Connie Willis - Bellwether

“Next time you’re going to have to pick it up yourself,” Flip said, walking on the clippings toward the door.

I shook the box, listening for broken sounds. There weren’t any, and when I looked at the top, it didn’t say FRAGILE anywhere. It said PERISHABLE. It also said DR. ALICIA TURNBULL.

“This isn’t mine,” I said, but Flip was already out the door. I waded through a sea of clippings and called to her. “This isn’t my package. It’s for Dr. Turnbull in Bio.”

She sighed.

“You need to take this to Dr. Turnbull.”

She rolled her eyes. “I have to deliver the rest of the interdepartmental mail first,” she said, tossing her hank of hair. She slouched on down the hall, dropping two pieces of said departmental mail as she went.

“Make sure you come back and get it as soon as you’re done with the mail,” I shouted after her down the hall. “It’s perishable,” I shouted, and then, remembering that illiteracy is a hot trend these days and perishable is a four-syllable word, “That means it’ll spoil.”

Her shaved head didn’t even turn, but one of the doors halfway down the hall opened, and Gina leaned out. “What did she do now?” she asked.

“Duct tape now qualifies as a personal errand,” I said.

Gina came down the hall. “Did you get one of these?” she said, handing me a blue flyer. It was a meeting announcement. Wednesday. Cafeteria. All HiTek staff, including R D. “Flip was supposed to deliver one to every office,” she said.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“Management went to another seminar,” she said. “Which means a sensitivity exercise, a new acronym, and more paperwork for us. I think I’ll call in sick. Brittany’s birthday’s in two weeks, and I need to get the party decorations. What’s in these days in birthday parties? Circus? Wild West?”

“Power Rangers,” I said. “Do you think they might reorganize the departments?” The last seminar Management had gone to, they’d created Flip’s job as part of CRAM (Communications Reform Activation Management). Maybe this time they’d eliminate interdepartmental assistants, and I could go back to making my own copies, delivering my own messages, and fetching my own mail. All of which I was doing now.

“I hate the Power Rangers,” Gina said. “Explain to me how they ever got to be so popular.”

She went back to her lab, and I went back to work on my bobbed hair. It was easy to see how it had become popular. No long hair to put up with combs and pins and pompadour puffs, no having to wash it and wait a week for it to dry. The nurses who’d served in World War I had had to cut their hair off because of lice, and had liked the freedom and the lightness short hair gave them. And there were obvious advantages when it came to the other fads of the day: bicycling and lawn tennis.

So why hadn’t it become a fad in 1918? Why had it waited another four years and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, hit so big that barber shops were swamped and hairpin companies went bankrupt overnight? In 1921, hair-bobbing was still unusual enough to make front-page news and get women fired. By 1925, it was so common every graduation picture and advertisement and magazine illustration showed short hair, and the only hats being sold were bell-shaped cloches, which were too snug to fit over long hair. What had happened in the interim? What was the trigger?

I spent the rest of the day re-sorting the clippings. You’d think magazine pages from the 1920s would have turned yellowish and rough, but they hadn’t. They’d slid like eels out onto the tile floor, fanning out across and under each other, mixing with the newspaper clippings and obliterating their categories. Some of the paper clips had even come off.

I did the re-sorting on the floor. One of the lab tables was full of clippings about pogs that Flip was supposed to have taken to be copied and hadn’t, and the other one had all my jitterbug data on it. And neither one was big enough for the number of piles I needed, some of which overlapped: entire article devoted to hair-bobbing, reference within article devoted to flappers, pointed reference, casual reference, disapproving reference, humorous reference, shocked and horrified reference, illustration in advertisement, adoption by middle-aged women, adoption by children, adoption by the elderly, news items by date, news items by state, urban reference, rural reference, disparaging reference, reference indicating complete acceptance, first signs of waning of fad, fad declared over.

By 4:55 the floor of my whole lab was covered with piles and Flip still wasn’t back. Stepping carefully among the piles, I went over and looked at the box again. Biology was clear on the other side of the complex, but there was nothing for it. The box said PERISHABLE, and even though irresponsibility is the hottest trend of the nineties, it hasn’t worked its way through the whole society yet. I picked up the box and took it down to Dr. Turnbull.

It weighed a ton. By the time I’d maneuvered it down two flights and along four corridors, the reasons why irresponsibility had caught on had become very clear to me. At least I was getting to see a part of the building I ordinarily was never in. I wasn’t even exactly sure where Bio was except that it was down on the ground floor. But I must be heading in the right direction. There was moisture in the air and a faint sound of zoo. I followed the sound down yet another staircase and into a long corridor. Dr. Turnbull’s office was, of course, at the very end of it.

The door was shut. I shifted the box in my arms, knocked and waited. No answer. I shifted the box again, propping it against the wall with my hip, and tried the knob. The door was locked.

The last thing I wanted to do was lug this box all the way back up to my office and then try to find a refrigerator. I looked down the hall at the line of doors. They were all closed, and, presumably, locked, but there was a line of light under the middle one on the left.

I repositioned the box, which was getting heavier by the minute, lugged it down to the light, and knocked on the door. No answer, but when I tried the knob, the door opened onto a jungle of video cameras, computer equipment, opened boxes, and trailing wires.

“Hello,” I said. “Anybody here?”

There was a muffled grunt, which I hoped wasn’t from an inmate of the zoo. I glanced at the nameplate on the door. “Dr. O’Reilly?” I said.

“Yeah?” a man’s voice from under what looked like a furnace said.

I walked around to the side of it and could see two brown corduroy legs sticking out from under it, surrounded by a litter of tools. “I’ve got a box here for Dr. Turnbull,” I said to the legs. “She’s not in her office. Could you take it for her?”

“Just set it down,” the voice said impatiently.

I looked around for somewhere to set it that wasn’t covered with video equipment and coils of chicken wire.

“Not on the equipment,” the legs said sharply. “On the floor. Carefully.”

I pushed aside a rope and two modems and set the box down. I squatted down next to the legs and said, “It’s marked ‘perishable.’ You need to put it in the refrigerator.”

“All right,” he snapped. A freckled arm in a wrinkled white sleeve appeared, patting the floor around the base of the box.

There was a roll of duct tape lying just out of his reach. “Duct tape?” I said, putting it in his hand.

His hand closed around it and then just stayed there.

“You didn’t want the duct tape?” I looked around to see what else he might have wanted. “Pliers? Phillips screwdriver?”

The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it. “Sorry,” he said. His face was freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “I thought you were that mail person.”