Connie Willis - Bellwether

“I show an overdue book for you,” the girl said. “It’s four weeks overdue.”

I went home, excited for the first time that I was on the right track, and started work on the new variables.

The twenties had been awash in fads: jazz, hip flasks, rolled-down stockings, dance crazes, raccoon coats, mah-jongg, running marathons, dance marathons, kissing marathons, Stutz Bearcats, flagpole-sitting, tree-sitting, crossword puzzles. And somewhere in all those rouged knees and rain slickers and rocking-chair derbies was the trigger that had set off the hair-bobbing craze.

I worked until very late and then went to bed with Far from the Madding Crowd. I was right. It was about sheep. And fads. In Chapter Five one of the sheep fell over a cliff, and the others followed, plummeting one after the other onto the rocks below.

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 then 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 campshirt 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 is?”

“Luck,” I said.

Now she did look offended. “ Luck?”

“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?”