Connie Willis - Bellwether

It wasn’t there, or in the stack of old memos on the staff table, or in the microwave. Or in Alicia’s lab. “I looked all through it,” Shirl said, sticking her head in. “What day did Dr. O’Reilly give it to Flip?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was due on Monday.”

She shook her head grimly. “That’s what I was afraid of. The trash comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

I was sorry I’d brought her into this. I went down to the recycling bin. Bennett was almost all the way inside it, his legs dangling in midair. He came up with a fistful of papers and an apple core.

I took half the papers, and we went through them. No funding form.

“All right,” I said, trying to sound upbeat. “If it’s not in here, it’s in one of the labs. What shall we start with? Chem or Physics?”

“It’s no use,” Bennett said wearily. He sank back against the bin. “It’s not here, and I’m not here for much longer.”

“Isn’t there some way to do the project without funding?” I said. “You’ve got the habitat and the computer and cameras and everything. Couldn’t you substitute lab rats or something?”

He shook his head. “They’re too independent. I need an animal with a strong herd instinct.”

What about “The Pied Piper”? I thought.

“And even lab rats cost money,” he said.

“What about the pound?” I said. “They’ve probably got cats. No, not cats. Dogs. Dogs have pack behavior, and the pound has lots of dogs.”

He was looking almost as disgusted as Flip. “I thought you were an expert on fads. Haven’t you ever heard of animal rights?”

“But you’re not going to do anything to them. You’re just going to observe them,” I said, but he was right. I’d forgotten about the animal rights movement. They’d never let us use animals from the pound. “What about the other Bio projects? Maybe you could borrow some of their lab animals.”

“Dr. Kelly’s working with nematodes, and Dr. Riez is working with flatworms.”

And Dr. Turnbull’s working on ways to win the Niebnitz Grant, I thought.

“Besides,” he said, “even if I had animals, I couldn’t feed them. I didn’t get my funding form in on time, remember? It’s okay,” he said at the look on my face. “This’ll give me a chance to go back to chaos theory.”

For which there isn’t any funding, I thought, even if you do turn in the forms.

“Well,” he said, standing up. “I’d better go start typing my resume.”

He looked at me seriously. “Thanks again for helping me. I mean it.” He started down the hall.

“Don’t give up yet,” I said. “I’ll think of something.” This from someone who couldn’t figure out what had caused the angels fad, let alone hair-bobbing.

He shook his head. “We’re up against Flip here. It’s bigger than both of us.”

Chain letters [spring 1935]

Moneymaking fad which involved sending a dime to the name at the top of a list, adding your name to the bottom, and sending five copies of the letter to friends, who, hopefully, were as gullible as you were. Caused by greed and a lack of understanding of statistics, the fad sprang up in Denver, deluging the post office with nearly a hundred thousand letters a day. It lasted three weeks in Denver, then moved on to Springfield, where dollar and five-dollar chains circulated for a frenzied two weeks before the inevitable collapse. Mutated into Circle of Gold (1978), which passed the letters in person, and various pyramid schemes.

I watched him go and then went back up to my lab. Flip was there on my computer. “How do you spell adorable?” she asked.

It took all my willpower not to shake her till her i rattled. “ What did you do with Dr. O’Reilly’s funding form?”

She tossed her assortment of hair appendages. “I told Desiderata you’d take it out on me for stealing your boyfriend. Which is not fair. You already have that cow guy.”

“Sheep,” I corrected automatically, and then gaped at her. Sheep.

“Telling an interdepartmental communications liaison who they can write letters to is ha rass ment,” she said, but I didn’t hear her. I was punching in Billy Ray’s number.

“Boy, am I glad to hear your voice,” Billy Ray said. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”

“Could I borrow some sheep?” I said, not listening to him either.

“Sure,” he said. “What for?”

“A learning experiment.”

“How many do you need?”

“How many does it take before they act like a flock?”

“Three. When do you want them?”

He really was a very nice guy. “A couple of weeks,” I said. “I’m not sure. I need to check some things out first. Like how big a flock we can have in the paddock.” And I need to get Bennett to agree. And Management.

“Drawing a circle doesn’t make somebody somebody’s prop erty,” Flip said.

I ran back down to Bio. Bennett wasn’t typing up his resume. He was sitting on a rock in the middle of the habitat, looking depressed.

“Ben,” I said, “I have a proposition for you.”

He almost smiled. “Thanks, but—”

“Listen,” I said, “and don’t say no till you hear the whole thing. I want us to combine our projects. No, wait, hear me out. I asked for funding for a higher-memory-capacity computer, but I could use yours. Flip’s always on mine anyway. And then we could use my funding to buy the food and supplies.”

“That still doesn’t solve the problem of the macaques. Unless you asked for an awfully expensive computer.”

“I have a friend who has a sheep ranch in Wyoming,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“He’s willing to loan us as many sheep as we need, no cost, we just have to feed them.” He looked like he was getting set to refuse, and I hurried on. “I know sheep don’t have the social organization of macaques, but they do have a very strong following instinct. What one of them does, they all want to do. And they withstand cold, so they can be outside.”

He was looking at me seriously through his thick glasses.

“I know it’s not the project you wanted to do, but it would be something. It would keep you from leaving HiTek, and it’ll probably only be a few months till Management comes up with a new acronym and a new funding procedure, and you can put in for your macaques again.”

“I don’t know anything about sheep.”

“We can do all the background research while we’re waiting for the paperwork to go through.”

“And what do you get out of it, Sandy?” Ben said. “Sheep have their hair bobbed for them.”

I couldn’t very well tell him I thought his immunity to fads was part of the key to where fads came from. “A computer I can run these new diagrams I thought of on,” I said. “And a different perspective. I’m not getting anywhere with my hair-bobbing project. Richard Feynman said if you’re stuck on a scientific problem, you should work on something else for a while. It gives you a different angle on the problem. He took up the bongo drums. And a lot of scientists make their most significant scientific breakthroughs when they’re working outside their own field. Look at Alfred Wegener, who discovered continental drift. He was a meteorologist, not a geologist. And Joseph Black, who discovered carbon dioxide, wasn’t a chemist. He was a doctor. Einstein was a patent official. Working outside their fields makes scientists see connections they never would have seen before.”

“Umm,” Ben said. “And there definitely is a connection between sheep and people who follow fads.”

“Right. Who knows? Maybe the sheep will start a fad.”

“Flagpole-sitting?”