnitz von Drull, who lived in fifteenth-century Bavaria. If it’s Ludwig, that would account for the biological bias. Von Drull was more famous. His area was alchemy.”

  “I have to go,” I said, standing up. “If I’m going to switch my fads project to changing lead into gold, I’ll need to get busy,” and I walked out.

  Bennett followed me out into the hall. “Thanks for bringing the funding form.”

  “We have to stick together against the forces of Flip,” I said. “Have you met her new assistant?”

  “Yeah, she’s great,” he said. “I wonder whatever possessed her to take a job like this?”

  “NIEBNITZ may also be an acronym,” Alicia said from the doorway. “In which case—”

  I took my leave and went back up to my lab.

  Flip was there, typing something on my computer. “How would you describe me?” she asked.

  I looked around the lab. It was spotless. Shirl had cleaned off the lab tables and put all my clippings in folders. In alphabetical order.

  Inescapable, I thought. Impacted. “Inextricable,” I said.

  “That sounds good,” she said. “Does it have two ks or one?”

  dr. spock (1945—65)—–Child care fad, inspired by the pediatrician’s book, Baby and Child Care, growing interest in psychology, and the fragmentation of the extended family. Spock advocated a more permissive approach than previous child care books and advised flexibility in feeding schedules and attention to child development, advice which far too many parents misinterpreted as letting the child do whatever it wanted. Died out when the first generation of Dr. Spock-raised children became teenagers, grew their hair down to their shoulders, and began blowing up administration buildings.

  Wednesday I went to the birthday party. I’d arranged to leave early and was putting on my coat when Flip slouched in, wearing a laced bodice and duct-tape-decorated jeans, and handed me a piece of paper.

  “I don’t have time for any petitions,” I said.

  “It’s not a petition,” she said, tossing her hair. “It’s a memo about the funding forms.”

  The memo said the funding forms were due on the twenty-third, which I already knew.

  “You’re supposed to turn the form in to me.”

  I nodded and handed it back to her. “Take this down to Dr. O’Reilly’s lab,” I said, pulling on my gloves.

  She sighed. “He’s never there. He’s always in Dr. Turnbull’s lab.”

  “Then take it to Dr. Turnbull’s lab.”

  “They’re always together. He’s completely raved about her, you know.”

  No, I thought, I didn’t know
that.

  “They’re always sitting at the computer together. I don’t know what she sees in him. He’s completely swarb,” Flip said, picking at the duct tape on the back of her hand. “Maybe she can make him not so fashion-impaired.”

  And if she does, I thought irritatedly, there goes his nonfadness, and I’ll never figure out why he was immune to them.

  “What does sophisticated mean?” Flip asked.

  “Cosmopolitan,” I said, “but you’re not,” and left for the party. The weather had turned colder. We usually get one big snowstorm in October, and it looked like the weather was gearing up for it.

  Gina was nearly hysterical by the time I got there. “You won’t believe what Brittany decided she wanted after I said she couldn’t have Barney,” she said, pointing to the decorations, which were a pink that bore no relation to postmodern.

  “Barbie!” Brittany shouted. She was wearing a Little Mermaid dress and bright pink hair wraps. “Did you bring me a present?”

  The other little girls were all wearing Pocahontas pinafores except for a sweet little blonde named Peyton, who was wearing a Lion King jumper and light-up sneakers.

  “Are you married?” Peyton’s mother said to me.

  “No,” I said.

  She shook her head. “So many guys have intimacy issues these days. Peyton, we’re not opening presents yet.”

  “Are you dating anyone?” Lindsay’s mother said.

  “We’re going to open presents later, Brittany,” Gina said. “First we’re all going to play a game. Bethany, it’s Brittany’s birthday.”