Bellwether

by Connie Willis

  Scientific breakthroughs have been triggered by the most minor of events: the sight of bathwater rising, the movement of a breeze, the pressure of a foot on a step. I had never heard of one being triggered by a kiss, though.

  But it was a kiss that had the full weight of five weeks of chaotic turbulence behind it, shifting patterns of thought out of their accustomed positions, stirring up the variables, separating and mixing them again into new conjunctions, new possibilities. And when Ben had put his arms around me, it had been like the discovery of penicillin and the benzene ring and the Big Bang all rolled into one. Eureka to the tenth power. Like coming to the source of the Nile.

  “This FLIP thing, where you met him,” the waitress was saying, “is it like a recovery group?”

  “Discovery,” I said, staring transfixed after Ben, wondering how I could have been so blind. It was all so clear: what triggered fads and how scientific breakthroughs happen and why we had won the Niebnitz Grant.

  “Can anybody join this FLIP?” the waitress said. “I’m already in a latte recovery group, but there aren’t any cute guys in it.”

  “I need my check,” I said, fishing a twenty out of my purse and handing it to her so I could go back to HiTek and get all this on the computer.

  “He already paid,” she said, trying to hand me back the twenty.

  “Keep it,” I said, and grinned at her as something else hit me. “We’re rich. We won the Niebnitz Grant!”

  I hurried back to HiTek and up to the stats lab, and called up my hair-bobbing model.

  Suppose fads were a form of self-organized criticality arising out of the chaotic system of the popular culture. And suppose that, like other chaotic systems, they were influenced by a bellwether. The independence of women, Irene Castle, outdoor sports, rebellion against the war, all of those would simply be variables in the system. They would require a catalyst, a butterfly to set them in motion.

  I focused in on the bump in Marydale, Ohio. Suppose that wasn’t a statistical anomaly. Suppose there’d been a girl in Marydale, Ohio, a girl just like everybody else, with flapping galoshes and rouged knees, indistinguishable from the rest of the flock, only a little greedier, a little faster, a little hungrier. A little ahead of the flock. A girl who had had a crush on a dentist on the other side of town and had walked into the barbershop and, with no idea she was starting a fad, that she was crystallizing chaos into criticality, told the barber to cut off her hair.

  I called up the rest of the twenties data and asked for geographical breakdowns, and there was the anomaly again, for rolled-down stockings and the crossword puzzle, right over Marydale. And for the shimmy, even though the dance had originated in New York. But it hadn’t become a fad until a bobbed-haired girl in Marydale, Ohio, had picked it up. A girl like Flip. A butterfly. A bellwether. The source of the Nile.

  I called up the paintbox and traced the course of events at HiTek again, from Flip’s misdelivering Dr. Turnbull’s package to her fiddling with the latch on the gate, but this time I also fed in Led On by Fate and the bread pudding, Management’s sensitivity exercises, the duct tape, Elaine’s exercises, Shirl’s smoking, Sarah’s boyfriend, Romantic Bride Barbie, and the various skill levels of caffe latte.

  All the variables I could think of and every one of Flip’s actions, irrelevant or not, all of them feeding back into the system, adding turbulence, and leading not, as I’d thought after the sensitivity exercise, to disaster, but to the Niebnitz Grant, to love and to geographic compatibility and the source of hair-bobbing. To a new, higher state of equilibrium.

  Flip had felt itch, and as a result I had told Billy Ray I’d go out with him, and he’d said he felt itch, too, and told me about the sheep, which I’d thought of when Flip lost Ben’s funding form.

  Flip. Her footprints, like Barbie’s sharp little high heels, like the echoes of Pippa’s voice, were all over the crime scene. She had told Ben I was engaged to Billy Ray, she had failed to copy pages 29 through 41, she had taught the bellwether to open the gate, she had told Management about Shirl’s smoking, upping the level of chaos each time, mixing and separating the variables.

  The screen filled with lines. I connected them, feeding in the iteration equations, and the lines became a tangle, the tangle a knot. The lost stapler, Browning’s “Pied Piper,” Billy Ray’s cellular phone, po-mo pink. Flip had circulated a nonsmoking petition and Shirl had ended up out in the parking lot in a blizzard and I took her down to Ben’s lab and she watched Ben and me struggle with the sheep and said, “You need a bellwether.”

  The screen went dark, layer on layer of events feeding back into each other, and then sprang suddenly into a new design. A beautiful, elaborate structure, vivid with radical red and cerulean blue.

  Self-organized criticality. Scientific breakthrough.

  I sat and looked at it for a while, marveling at its simplicity and thinking about Flip. I had been wrong. The i on her forehead didn’t stand for incompetence or itch. Or even influence. It stood for inspiration. And she was Pippa after all, only instead of singing she was stirring up the variables, upping the level of chaos with every petition and misdelivered package until the system went critical.

  I also thought about penicillin and Alexander Fleming, with his crowded, too-small lab, heaped with piles of moldy petri dishes. The institute he worked in had been right in the middle of chaos—half a block from Paddington Station on a noisy street. Add in the vacation and the August heat and the new research assistant he had had to make room for, and all those tributary details like his father and the rifle team. And water polo. At school he’d been on a team that played a water polo match against St. Mary’s Hospital. Three years later, when he was getting ready to go to medical school, he picked St. Mary’s because he remembered the name.

  Add in that, and the soot and the open window of the lab above, and you had a real mess. Or did you?

  David Wilson had called the discovery of penicillin “Quite one of the luckiest accidents that ever occurred in nature.” But was it? Or was it a scientific discovery waiting to happen, a system so chaotic that all it would take to push it over the edge into self-organized criticality was a spore, drifting in through an open window like Pippa’s song?

  Poincaré had believed creative thought was a process of inducing inner chaos to achieve a higher level of equilibrium. But did it have to be inner?

  I saved everything to disk, stuck it in my pocket, and went down to Bio.

  “I need to know something,” I asked Ben. “Your bellwether chaos theory. Did you figure it out little by little or did it hit you all at once?”

  He frowned. “Both. I’d been thinking about Verhoest and his X factor, and that maybe he was right, and I started trying to think what form another factor might take.”

  “And that’s when the apple hit you on the head?”

  He shook his head. “Alicia came in to tell me her research showed the next Niebnitz Grant recipient would be a radio astronomer and that Management had called another meeting, and then we had the sensitivity hug and for a couple of days after that all I could think about was you and how you were engaged to that cowboy.”

  “Ostrich rancher,” I corrected. “For a couple of weeks, at least. So the ideas were in there percolating, but do you remember what it was that put it all together?”

  “You did,” he said. “The sheep were milling around in the hall outside of Management, and you said, ‘Flip did this. I know it,’ and Shirl said she wasn’t there, and you said, ‘I don’t care. Somehow she’s behind this.’ And I thought, No, she isn’t. The bellwether is. And I remembered Flip leaning on the paddock gate, flipping the lock up and down, and I thought, The bellwether must have learned how to open it from her, and led the rest of the sheep into this chaos.

  “And it hit me, just like that. Bellwethers cause chaos. They’re the unseen factor.”

  “I knew it,” I said. “I have to go find something. Just what I thought. You’re wonderful. Be right back.” I kisse
d him for inspiration, and went to find Flip.

  I had forgotten she’d quit. “Three days ago,” Elaine in Personnel said. She was wearing a pair of Cerenkhov blue Rollerblades. “In-in-line skating,” she said, raising her leg to demonstrate. “It gives a much better full-body workout than wall-walking, and it helps you get around the office faster. Did you hear about Sarah and her boyfriend?”

  “They broke up?” I said.

  “No. They got married!”

  I pondered the implications of that, “Did Flip leave a forwarding address?” I asked. “Or say where she was going?”

  She shook her head. “She said to give her check to Desiderata down in Supply and she’d send it on to her.”

  “Can I see her file?”

  “Personnel records are confidential,” she said, suddenly businesslike.

  “Call Management and ask them,” I said. “Tell them it’s me.”

  She did. “Management said to give you anything you want,” she said bemusedly, hanging up. “Do you want the whole file?”

  “Just her previous work record.”

  She skated over to the file cabinet, got it, and skated over to me, executing a neat toe stop.

  It was what I’d expected. Flip had worked at a coffeehouse in Seattle, and before that at a Burger King in L.A. “Thanks,” I said, handing it back to her, and then thought of something else. “Let me see her file a minute.” I opened it and glanced at the top line, where it said “full name, last, first, middle initial.”

  “Orliotti,” it said. “Phihppa J.”

  tattoos (1691)—– Self-mutilation fad which first became popular in Europe in the 1600s when explorers brought the practice back from the South Seas. The fad recurred as an upper-class craze in the Edwardian era. Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother, had a snake tattooed around her wrist. Tattooing became popular again in World War II, this time among servicemen and especially sailors, again in the sixties as part of the hippie movement, and yet again in the late eighties. Tattooing has the disadvantage of being a passing fad with permanent results.

  I wrote down Flip’s last name and made a note to find out her grandmother’s maiden name and check to see if she was living anywhere near Marydale, Ohio, in 1921, and went down to Supply.

  Desiderata couldn’t find Flip’s forwarding address. “She said she was going to someplace in Arizona,” Desiderata said, looking in among the erasers. “Albuquerque, I think.”

  “Albuquerque is in New Mexico,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, frowning. “Then maybe it was Fort Worth. Wherever he went.”

  “Who?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The dentist guy.”

  Of course. He had particularly specified geographic compatibility.

  “Maybe she told Shirl,” Desiderata said, rummaging through the pencils.

  “I thought Shirl got fired,” I said, “for smoking in the paddock.”

  “Hunh-unh,” Desiderata said. “She quit. She said she was only going to stay till they hired a new workplace message facilitation director, and they did that this morning, so maybe she’s already gone.”

  She wasn’t. She was in the copy room, fixing the copy machine before she left, but Flip hadn’t told Shirl where she was going either. “She mentioned something about this Darrell moving his practice to Prescott,” Shirl said, leaning over the paper feed. “I heard you and Dr. O’Reilly won the Niebnitz Grant. That’s wonderful.”

  “It is,” I said, watching her yank a jammed sheet of paper out of the feed with her fingers. There were no signs of nicotine stains on them. “It’s too bad I don’t know who gives the grant, I had something I wanted to tell them.”

  Shirl pushed the feed into position and closed the lid. “I’m sure the committee wants to remain anonymous.”

  “If it is a committee,” I said. “Committees are terrible at keeping secrets, and even Dr. Turnbull wasn’t able to find out anything. I think it’s one person.”

  “One very rich person,” she said, her voice no longer raspy.

  “Right. Somebody circumstantially predisposed to wealth, who thinks for herself and wants other people to, too. When did you quit smoking?”

  “Flip converted me,” she said. “Filthy habit. Hazardous to your health.”

  “Umm,” I said. “Somebody extremely competent—”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, “have you run into Flip’s replacement yet? It’ll make you glad you don’t work here anymore. I didn’t think it was possible to hire somebody worse than Flip, but Management’s succeeded.”

  “Somebody extremely competent,” I repeated, looking steadily at her, “who travels around the country like Diogenes, looking for scientists with circumstantial predispositions to scientific discovery. Somebody no one would suspect.”

  “Interesting theory,” Shirl said dismissively, centering the paper on the glass plate. “What was it you wanted to tell this person? If he or she is incognito, he or she probably doesn’t want to be thanked.” She hit a button and started to lower the lid.

  “Oh, I wasn’t going to thank her,” I said. “I was going to tell her she’s going about things all wrong.”

  The copy light flashed blindingly. Shirl blinked. “You’re saying the Niebnitz people picked the wrong winners?”

  “It’s not the people you choose. It’s the grant itself. A million dollars means the scientist can quit his job, get a lab all his own, pursue his work in complete peace and quiet.”

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “Maybe. Look at Einstein. He discovered relativity while he was working in a dinky patent office, full of papers and contraptions. When he tried to work at home, it was even worse. Wet laundry hanging everywhere, a baby squalling on one knee, his first wife yelling at him.”

  “And those seem like ideal working conditions to you?”

  “Maybe. What if instead of being hindrances, the noise and the damp laundry and the cramped apartment all combined to create a situation in which new ideas could coalesce?” I held up two fingers. “Only two of the winners of the Niebnitz Grant have gone on to make significant discoveries. Why?”

  “Scientific discoveries can’t be produced on demand. They take long years of painstaking work—”

  “And luck. And serendipity. A breeze blowing Galvani’s frog legs against a railing and closing a circuit, a hand getting in the way of cathode rays, an apple falling. Fleming. Penzias and Wilson. Kekulé. Scientific breakthroughs involve combining ideas no one thought to connect before, seeing connections nobody saw before. Chaotic systems create feedback loops that tend to randomize the elements of the system, displace them, shake them around so they’re next to elements they’ve never come in contact with before. Chaotic systems tend to increase in chaos, but not always. Sometimes they restabilize into a new level of order.”

  “Archimedes,” Shirl said.

  “And Poincaré. And Roentgen. All of their ideas came out of chaotic situations, not peace and quiet. And if a chaotic situation could be induced instead of us having to just wait for it to happen … It’s just an idea, but it accounts for why dozens of scientists could experiment with electrically discharged gases and never discover X rays. It accounts for why so many discoveries are made by scientists outside their field. Which is why you specified ‘circumstantially predisposed,’ why you choose people working outside their field, because you knew how it worked, even if you didn’t know why. Of course it’s still just an idea. But it fits with Bennett’s theory of the bellwether effect. I’ll need a lot more data, and—”

  Shirl was smiling a not-at-all-pinched smile at me. “And you still think I’m going about it all wrong?” she said. She leaned over to pull the copy out of the machine. “Interesting theory,” she said, picking up a stack of papers. “If I ever run into whoever it is that gives the Niebnitz Grant, I’ll be sure to pass it on.” She started out the door.

  “Goodbye,” I said, and kissed her on her leathery cheek.

  “What wa
s that for?” she grumbled, rubbing at her cheek with her hand.

  “Fixing the copy machine,” I said. “Oh, by the way,” I called after her. “Who’s the Niebnitz Grant named after?”

  “Alfred Taylor Niebnitz,” she said without turning her head. “My high school physics teacher.”

  ouija board (1917—18)—–Psychic game fad that purports to tell the future. Players push a planchette around a board with letters and numbers, spelling out answers to questions. Originated either in Maryland in the 1880s with C. W. Kennard or William and Isaac Fuld or in Europe in the 1850s, but did not become a fad until America entered World War I. Recurs every time there’s a war. Popular during World War II and the Korean conflict. Hit its highest number of sales in 1966-67, during the Vietnam War.

  A theory is only as good as its ability to predict behavior. Mendeleev predicted that the blanks in his periodic table would be filled with elements of certain atomic weights and properties. The subsequent discoveries of gallium, scandium, and germanium bore out his predictions. Einstein’s special theory of relativity correctly predicted the deflection of light by the sun, tested out by the 1919 eclipse. Wegener’s theory of continental drift was corroborated by fossils and satellite photographs. And Fleming’s penicillin saved Winston Churchill’s life during World War II.

  The bellwether theory of chaotic systems is just that, and Ben and I are still in the early stages of our research. But I’m willing to hazard a few predictions:

  HiTek will switch acronyms at least twice in the next year, establish a dress code, and make the staff hold hands and nurture their inner children.

  Dr. Turnbull will spend all of next year attempting to handicap the Niebnitz Grant, to no avail. Science doesn’t work like that.

  I predict a number of new fads out of Prescott, Arizona, or Albuquerque or Fort Worth. Boulder, Seattle, and L.A. will fade out as trendsetters. Forehead brands will be big, and dental floss, and bobbed hair, particularly the marcel wave, will make a comeback.