Connie Willis - Bellwether

“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.”